∞ Friends of the Berkeley Public Library Bookstore

186 Words filed by Frank @ 05:43 | 29-Mar-07 in bookstores |

It’s tucked away in a little pedestrian alleyway west of Telegraph between Channing and Durant. It’s basically a hole in the wall, staffed by elderly volunteers, most of whom are way more devoted to shelving and tending the collection than they are to the people who happen to wander in to browse and buy their stock. If you’re in the way when they’re shelving, you’ll get a brisk “Excuse me!”

But they have some surprisingly good stuff, for a hole in the wall. I’ve picked up quite a few good buys there recently. And most have been not more than $2 apiece.

One good find was Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Another was The People’s Almanac, a book which my aunt in Houston sent me for my tenth birthday and which turned me into a lifelong fan of subversive writing — it was probably the most influential book I read as a kid. (I have a feeling that my aunt just picked it up and thought it was a plain old thicker-than-usual World Almanac-type book. Little did she know.) ★

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