Bookstores I have known and loved

Having always loved bookstores, I can’t imagine a world without them. Surely my chairmanship of Temple Beth-El’s splendid Braude Library would already have come to an end! So much for People of the Book and the Book of Life!

As a kid, perhaps without even knowing it, I had several favorite bookstores near my home in Los Angeles. One was Campbell’s, in Westwood Village, a stone’s throw from the University of California, Los Angeles. Although primarily an enclave for students and professors, it must have had an inviting children’s section.

Another favorite was Hunter’s, in Beverly Hills, where my great-aunt and great-uncle, Evelyn and Julius, often took my older twin, Ted, and me to enjoy looking around.

Once my sixth-grade teacher scolded me for my fascination with Perry Mason mysteries, which were available in a new format, paperbacks. A year or so later, when my junior high math teacher introduced himself to my class, he said, “I’m not that John Steinbeck.”

One reason that Ted and I learned to enjoy bookstores was that we were forbidden to read comic books. Indeed, we were never allowed to bring any to summer camp and were discouraged from reading those belonging to bunkmates.

Around this time, however, I became devoted to Mad Magazine, which Mom and Dad somehow accepted as a more creative publishing endeavor. How ironic that, in 2001, I wrote an article for an academic journal, Modern Judaism, about cartoons and Jews!

My parents subscribed to numerous magazines and, eventually, to two daily newspapers, but they weren’t keen on visiting bookstores – perhaps because their lives were too full. But Dad, who much enjoyed reading history, politics and biographies, was a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Mom was a wizard in our kitchen, but she didn’t collect cookbooks. Yet one of her treasures was an early edition of “The Settlement Cook Book,” a collection of Jewish recipes first published in Milwaukee in 1910.

My family’s bookcases included many other heirlooms, including an 1895 edition of “The Union Prayer-Book (Reform).” Yet, I can’t recall what happened to one of my favorite Bar Mitzvah presents, a complete edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

By the time I was a college student, in suburban Lake Forest, Illinois, I was becoming a serious bibliophile. I was especially fond of the magnificent bookstore at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I also began subscribing to a series, “The Great Museums of the World,” which was published by Newsweek magazine. I still have about 25 volumes, with stunning color photos, which I often use for reference.

As a graduate student in New York City, and later near San Francisco, I continued to buy catalogs of art museums’ permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, and I’ve saved most of these too.

While teaching art history back in L.A., I became practically addicted to Hennessey & Ingalls, which is not a cocktail but a bookstore specializing in art and architecture books.

I was not yet fascinated by Jewish books. This occurred through further graduate studies at the L.A. campus of Hebrew Union College. But I never found a Jewish bookstore with a broad enough sweep of Jewish history for me.

In 1985, before moving to St. Paul, Minnesota, my wife, Betsey, and I gave many books to my high school library, where I would eventually establish an endowed acquisitions fund.

In the Twin Cities, we enjoyed many bookstores, especially at its wonderful art museums. A favorite store in St. Paul was Odegard’s, not far from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, where we occasionally bumped into Garrison Keillor and chatted about his locally-produced radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” or his latest story collection or novel.

After Molly, our first child, was born, Betsey and I wanted to move closer to my family or hers, near Boston. I definitely needed access to an impressive art museum, numerous historical sites and a bounty of good bookstores.

For perhaps two decades I was enamored of the Brown Bookstore, but it seemed eventually to devolve into a coffee and souvenir shop. Sadly, both the RISD Museum and the RISD Store also sold fewer and fewer books. Perhaps one reason was the proliferation of chain stores, including Borders, which enlightened the Providence Place mall until 2011.

There’s one obvious reason why Borders closed: It had remaindered a dozen copies of “The Jews of Rhode Island,” which I had co-edited for the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association and Brandeis University Press in 2004!

Fortunately, I have grown to rely on two wonderful shops in the East Side of Providence, which I visit almost weekly. For new books, especially paperbacks, I thoroughly enjoy Books on the Square, near Wayland Square, which has been a vital force in our community since 1992. Established by my Beth-El friends, Sarah and Richard Zacks, it has been owned and operated by Merc and Rod Clifton for more than a dozen years.

You may recall the Providence Bookstore Café, which was located in the basement of the Wayland Manor. In 1996, its manager, Kristin Sollenberger, a Michigander who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, bought that store’s inventory and opened her own shop on South Angell Street, east of Wayland Square. Myopic Books specialized in rare and second-hand books, especially in art and architecture. In 2017, the store was renamed Paper Nautilus and moved a few doors farther east. I should probably pay an hourly rate merely to visit, because of its profound therapeutic effects!

Another bookstore, Accident or Design?, also specializing in the visual arts, once operated on the southwest corner of North Main and Meeting streets. I’m afraid that the proprietor was not well suited to running a retail business because she could barely tolerate customers. She once told me, “If you touch that book, you just bought it.” I think that she lasted no more than three years.

How ironic that Betsey and I were customers at Linda Fain’s nearby carpet store for about 16 years, until it closed in 2008. Fain insisted that we fondle every item!

Fain also gave us a beautiful book to learn more about Turkish carpets. What a perfect reminder that Jewish history – near and far – is woven through words, stories and books!

GEORGE M. GOODWIN, of Providence, is the editor of Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes.