Philly Photos: Used Bookstores
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on April 9th, 2010
Archive for the 'Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos' Category
A little Bookstore Neon
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on March 8th, 2010 
Down in Florida…checking out the open shops…
Virginia Woolf on Second Hand Book Stores
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on February 9th, 2010
Virginia Woolf on second hand book shops:
"But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller's wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don't live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind's inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller's wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman's library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.
Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author…
The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime."
from 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' in The Death of the Moth.
Cincinnati Cartel?
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on December 30th, 2009Every used bookstore
I visited
this past Sunday in Cincinnati
was, save for this kid's store
closed… 
Must have been some sort of unsavory behind-doors deal struck to shut us biblio heathens out on the Sabbath.
Bookstore Photo of the Week
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on October 12th, 2009
The Book Garden, Montpelier, Vermont.
Beale’s Best Book Shops
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on September 11th, 2009This ain’t no Zagat, or Michelin guide, but I do want to proffer the Nota Bene seal of approval on several bookstores visited during last weekend’s drive from Ottawa to Portland, Maine, and back. No hard criteria, many floating ones…common to them all however was this quality: if after 45 minutes browsing I couldn’t bring myself to leave, or if the necessity of it resulted in weeping and wailing…it got the grade. So:
For its immaculate organization and presentation, and its owner (Nancy S. Grayson)”s superb collecting suggestions (King Penguins and Britain in Pictures), Cunningham Books in Portland:
Also in Portland, for its plentiful supply, well chosen titles, and delightful, chaotic presentation:
Yes Books.
For their focus on food, their innovative combination of new and antiquarian fare, and for involvement with their audiences, Don and Samantha Hoyt Lindgren, Rabelais Books, Portland.
For its significant collection of basement-housed periodicals, its Books on Books section ( from which was pulled signed copies of A. Edward Newton’s Amenities of Book Collecting, and The Truth About Publishing by Stanley Unwin),
and all of the wonderfully
photogenic
books
gracing
the place (thank you Caroline)
De Wolfe and Wood in Alfred, Maine.
For its deceptively diminutive facade, and behind it the miles of shelf lined warrens, and the fact it provided me with an addition to my Auden collection, Northwood Books
in Northwood, New Hampshire. For similar reasons, and for taking pity on late arriving biblioholics, its sister store in Henniker, NH. manned by husband to the proprietess at Northwood: #6 Book Depot.
Ditto Pleasant Street Books in Woodstock, Vt. for keeping the lights on hours past normal,
for two more Auden titles (one On This Island signed by Joseph Blumenthal of Spiral Press fame …printer of said book), a bulging Lit Crit section, from which I extracted First Editions of Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives (in a VG DJ) Ford Madox Ford’s The English Novel (sadly without), and, from nearby Literature, a re-bound First of Aldous Huxley’s Mortal Coils…plus its roof:
A Bookstore that’s Succeeding
Posted in Nigel Beale Bookstore Photos on August 16th, 2009
Five years ago or so I paid a visit on Robert Wright who operated a rare book shop out of his home (still does) in Tamworth, Ontario. I bought a signed first edition of E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, Lincoln by Gore Vidal, and several early works by Aldous Huxley.
I dropped in on Robert again last weekend. He and his wife were preparing a meal for some guests, so we didn’t have much time to spend together, enough, however to pick up two more Huxley’s (including a lovely copy of the American edition of The Olive Tree, complete with sparkling end papers) and explore his new, at least to me, shop…Shortly after my initial visit he converted a barn on his property into an open store catering to the general reader. While he continues to run the rare book operation, most of his time is now spent doing appraisals, and running The Tamworth Book Shop,
which, I’m happy to report, is doing very well.
The place was ‘packed to the rafters’ – not a free bail to sit on - recently for a reading by Kingston poet Carolyn Smart. Here’s the evidence:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geBTlygDBx4
More of the same is planned for the coming months.
