Pilgrimage to Powell’s BooksI catalog all my books and when I read them. I recently came across my catalog for 1984, and found a record of what I think was my first visit to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. It was on 23 November 1984, more than thirty years ago, when I was twenty-two—and I’ve enjoyed visiting as often as possible since then. I’ve been to some pretty big bookstores in London, Tokyo, and New York, but Powell’s is still my favourite bookstore in the world. Here are the ten books I bought on my very first pilgrimage:
These books included my first Lewis Carroll and E. E. Cummings books, now part
of a collection that I keep in entire six-foot-tall bookcases full of their
work. Later I bought many haiku books there, too, and well remember the spaces where they offered haiku and related poetry—an entire bookcase full, one much taller than six feet. Haiku has not been featured in such a way for more than decade (such books vastly decreased in number and now scattered throughout other poetry books). The poetry section is huge, filling a couple of fabulous aisles, but the haiku section is no more, and the haiku selections are appallingly scant, even while a treasure might emerge now and then. Powell’s is still a spectacular bookstore. It used to be that I never set
foot in it without spending at least a hundred dollars. However, on a recent visit in August of 2016, I hardly bought anything (okay, two books—Simon
Winchester’s The Alice Behind Wonderland and Michael Chabon’s novel Summerland, both in hardback). Before Amazon and the Internet, Powell’s always had treasures and
discoveries, and one could spend hours searching for the veins of gold, but those days seem to be gone, because now I can find most of Powell’s surprises online. Plus maybe I’d be more delighted
to see particular books if I didn’t already have them. Still, if you ever have the
chance, get yourself to Powell’s, pick up a store map when you enter, and give
yourself a few hours to wander and wonder. You’ll be there for a while: If you rocket along, merely looking at one book per minute for eight hours a day, every day of the year, it would take you almost six years to look at every book—and then, after six years, you’d have to catch up with all the new books they’d add during that time. It is, after all, not only my favourite bookstore in the entire world, but also the largest. —21 September 2016
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