By Brian Joseph Davis
I've passed my life in used bookstores, a trait that's probably a variation on my scavenger family's love of a good yard sale. There is nothing quite like the pointless acquisition of a used book. As a weekly book reviewer, however, books are now almost annoyingly free, so my habit has fallen off in recent years. Yet a good used bookstore, like a record store, is still my landmark when travelling to different cities for finding interesting neighbourhoods. A used bookstore or two suggests the presence of affordable food and pre-gentrified nightlife of some kind, as well as being a very quiet place to kill two hours in a strange city while attaining a paper-scented Zen. Unlike a new bookstore, with its do-or-die focus on recent trends (where a title has a life expectancy of one to four months) a used bookstore is pure local anthropology — a catalogue of mistakes, fashions and plain old forgotten ideas particular to that region.
As you can guess, this list is going to be woefully subjective and measured against my own criteria, which include, but are not limited to, the following:
-- The staff must consist solely of the owner and one intense young man or woman who is paid in Sci-Fi paperbacks and never leaves.
-- The store should be just as likely to have a box outside the door of free, rain-soaked Susan Powter books as they are to have a first edition of Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
-- The store must never have “by appointment” hours because that's the mark of snobbery.
-- A pencil crayon portrait of William S. Burroughs as decoration is barely tolerable, but incense is not tolerable at all.
Subjective as this series of posts may be, I hope in the coming days you use the comments section to talk about your own favourite haunts. My list begins with a store most readers have never heard of but it was my first used bookstore and it set the bar for all to follow. Let me tell you about Clem's Book Exchange of Chatham, Ontario.
As a teenager in the early 1990s, Clem's was a one-stop shop that gave you an entire decades-spanning ironic lifestyle for pennies. In the front room, the walls were filled with black velvet paintings and the ceiling was cluttered with a beguiling assortment of molded plastic lamps. Past a door into the back was a paperback graveyard in endless jury-rigged rooms: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, Marshal McLuhan editions designed by Quentin Fiore, Iceberg Slim novels and Kurt Vonnegut by the boxful. There was a room just for true crime, and always, somewhere, a copy of the Xaviera Hollander LP. Clem's, to me, was sex, crime, out-of-date radicalism, forbidden thought and everything else that should excite a teenage mind.
I haven't been to Clem's in 15 years — it's still there — so I can't guarantee you'll have the same bildungsroman-worthy experience, but I do hope some other budding teen anti-Christ is, right now, building a recreation of a 1972 intellectual's library.
Next post: John K. King Books of Detroit
