fiction files redux discussion

These are really super cool! Wouldn't it be rad if we could start pilgrimages to these bookstores??

http://flavorwire.com/194844/10-uncon...

Sweet Megan! You'll have to report back on how amazing it is!

Quimby's in Chicago, hands down.

http://www.quimbys.com/

Kerry -

I LOVE this idea! I'll start msaving money for a pilgrimage with you immediately ^_^ Shall we add a few film or music stops in as well, or just literary?

I love when Michael Seidenberg suggesting selling crack as a better form of retail than bookshops. It's very sad, but true.

Kerry,

This thread got me thinking about wanting to visit the world's oldest bookshop[s] and I found this one as a result: http://kissmequick-kissmenow.blogspot...

Shall we add it to our list of pilgrimage sites?

Yes please!

What about unconventional bookstore patrons?

I used to visit a bookstore where I often heard a woman in another aisle mumbling & chuckling. I always assumed that she was chatting on a cellphone, but then one evening I browsed nearby and realized that she was reading aloud from a novel and having a conversation with the characters.

She seemed to favor Victorian novelists, and I would hear her complimenting or insulting characters in Dickens or George Eliot, sometimes promising to meet everybody at a pub. She was very rude to Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch.

I thought she was eccentric & harmless. But one night the manager threw her out of the store and called the police. The manager had caught her smoking in a bathroom where the woman had also dumped an armload of paperbacks in a trash can which she was trying to set on fire.

i rather love this story, adrian. i imagine that the characters in the books she was burning had probably been very very rude to her.

Patty wrote: i imagine that the characters in the books she was burning had probably been very very rude to her."

Yes, that makes sense. Or perhaps she had wandered out of her Victorian comfort zone and became enraged/inspired by the characters in Fahrenheit 451 or Firestarter.

Adrian wrote: "What about unconventional bookstore patrons?

I used to visit a bookstore where I often heard a woman in another aisle mumbling & chuckling. I always assumed that she was chatting on a cellphone, b..."

Middlemarch. Really? Adrian, did you fabricate this story? I like it, but if you made it up, I love it.

Elizabeth wrote: "
Middlemarch. Really? Adrian, did you fabricate this story? I like it, but if you made it up, I love it. ..."

This is a true incident. The woman was relatively young, in her early 30s, and wore clean, fashionable clothing; she wasn't an elderly street vagrant. (I specifically remembered her fixation on the George Eliot novel because I had just read it and Daniel Deronda.)

The bookstore was near a college where I took graduate-level courses. When I described the woman in a class, another student identified her as a former student who lived on a trust fund. Apparently, she had to withdraw from school because she had begun disrupting classes with obscene outbursts.

When I worked at Borders we had a patron who would come in once every three or four months. He LOOKED homeless with very dirty clothes, really long black hair peppered with gray that was stringy and greasy and dandruffy, his face was scruffy, but not with a full on beard, but he hid it behind the curtains of hair. He was short but also he would slump so he seemed really small. He would scurry about the store like a mouse pulling a huge armful of books every time. He smelled really bad and would leave a scent trail around the store. We called him the Stinky Cheese Man because that's what he smelled like. But after a few hours of pulling his armful of books, he would check out. We are talking HUNDREDS of dollars worth of books every few months which he would then pay for with cash! He would never say a word and barely look up at you during checkout.

We truly never knew what his deal was. Was he a hermit with bad hygiene? Was he indeed homeless and used his panhandling money to buy new books? Was he a mental patient who was only let out once every few months to buy books?

We'll never know.