Like any other self-admitting book nerd, I cannot resist a used bookstore, even if I have twenty books waiting to be read, and even if I have not physically held a book in my hands in quite a bit of time. The ones of New Haven are especially thriving, if only for the fact that the Yale students who have not yet discovered the beauty of renting books or obtaining definitely-legal copies of their texts online need a place to discard the physical books of semesters past. And Book Trader Café, an independent bookseller-coffee-shop situated on the corner of Chapel and York, is among them.
I promise you the used bookstores of Denver, where I call home, do not carry four copies of Madame Bovary for one dollar each. Nor do they frequently feature a graduate student enthusiastically discussing the importance of Philip Roth’s stories to the Jewish-American identity with (or perhaps involuntarily at) the bookstore clerk. Our nonfiction sections are never this full, and they rarely feature history books I might be genuinely compelled to read. And I am sure there is never a man sitting in the outside patio typing a poem of sorts on a turquoise typewriter he has laid out on his lap.
But there are also many things that are the same—some things in used bookstores remain true across both time and scale. There are handwritten signs denoting genre, form, or region haphazardly taped onto their shelves. The books are old, their insides full of annotations, stickers, earmarks. The floor serves as a second home for the titles that do not fit on the too-full shelves, and the yellowed paper, dust, and coffee mixing in the air smells the same in Connecticut as it does in Denver, as it does everywhere.
This is all new to me.
My routine too remains the same across bookstores: I begin with fiction, pick out titles I find interesting, scan for names I know, and gather a stack for later sorting. If I’m feeling especially bold, I might even venture into non-fiction, and I will always make an obligatory visit to poetry and drama. Sometimes I’ll even do this alphabetically.
Today is no different.
I begin in the fiction section, which comprises almost the entire backmost wall of Book Trader. There are many options but perhaps because I am tired or because I do not want to read large tomes on top of class readings, I only look at the relatively brief works. There is a book about the London Underground. There are essays by Saul Bellow. There is a book about a predatory sexual affair during China’s Maoist era, there is a Jodi Picoult novel, and there are books I can tell used to be on syllabi for classes from the sheer number of identical copies, consuming large swaths of an entire row of fiction books.
Also occurring as I walk is the reappearance of faces and titles and names that are familiar to me—authors whose work I know, books I have read, stories feature characters I have loved throughout all of my different times.
And for a very brief second, I feel as if this is an odd literary reunion of some sorts.
I think it is important to note here that I am in my first year at Yale. I tell you this because amidst all the hubbub that accompanies that classification—course registration, new friends, club applications, tryouts, callbacks, a concerningly weird amount of ritualistic tap nights, trying to discern what exactly I must say to this ninety-year old professor to let me take his classes on the ontology of moss, and (god fucking forbid) an endless, endless stream of coffee chats—I find it very easy to feel lost. I have felt alone, incredibly so, and I have felt as if I know no one. Because really, there are relatively few—if any—people at this school who I have known for over twenty days.
But here, in this place, is Jonathon Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century which I have had kept on my shelf for three years even though I’m well aware that I’m probably not smart enough to truly understand its contents. There are many copies of Susan Sontag’s essays, who I was briefly but very vehemently obsessed with as a junior. There is Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s Dunio Elegies, which contains the same poem I read to myself every night for two weeks straight last year. There are the names whose work I have not actually read, but I vaguely recognize are of some importance. There is the short story I had to read with my seventh-grade class. There is my mother’s favorite author, and there is the one she would point out to me in abject disgust.
There, for some odd reason, are ten-plus copies of Robert Ford’s Independence Day.
There is magic here.
Because did you know that if you look hard enough in this one room of this one café, in this one room that is not even really a room and is more like a small annex of sorts, you can find the story of gay lovers whose affair takes place solely in the workrooms of the London Underground? Or that you can talk to Marx, and read not only his words, but also his critics and defenders that came some hundred years after him? Did you know you can read lines of poetry written thousands of years before your existence, which have been read by generations of people before you, and that you can find them in this little annex of ours?
And in a town where I feel like I know no one, I can come and greet friends I have known for years.
I call this place magical because you can come and find all of this in only four of the some 16,000 titles Book Trader purports to sell here.
So, I urge you, indulge in this magic. Go to this bookstore, and find a book. It does not have to be any special book. It probably won’t be all that special, and you might not find your bestest literary friend within its pages.
But, for the love of all that is holy, find a book and let yourself be.
Let yourself read without goals or objectives. Let yourself simply breathe, and enjoy the magical fact that printed ink on a page can teleport you to a world far different than your own, and make you feel things and think things. Let yourself be in that moment. Let yourself be in the bookstore line and let yourself not think about if you’re standing in a particularly attractive way or if your bangles are falling in a cool enough way so that the person you’ve singled out as one of the few minimally attractive people in a five square mile radius will see you and think Wow! That person is reading, and a book at that! How unique! I bet no one in human society has ever understood the importance of literature to our lives as human beings—I must approach and ask her to dinner.
But to do any of that, you first have to come to Book Trader Café.
