Finding Unlikely Books in Likely Places

Earlier this summer I stopped at one of my regular haunts while up in the Adirondacks, The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, NY, and said hello to the folks who run the shop, Sarah and Marc. They have a good selection of titles—a particularly nice variety in my own areas of interest, history and the outdoors.
   It hasn't gotten any easier these days to run an independent bookstore, a truth vouchsafed by the very fact that you're reading these lines now on the Web—in the comfort of your home or even on the go, using a tablet or smart phone. How easy just to click through to a book and order without batting an eye!
     But it's worth thinking about how one comes across the best books. Sure, ordering off the Web is easy and quick, especially when you have a particular title already in mind. But  the most interesting finds don't come when you proceed straight as an arrow. When I'm looking up a volume in the library for research, I always browse up and down the shelf, to see what else is there that I knew nothing about. Sometimes a really astute study is tucked six or seven books down, something that covers a subject far better than the book I was seeking. Other times an archaic tome surfaces, the dust still clinging to it but fascinating and useful for its own reasons. Sometimes the find is an utterly nutty artifact  which relates to nothing in particular I'm doing, but leaves me grinning ear to ear. (I still have xeroxes I made in the 1970s, of a manual from the early twentieth century on stage hypnotism, as well as a handbook on trapping in the Canadian North, which laid out little-known tricks to hunting beaver in the dead of winter or "pulling" fox hearts. (Both books are good topics, come to think of it, for future posts...)

    Bookstores boast a similar advantage—the chance to browse and find an item you had never considered, but now have a few moments to explore. Not merely by looking at the first few pages supplied by Amazon's "Look Inside," but by leafing through at will, fore and aft, to see if your fancy is tickled. Bookshelves reveal strange but intriguing bedfellows. Looking back at what's been shelved beside A Little History of the United States, I see that in Princeton it kept company with Erik Larsen's Dead Wake, recounting the sinking of the Lusitania; in Denver. it sat beside The Spy's Son, about a CIA double agent who from jail trained his son to carry on in his footsteps; and last but not least, in The Bookstore Plus, cheek by jowl with Evicted, a highly praised study of landlords and tenants in gritty Milwaukee, a book which reveals up close the stresses of poverty in twenty-first century America. Who could have predicted such wonderfully diverse and strange company?

    So stop by The Bookstore Plus if you're in Lake Placid and browse. Then take your newfound purchase a few doors down to Big Mountain Deli and dive into your read while sampling one of their 46 multigrain and multifarious sandwiches, each named after one of the Adirondacks' 46 mountains over 4000 feet. I recommend #17 Saddleback: smoked salmon and bacon, lettuce, tomato seasoned with cracked pepper mayo. Truly tasty whether you're cruising across the Atlantic on the Lusitania, being thrown out of a Milwaukee tenement, or beginning a 500-year journey across America.