The Literary Life of Used Books

I’ve come to consider used book stores and antique stores as depositories of our literary and social history. You can find just about anything you’re looking for on Amazon, but until you spend some time perusing and holding old books important in their day but largely forgotten now can you see a glimpse of American literary heritage.

I’ve found an old edition of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, a 1918 edition of Love Songs by Sara Teasdale (for a dollar!), The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1926), The Speeches of Daniel Webster (1854), Ida Tarbell’s Life of Lincoln (1907), and more.

We’ve lived in Kirkwood, our suburb of St. Louis, for more than 30 years. When we moved here, an antique shop in the downtown area had been in operation for a long time. It was called Dappled Gray Antiques, and it was filled with the valuable and the not-so-valuable.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Poetry Alcove

I live in an older suburb of St. Louis, the oldest suburb, in fact, incorporated in 1857. Just a few blocks from our house are four used bookstores, kept well supplied no doubt, by local estate sales and the numerous used book fairs held every year.

The oldest of the four, and the one with the most prosaic name, is The Book House. I used to frequent it more often years ago when I collected texts about speeches and speechwriting, but now I make an occasional visit to see what’s happening with poetry. (I can say that I don’t attend the every-other-Friday Tarot card readings; booksellers have to do strange things these days to market themselves.)

The Book House occupies an old farmhouse dating from the 1800s. Poetry is on the second floor, so I have to take the stairs, which are steep and narrow enough that one has to climb the steps almost sideways. They are also rickety. Reaching the top, I make a u-turn and walk straight to the poetry room, where I find more than poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.