116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
On Topic: Iowa City
Michael Chevy Castranova
Dec. 11, 2011 11:35 am
You can't judge a book by its cover. But sometimes you can get a good sense of a city by its bookstores.
That's probably even more true today than it used to be, what with the Internet crushing the businesses that offer the opportunity to not only look inside the product you're considering, but also touch and feel it - to hold it in your hands.
And it's precisely because so many of these stores have vanished into the retail mist, or have closed their doors to serve only online orders, that we need to give them their due.
One of my favorite bookstores was on Main Street in downtown Cincinnati for years. Acres of Books was an old, drafty, high-ceilinged warehouse of a place, with - if memory serves - three floors of books.
A first floor casement behind the register held the rare items. On my initial visit there, I came away with a well-preserved first edition of Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” with a deep green cover and heft.
The second and third floors held other kinds of treasures - everything from rows of dog-eared Erle Stanley Gardner to picture books for birders. And I maintained the impression that employees didn't get up to these dusty upper levels much.
The last time I was in Cincinnati, in the mid-1990s, I discovered Acres of Books itself wasn't where I'd left it. The building had been commandeered by a furniture store.
But my all-time-favorite bookstore is the always-bustling Strand, at Broadway and 12th in Manhattan. It is what the banner outside boasts: 18 miles of books.
(For years the slogan was “8 miles of books.” I'm not sure how they crammed 10 more miles inside.)
In the decades I've been making the pilgrimage there, I've learned Strand is not where you go for specific titles. It's more a subject-matter kind of store.
That is, it specializes in used and estate books and, because this after all is New York City, loads of reviewers' copies - the editions printed ahead of official publication for the critics, often without photos and, some I've seen, without all the page numbers.
Strand may not have a splashy display of the latest “instant best-seller” by Dan Brown. But, by golly, it carries groaning wooden shelves detailing the art of Leonardo da Vinci.
What ties all these shops together is that they were not/are not Top 40 marts. You went there for the experience - they're idiosyncratic.
Which brings us to Prairie Lights in Iowa City. (Iowa City itself is a UNESCO City of Literature.)
I got the reference right off - its name echoes the godfather of independent bookstores, San Francisco's City Lights, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and publisher Peter Martin.
Ferlinghetti saw that bookstore-publisher combo, he once said, as a “great conversation” between readers and authors.
Prairie Lights, as with City Lights and Strand, supports that conversation. It brings in authors who read from their work.
This past June, for example, I chatted with director John Sayles, who was at Prairie Lights promoting his new novel, “A Moment in the Sun.” I told him I'd particularly loved his movie “Baby It's You,” and I still adored its star, Rosanna Arquette.
He in turn related witty anecdotes about the movie, and subtly corrected my pronunciation of Rose-Ahhna's name. ...
And, of course, the store sells books - things to read, smell and touch. Things that show us new worlds and ideas.
Things that, if we let them, engage us in conversation.
+++
On a not-unrelated note, a reader emailed not long ago in response to one of my columns to ask how what I'd written had anything to do with business.
“More like monkey business,” he speculated. (The Business 380 theme that week was residential real estate, if I recollect correctly, so I'd written about how houses can leave lasting, personal impressions.)
Other emails have thanked me for an interview with recovering gambling addict and author Michael J. Burke (that week's theme was the casino industry). One asked for more details on the historic Shepheard Hotel in Cairo, Egypt (written about in a column on commercial real estate).
One email simply requested: “More funny.”
I mention all this as next month will be the one-year mark for Business 380.
We've covered a chunky variety of business topics in these pages - from credit unions to biotech to economic development - and not every reader can be an expert in all of them. The purpose of “On Topic” is to open another door, to present a slightly different view on each week's theme.
So, yes, a column about the knowledge-based economy might start out about learning to drive a stick shift. A focus on Hiawatha might include ruminations on the Midwest and a snippet from Meredith Willson's “The Music Man.”
And, sometimes, a little leavening (aka, “more funny”) isn't a bad thing, either.
Thanks for reading.