A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Bookstores
Best Bookshops in the World
Click here for the Guardian UK’s list of the best bookshops in the world. These were chosen mostly for their architectural magnificence, it seems, and do, of course, exhibit British perspective. But if they aren’t enough to make a book lover slaver, I don’t know what is. If you are ever in the Portland, Oregon area and at a loss for what to do, I highly recommend Cameron’s Books. I stumbled on the store a few years back while killing time before meeting a client in the SW district near the river. It was a cold day (my usual experience in Portland) and the shop was pleasantly warm, stacked floor to ceiling with used books and magazines, all in order. Just a week ago when I visited the city (another cold day, and visiting the same client), I dropped in. I looked for a copy of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Not only did I find a handsome hardcover copy with a painting of a bleak New England scene on the cover but the book was only three dollars. Each time I have visited Cameron’s I have come out with something I had wanted or something serendipitous. Cameron’s is on [...] Read More »
Denver to Hastings, NE to Red Cloud, NE
East of Denver, more of the same. Interstate lanes, buttes and rises and hillocks smoothed by mighty earthmoving equipment to create the Eisenhower Interstate System, alongside which not a living soul is to be seen…Our TARP dollars at work in mile after mile of road repairs: white line painting, paving, inexplicable spraying of liquid on the shoulders, miles upon miles of orange striped road work barrels taller than my son with signs warning of increased fines in road work areas (trying to give some of that TARP money back?) Back in Denver at the Tattered Cover the booksellers gathered ’round the book, admiring it. The Tattered Cover, another died and gone to bookstore heaven experience, a different heavenk, this one in a former opera house or theather…immense…with comfortable chairs, the barnes and noble experience of pleasanty seating but un-canned, the furrniture not something you would find at the Holiday Inn Express…W.P. Kinsella, Annie Leibovitz looking dramatic, Al Gore looking not, Nick Bantock, Opalonga Pugh, Bobbie Ann Mason looking like a Bobbie Ann (with all due respect), Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro looking like his prose, George Plimpton looking like a living icon (may he rest in peace), Susan Minot with flashes [...] Read More »
Hopkins Bookshop
When I was young, my parents became friends with Bill and Roddy Cleary, owners of the first bookstore that I ever experienced. The name of the shop was Hopkins. Bill Cleary was a former Jesuit. The store was named after another Jesuit—and poet—Gerard Manley Hopkins [for a poem by Hopkins, see below]. So, really my parents fell in with fellow Catholics and poetry lovers at the same time (not to mention musicians; Mr. Cleary, who had a fine sense of humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes, had once entertained some important group for an evening when their regularly scheduled entertainment fell through. When the night was over he was offered cash or the piano and he took the piano. I always thought that was the height of musicianship and showmanship). Hopkins Bookshop was located at the time on Church Street—the most important mercantile street in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Church Street has a perfectly symmetrical, beautifully proportioned brick Unitarian Church at the head of it, and at some point in my childhood, the first four blocks in front of the church were turned into a pedestrian zone. At any rate, it meant something if you were on Church Street, [...] Read More »
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