Millions Quiz: Out of Print Gems

So that you may get to know us better, it’s The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.

As many long-time readers of the site know, the creation of The Millions was partially inspired by Max’s time spent working in an independent bookstore.

With regular Millions writer Patrick’s recent departure from Vromans in Pasadena, we believe this is now the first time in the history of the site that none of its regular contributors are working for an indie bookstore. In commemoration of that fact, the former booksellers among us have offered up encomiums on some of the bookstores that helped pay their rents and feed their minds over the years.

Edan:
Book Soup, West Hollywood, California
Book Soup is on the Sunset Strip, across the street from the Viper Room (where River Phoenix died), and not too far from the manicured estates of Beverly Hills. It’s my favorite book store because they’ve got everything, and because you can lose yourself in its tall, labyrinthine aisles, maybe run into a starlet or two along the way (in the self-help section, most likely). I worked there for a summer when I was 19, and for another two years after I graduated from college. I call it my alma mater. In my essay about the late Glenn Goldman, the owner of the store who passed away last winter, I wrote: “Outside of Book Soup there are trashy girls from the Inland Empire, heading with arms crossed to a nearby club, and raving homeless men, and at the newsstand an actress is reading about herself in the tabloids. A man walks by selling puppies, maybe a waterproof radio. Inside of Book Soup there are highly opinionated, supremely well-read booksellers who want to know what five books you’d take with you to a desert island, go, and what your favorite Morrissey song is, and how many people you’ve slept with, and don’t you think I need another tattoo? Inside there are books, so many books.” When I close my eyes and think of a book store, it’s The Soup I see.

Skylight Books, Los Angeles, California
Skylight is all light and space and beautiful displays of beautiful books. There is a tree in the center of the room, and, yes, a huge skylight. When it rains, it’s loud, and you feel like you’re in the heart of some big storm–but safe, too. The store’s got an art annex, right next door, with lovely large books, and kiosks of zines, and an incomparable graphic novel section which attracts the cute boys. (In fact, Skylight has the cutest clientele in the universe–I’m pretty sure of that.) There is now a kitten, Franny, who inherited the store from beloved Lucy, may she rest in peace. I worked at Skylight a couple times a week for about a year, and only stopped recently. (Actually, my exit coincided with Franny’s arrival–and I was relieved. She’s adorable, but, alas, I’m allergic to cats.) I love Skylight most for the community it inspires. It’s the center of Los Feliz Village, and the store does all it can to promote not only literacy, but conversation, and fun. At the store employee Christmas party, we sang songs. At the summer employee party, we hula-hooped. Where else can you find that goodness?

Lydia:
The Brick Row Book Shop; San Francisco, California.
The BRBS is a venerable antiquarian book shop founded in New Haven in 1915 before eventually being relocated to the west coast; I believe it is one of the oldest continuously run book shops in the country. Owner John Crichton ostensibly specializes in English and American literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, but the shop inventory includes a whole range of material (fine press books, Americana, 20th century poetry, travels & voyages). Wow, I sound like a brochure. Anyway, the two years I spent working here were the best two years of my professional life so far. When people (mostly the online commenters on NYT pieces about education) proclaim the futility of a liberal arts education, which, they allege, renders its recipients unfit for any sort of employment, I write a strongly-written letter in my head and tell them about this job. Because it was wonderful, and it would have been unfit for anyone who thinks a liberal arts education is futile.

The Book Rack; Menlo Park, California.
This is my grandmother’s secondhand book shop, which she has owned for many years. I can’t be said to have worked here in the fullest sense of the word, because I was a child and child labor is wrong, but I certainly hung around here a lot and helped (although I may not have done that in the fullest sense of the word either). When we visited her throughout my childhood and adolescence, this is where I spent most of the visit, stacking and sorting and pressing buttons on the register. I was given lots of ice cream, and when I got older I commanded a more competitive salary. The experience was undoubtedly formative, especially considering my abiding love of secondhand paperbacks. The Book Rack is particularly well-stocked in mystery and romance novels, but they buy, sell, and trade books of all sorts.

