Yesterday I returned to York to finally visit the York Emporium. This is a throwback to the good old days of used book stores where you could pick up quality older books at fantastic prices.
I had been planning on going there for a long time. They coordinate a book and paper fair twice yearly but I somehow keep missing it. So it was nice to finally get over there.
The building looks small upon arrival but the entrance hides a vast, vast single floor of all kinds of books. How vast? I was there for over three hours. It isn't often that such a thing happens, but I found myself getting tired of looking at book near the end.
The proprietor was very friendly and helpful. Reminded me a lot of a guy I knew who ran a bookstore when I was in high school.
I know you're wanting to know, did I get anything? Of course I did. Amazingly, despite all the books that were there, I found only two baseball books that intrigued me. Both were more than I wanted to spend (which was really strange because most of the books here were under five dollars) so I let them slide for the time being.
So what did I buy? Six Christopher Morley books and a biography on Morley; a novel from the 1970's called Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel by Richard Brautigan; a travelogue by J. Maarten Troost entitled The Sex Lives of Cannibals; an intriguing little book by John McPhee with the title The Survival of the Bark Canoe. And lastly, the most expensive book of the bunch at ten dollars, the first American edition of Rick Gekoski's Nabokov's Butterfly.
It was really refreshing to find that there are still bookstores like this. I'm looking forward to finally making it to one of their fairs, hopefully the one in October.
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