One of the
pleasures of traveling is coming across a lovely little local bookstore where
you’re staying. I have fond memories of several such places, some still around
and some not.
In the
latter category, I’d put the Pink Cadillac bookstore in Chester, CA by Lake
Almanor in the mountains northeast of San Francisco and Sacramento. That one’s
been gone for some time now (the town’s probably not a big enough market to
support it), but I stopped there in the late 1980s and bought a couple of used
mysteries. When a nasty, afternoon-long thunderstorm confined me to my motel
room, I was glad I had them with me, even though I can’t remember the name of
the book I read that day.
Still with
us is the Gallery Bookstore in Mendocino, where I go to recharge my batteries
for a few days every couple of years. The Gallery sells mostly new books, and I
always make a point of browsing the store and buying a couple of titles when
I’m up there.
The Outdoor Bookstore
On a recent
visit to the Santa Barbara-Ojai area in Southern California, I made the
acquaintance of two locally owned bookstores. The first was Chaucer’s, which is
located in an unprepossessing strip mall on State Street in Santa Barbara. It’s
primarily a store that sells new books, and it fits a lot of them into a space
not all that large.
I can’t
recall ever seeing a bookstore so densely packed with books as Chaucer’s. The
aisles were tight, the shelves were high, and the available space was stuffed
to the gills with books shelved sideways and up and down. They had a terrific
selection of contemporary mystery authors who are in print but not always
readily available because they don’t necessarily appeal to the airport crowd. I
scored several books there, including three Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries by the
late Reginald Hill.
Even more
interesting was Bart’s Books in Ojai, which bills itself as the largest outdoor
bookstore in the world. It doesn’t rain too much in Ojai, so it was possible to
build the bookstore around a large, open-air courtyard, with overhangs
protecting the inventory from the stray shower.
Phoebe and Father Knox
Rain was
not an issue the day I was there. The high temperature that day was almost
100F, and by 10:30 in the morning, it was pretty oppressive in the store. The
books at Bart’s are nearly all used, and the fiction section alone is probably
as big as a lot of community bookstores. (Mysteries were included in the
fiction section, so searching was a bit of a slog. I checked to see if anyone
had turned in a copy of my book, The McHenry Inheritance, but no such luck.)
This is a
place where a patient search of the shelves can turn up books you never heard
of or despaired of finding. I was able to come away with several older,
out-of-print books by authors in the classical era of the mystery (or closer to
it than today).
Included in
the haul, in order of publication, were Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1869), one of the first detective novels and an
inspiration for Sherlock Holmes; The Footsteps at the Lock, a 1928
classic by Father Ronald A. Knox, a contemporary and friend of Agatha Christie,
John Dickson Carr, et. al; Beginning With
a Bash (1937), a New England mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, writing as
Alice Tilton; and Coffin Scarcely Used,
a 1958 British mystery by Colin Watson, a master of mordant humor.
A good
day’s shopping, and now, with winter on the way, I have some treats set aside
for those long, cold nights.