Sonya:
Housing Works Bookstore Café, New York City, New York
Housing Works Bookstore Café is a bright and out-of-orbit star in the indie bookstore solar system. Technically a subsidiary of Housing Works, Inc. — a multi-service AIDS service and advocacy organization serving homeless New Yorkers — it’s also its very own weird and beautiful thing: a nonprofit bookstore that sells both new and used stock (100% donated by well-read New Yorkers from all over the city), staffed lovingly and almost entirely by volunteers, located in a stunning SoHo loft space (spiral staircases and balconies and all) where not only bookselling but music concerts, lit events, comedy showcases, and staged readings are held regularly. Twice a year staff and volunteers haul out the inventory for a huge Street Fair on the cobblestones of Crosby Street, all books and CDs on sale for $1. The café is excellent — one of the hats I wore during my time there was as a café volunteer, where I helped launch a quiche-and-baked-goods-making brigade — and the store has a membership program with great benefits. Literary lights and other cultural icons who love, have read at, and have been sighted hanging out at HWBC: Mary Gaitskill, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Lethem, Lynne Tillman, Anne Carson, the late Heath Ledger, Salman Rushdie, on and on. Having spent much of my adult professional life working in nonprofits, and now seeing up-close a sliver of the commercial publishing world, one wonders if all literary enterprises should consider this hybrid businessy-nonprofit model. And, as if supporting the literary cause were not enough, all store profits go to support Housing Works, Inc. AIDS programs.

Max:
Second Story Books, Rockville, MD
As a high schooler in Washington, DC, my friends and I haunted the dusty purveyors of second-hand records and used books. The pinnacle of the literary side of this pantheon was Second Story Books, in whose Dupont Circle location we would imagine ourselves neo-Beatniks as we thumbed through volumes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. At sixteen, I wheedled my way into a job, but not at any of their regular locations. Instead I landed at the vast warehouse in suburban Maryland, where the manager — he of the rumpled, curmudgeonly school of used bookselling — eyed me with suspicion. I spent most of my time sweeping the labyrinthine aisles and sneezing in the clouds of dust. But I also set aside the broom and grabbed any old volume that caught my eye, pausing to read and read and read.

Book Soup, West Hollywood, CA
I arrived at Book Soup a “self taught” reader, well read in spotty, idiosyncratic ways, but I left nearly four years later with a broad and deep appreciation of a whole spectrum of books. That education was provided both by my coworkers and by a cast of regulars whose engagement with the literary overturned my naive preconceptions of “Hollywood.” But Book Soup doesn’t exist in opposition to Hollywood, it is very much of Hollywood, with some of its celebrity clientele “ego searching” the tabloids at the news stands, while others stock up on meatier fare (whether researching a role, or just for fun). Every city needs a great bookstore, and that bookstore will take on the character of its city. Book Soup is the creative, literary core of Hollywood that too many don’t know exists.

Garth:
Freebird Books and Goods; Brooklyn, New York
My first year out of graduate school, trying to plot the elusive point of diminishing returns on the money-time matrix, I was lucky enough to fall into part-time work at this bookstore right around the corner from home. Having written about Freebird in our Walking Tour of New York’s Independent Bookstores, I’ll spare you any lengthy description. I will say that my notion that I would get lots of reading done on the clock was misguided. Freebird’s collection, though modest in size, is high in quality – particularly in fiction and New Yorkiana – and before I could finish any one book, I would have picked up three or four others. Still, in summer, with the front door admitting a briny breeze off the harbor and folks strolling by on sleepy Columbia Street, to sit and sip a Moxie soda and fail to read novels was paradise.

Patrick:
The University of Chicago Bookstore, Chicago, IL
This was not, sadly, the famed Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of the best bookstores in the country, and to this day, my second favorite place in Chicago, after Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. This was the Barnes & Noble-affiliated campus bookstore. We sold physics textbooks and sweatshirts (which all looked strangely like off-brand Chicago Bears merchandise). I tried to work as many shifts as I could with a particular local high school girl who had landscapes painted on her fingernails. She was one of the coolest, smartest, most fun people I met at the University of Chicago, and she didn’t even attend the college.

