I am not going to lie — well, right now at least. I enjoy stepping onto the escalator at Barnes & Noble, running my fingers across the spines of crisp and shiny tomes, and spending $24.95 on one brand spankin’ new paperback that will inherently lose value as soon as I strut out of the store. I’m not going to wax poetic about how I love the smell of the dusty books in my municipal library stacks. It’s a nice notion, but in reality, aging doesn’t exactly turn me on.
But, but, what I will concede is that used bookstores and libraries are a gold mine of scarce and out-of-print books, books that not even Google knows about, that have never seen the light of Amazon, and that will go on largely forgotten and unpublicized until some heroic blogger (ahem) decides to plug them. We are lucky enough to have one of our own used bookstores in our midst, the Russian Hill Bookstore (2234 Polk at Green).
The shop is the source of the latest addition to my home library, a hilarious cookbook by a ’60s ad man. Want to hear about it? (more…)
