We spent most of the last week of June in Boston, a city I’d never visited before. The trip was ostensibly a birthday present for my son, who wanted to see one of his favorite noisy rock bands play, but it was also an excuse to exit the dreadful cruel wet heat of Florida summer. We stayed in the Back Bay neighborhood and did many of the requisite touristy things one expects of touring visitors, but also just soaked in the city’s vibes. The city was slammed with soccer — or football, excuse me — look, the city of Boston was crammed with World Cup goers, fans from all over it seemed, as well as localish folks who attended the France-Norway match in their New England Patriots gear. The general attitude of the city and its people seemed unexpectedly positive and generally very friendly. When I told a driver that I was surprised at how friendly everyone seemed, he told me that It’s because it’s the summer; it’s because you’re a tourist. (I had always thought that everybody hates a tourist.)
Boston is larded with good schools and good health care and just generally a lot of brains and history and such, which means a lot of bookstores, too many to get to, but I tried.
Brattle Book Shop is probably the most famous bookstore in Boston. The ground floor has a nice selection of used fiction, including curated and inexpensive mass market paperbacks (mostly sci-fi). The third floor is where the real magic is — rare and signed editions, not unreasonably priced, but I couldn’t find anything I had to have. (The truth is I like to stumble upon something odd in the wild. The hunt isn’t really fun when it’s already neatly bagged up and labeled for you.) I probably could’ve spent another hour at Brattle, but my scanning the bargain books carted outside was cut short by my hungry hungry teenagers.
I had better luck hunting a few days later at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I picked up a handsome and inexpensive (and frankly unread) copy of John A. Williams’ novel Captain Blackman. I actually read and reviewed Captain Blackman earlier this month; I’d been looking for a copy for awhile and eventually just checked it out from the library after I finished Williams’ most famous novel The Man Who Cried I Am. From my review Captain Blackman:
Captain Blackman is an astounding, imaginative, and appropriately angry synthesis of Black military history in the United States. It blends genre elements from war novels, science fiction, Westerns, political and economic theory, and even romance novels, and cites heavily from a range of historical documents. It’s very smart and often very funny, at times quite horny, and even surreal. It’s baggy and ambitious and rich and encyclopedic. I loved it.
I also picked up a copy of Joseph McElroy’s novel Actress in the House. About five years ago, maybe more, I came across a cache of maybe five or six McElroy’s novels at my favorite used bookstore and didn’t pick them up, and have since regretted it. When I opened it to check the price I was surprised to find it signed by the author (and not anywhere close to Brattle prices):
I visited a few other book stores, mostly incidentally, including Trident Booksellers and Beacon Hill Books (a cute spot but not all my vibe). And on my walk through the Freedom Trail I got to visit the storied and venerable Old Corner Bookstore, an American literary landmark that was once home to the publishing house Ticknor and Fields, which published titles by luminaries like Longfellow, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Stowe, and Twain.
It is now a fucking Chipotle.
Thankfully the Central Library in Copley Square remains bibliocentered and not burritocentered. I enjoyed the zine collection in the modern wing of the library, but it’s the old library that really blew me away (particularly John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion series of murals on the third floor). I even made a little time to check on my boy Ruggles’ ancestry while I was in the library–
–but it was closing before I could get much farther. It’s good to leave something for a future visit I suppose.
Biblioklept 