Book Soup, West Hollywood, CA and Costa Mesa, CA
What can I say about Book Soup that Max and Edan haven’t already said? I made so many enduring friendships at this place that I think of it as something other than a retail establishment. If one were to take a tour of my life, Book Soup would figure prominently. It was the pivot around which my entire adult life revolved. I started working there when I was in graduate school, and I continued to work there long after I’d decided that graduate school was terrible. When I began working at Book Soup, I thought I would be a filmmaker, and that working at the store would be a sort of quaint anecdote in my incredible highly lucrative directorial career. I was mistaken. What it turned out to be was the beginning of a career in books.

Book Soup was the place where I met people who were Booksellers, not writers who worked in a bookstore or filmmakers who worked in a bookstore. This was important. The people who considered bookselling important, not just something to do on the way to something else, were inspiring to a guy who was, it seemed, perpetually on his way to something else. I started out working the Friday and Saturday 4 p.m. to Midnight newsstand shift, and I ended up running one of their stores. It was where I met Paul McCartney and Michael Stipe and Gavin Rossdale (the first celebrity to acknowledge me in public, when we ran into each other at the now-defunct Aaron’s Records) and Terrence Malick and Martin Amis and Charles Fleischer, voice of Alf and Roger Rabbit and the original Book Soup regular. I also met some people I’m still proud to call friends. One of them, thank God, agreed to marry me.

Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena, CA
What can you say about a business that’s nearly as old as Stanford University? It was a humbling experience, working for a bookstore that was founded during Grover Cleveland’s presidency (the second one, sure, but still). Maybe more incredible than its endurance is its vibrancy. Here is a store that continues to innovate, that continually asks the question “What does it mean to be a bookstore?” There might be hipper bookstores, but I don’t think there are many that have a better idea of what their customers want. Run by a bookseller’s bookseller, Allison Hill, Vroman’s is always looking for something new to offer its customers.

At its heart, though, Vroman’s is all about tradition. It is every bit as much Pasadena as the Rose Bowl (which, by the way, was first played 5 years after Vroman’s was founded). I can’t tell you how many people I met who shopped there who told me “I grew up coming here,” or “My grandparents shopped here,” or, once, “My grandparents worked here.” It really is part of what makes Pasadena unique, and it’s a shame there aren’t more places like it in the world.

