Used Book Shopping
Hello, Spring Break.
Breaks from school can find me finishing a book in a day. An hour at breakfast, an hour after lunch, an hour at bedtime, plus five minute snatches during the day add up quickly, and I devour books in our school breaks. It helps that we have two weeks off, which feels like an unhurried, luxurious amount of time.
It is such a sweet amount of time that one of the first things we did with our time off was drive down to Nashville and go straight to McKay’s (after, of course, eating hot chicken, which is its own story and not relevant here except for how if you go to Nashville, you really do need some hot chicken).
McKay’s is a used bookstore chain first discovered by my husband when it was located in an old restaurant building in Knoxville, its tight aisles a delightful warren of possible treasures. Now I guess all of their stores, located in Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga in Tennessee and in Winston-Salem and Greensboro in North Carolina, are situated in box-shaped warehouses. The aisles are wider but the shelves are still filled with fabulous finds.
We go for the books, but my husband and son also spend quite a bit of time upstairs perusing old CDs and records, and my daughter loves their video game section. They have rows of DVDs and audiobooks, and all kinds of electronics. We generally head down several times a year, loaded with books we have cleaned from our shelves to make room for new ones, and we do well in trade credit, which means that we pretty much never spend our actual money–we just trade our old books for new.
You can’t go looking for particular things, of course. I almost always check for my list of books I want to read, and I am almost always disappointed. But the beauty in McKay’s is the surprises you find. I love walking down the aisles letting my eyes roam the shelves, and finding books I had forgotten, or books I know a friend wanted to read, or books that are totally new to me but just sound so good. I bring my new finds home and stack them on my bookshelf by my bed, so I can take them out at the right moment–a present to my future self.
Recently I was reading through comments in a food group to which I belong, and everyone was recommending Molly Wizenberg’s food memoir, A Homemade Life. I loved the title, and the book sounded perfect for relaxation and food inspiration. I couldn’t find it at the library, so I added the title to my list. A few days later, I was glancing over the most recent stack from McKay’s, thinking idly about what to read next, when I did a double take. A Homemade Life was already on my shelf, picked up with another food memoir for 75 cents, waiting for me to find the right time to read it.
I’m reading it now, and it is exactly what I hoped it would be.
I love going into a new bookstore and finding exactly what I wanted to read, and I love being able to order anything I want at any time. But there’s still something special about wandering shelves of somebody else’s books, wondering what they saw in them, listening for hints of the magic that made them buy the books in the first place, finding traces of the magic I want to take home with me. Sometimes it’s there in their literal inscriptions and marginalia. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, holding the book in my hand, feeling again like a part of something, just being the next page in a book that surely has touched people’s lives.