So that you may get to know us better, we introduce The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life the like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments.Today’s Question: What’s on your nightstand right now?Emily: Deciding where the nightstand stops in my dorm room is something of a quandary. And sadly, in this final dissertation push, pleasure reading is a thing of the past (Swift Studies 2006, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, The Chicago Manual of Style…). But among the piles that daily encroach on my bed are two recent purchases: Dover’s paperback editions of Goya’s print series Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War. If you haven’t seen them, take a look. I hesitate to call either a pleasure, but they are, in their ways.Edan: I’m about to read The Great Man by Kate Christensen, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award this year. I enjoyed her previous novel, The Epicure’s Lament, and this one, about a recently deceased painter and the women in his life, sounds like something to dive into.After that, I’m going to give Edith Wharton my attention, beginning with The Age of Innocence. I also have a galley of Joan Silber’s novel, The Size of the World, the follow-up to her terrific and pleasing story collection Ideas of Heaven (which was nominated for a National Book Award).I just snagged the latest issue of Field, the poetry journal published by the Oberlin College Press, and a copy of Darcie Dennigan’s debut poetry collection, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse. Aside from this poetry reading, I’ll be steamrolling through months of unread New Yorker and Gourmet magazine issues.Garth: I seem to be having a big books problem this summer; my nightstand is about to collapse under the weight of three of them. The first is Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which I’m about 600 pages into (out of 900). The second is Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, which I’m about 300 pages into (also out of 900)… and let’s just say that, for all that she does well. Gertrude lacks the, shall we say, narrative velocity of Mr. Bolano. Finally, clocking in at over 1000 pages, I’ve got Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men, which seems insane and brilliant and possibly unfinishable. I keep thinking there are only a finite number of gigantic books, and that once I get them out of the way I can move on, and then I learn about writers like McElroy. I’m also hoping to get to Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker this summer. Seriously. In order not to get hopelessly depressed about my rate of reading, I try to read really, really short things in between the long things. My current favorite amuse-bouche or palate-cleansers are Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance and Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. It occurs to me that I may be suffering from some variety of disturbance myself. Call it gigantobibliomania.Ben: I have 18 books on my nightstand at the moment, three of which I think I’m supposed to be reviewing. Most interestingly, I have two autobiographical accounts by historians who retraced the steps of Mao’s Long March. When I learned would be going to China this summer, I briefly toyed with the idea of spending a few months traveling along the route taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as they fled from the Kuomingtan. The three year journey was a harrowing race across thousands of miles of China’s most unforgiving wilderness, and it would eventually go on to become the founding myth of the CCP. Its story is replete with violence and political intrigue and following in its steps while observing how China has changed in the intervening years “would make one great book,” I thought. I was wrong. It has made two mediocre books. The Long March by Ed Jocelyn and The Long March by Sun ShuyunAndrew: It would appear that thirty or so books have taken up occupancy on or near my nightstand. This is where the triage happens. Every few weeks, books seem to show up, sometimes all at once, sometimes individually. Compulsive second-hand book-buyer that I am, I’m afraid I can’t control the in-flow.Like an ER, this may seem to be a chaotic place, but it’s functional and I give prompt attention to the book that demands to be read next. When completed, the book is transferred to the recovery area (aka the bookcases in my den), a much more orderly place. Calm. Perhaps too calm.I began M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall a few weeks ago, then had to abruptly stop when my life took a chaotic turn, and now that calm reigns once again, I’ve restarted it. Up next will likely be A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair, by Peter Wiedhaas, unless some literary emergency comes in off the street.Emre: My oft-cluttered, permanently dusty nightstand is home to months-old copies of Harper’s and New Yorker magazines, the occasional New York Times Magazine and four books. The books are all byproducts of articles I read in the aforementioned publications. Yet, despite the enticing reviews/mentions I find myself unable to read any of them. Top of the list is Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. After reading an article about the Bronx’s revival and realizing that as an adopted New Yorker with literary vices it is a sin not to have read a single Wolfe novel, I immediately picked up a used copy. Despite my best intentions to get going with it right after finishing Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, I am still only some 20 pages into the book. But it remains my top priority. Kind of.I might have a commitment problem. The second book is Parag Khanna’s The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. A book review in the NYT, as well as an excerpt from the book which appeared in the Times Magazine, sounded oh so interesting and timely that the politics wonk in me returned from the depths, turning me into the four-eyed nerd that I actually am to begin reading about how global powers – U.S., EU, China – are attempting to wrest control of the Second World – a term formerly ascribed to the communist bloc, which now may be morphing to describe emerging-market and resource-rich countries. Despite its accessible, Thomas Friedman-ish language, however, I am stuck at the end of Chapter 1. I blame my job for it. Part of my work description is to read news all day. After reading the Wall Street Journal, NYT, the FT and assorted other publications all day long, I have little appetite left for politics and business. On the other hand, I do feel an urgency – as in, lest I read this in the next six months, it may be obsolete.Sharing the third spot and making for a potential good duo-read are my girlfriend’s birthday presents to me: Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems. The gifts were, of course, not coincidental. They were conceived in the aftermath of a New Yorker article about the dying news industry (damn you, Huffington Post, et al.!) and born of our conversations regarding, well, the dying news industry. As conceptually interesting as Lippmann and Dewey’s books are, they also fall into the realm of thought-provoking, attention-requiring books, a la The Second World, which these days is a far stretch from the TV-watching couch potato I am after work. I might have to add a new book to my nightstand. Something in the 200-300 page range that involves fiction and is a light read – as in Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!-light. Any suggestions?Max: I’ve got just one book on my nightstand: Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which Mrs. Millions recently finished and which is waiting to be put back on the Reading Queue shelf. I’ve also got a teetering stack of magazines – issues of The New Yorker, The Week, and The Economist – that keep from reading my books. The book that I’m currently reading, meanwhile, is more often in the same room as me (or in my laptop bag if I’m on the go). This does make for occasional overnight stops on the nightstand.So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: What’s on your nightstand right now?