Who on Earth needs an exhaustive, 430-page history of the Battle of Stalingrad?
I guess I do.
“Caught your eye, huh? That’s an amazing book,” advises the clerk in The Military & History Bookshop in Sidney, British Columbia, Canada, a comment that spurs a few interesting thoughts. Like, how many bookstore clerks have actually read so much of the dry inventory of their secondhand shelves that they can render unsolicited assessments of a massive tome I happen to have in my hands?
Better yet, why am I here in Sidney? And the bookshop? And the book itself, considering that tech pundits have often declared the demise of printed books?
British historian Antony Beevor’s exemplary “Stalingrad” all by itself weighs almost 2 pounds. Aside from its 430-page text, it has 50 pages of follow-on footnotes, orders of battle, and other arcana. “Utterly superb!” declares a frontispiece note penned by a previous owner aimed at, well, me.
Sidney, a pleasant town of 11,000 a half-hour north of BC’s capital Victoria, overlooks a sparkling sapphire ribbon of the Salish Sea along Vancouver Island. Victoria and its island are rightly among North America’s most popular travel destinations, but Sidney, well, it’s nice. The Victoria airport and BC Ferry terminal are near. Lush ocean breezes whisk away morning mist. Redolent smells of coffee and butter tarts feather the streets. Tidy postwar split levels peer over the water behind manicured yards. Nothing extraordinary—except that the town’s half-dozen bookshops, all within a turning page of each other along the main drag, have led it to be identified as “Canada’s only book town.” So monikered, how could I resist a stroll through town?
Books, Books, and More Books
Blame it all on Hay-on-Wye, the world’s premier example of a delightful niche travel attraction: a town whose stock-in-trade is books. Poised on a gentle slope above the River Wye in a viridescent vale fronting Welsh hills, Hay-on-Wye has books new and used, modern and antique, big and small, cheap and dear. More than 20 shops offer books, plus maps, sheet music, and such. There’s a children’s bookshop, a mystery bookshop, a cinema bookshop, and so on. One bookstand is unstaffed and outdoors; you leave your money in an honor jar as you do at a roadside honey stand. It’s heaven for bookworms like me (not to mention Anglophiles).Serendipity is one of the most delightful aspects of travel. It’s what took me to Hay-on-Wye years ago as I was heading from Wales back to London. Until I wandered into this little border hamlet (it’s in Wales, but you could pitch a paperback from the edge of town into a sheep paddock in England), I had no idea there might be such a place as a town devoted to books; my route was simply the best between Aberystwyth and Heathrow. Signs advised visitors they were approaching a book town, and I steered directly toward the high street.
It’s been 25 years since I first heard tech cognoscenti lasciviously predict the death of printed books. I’m old enough now that such declarations amuse me, and I make a point of browsing bookstores wherever I go, partly just to thumb my nose at ghastly ignorance; partly because, to me, a week without a new book to read is alarming; partly because bookstores, like meadowlarks, are indicator species that signify fine places. And in this helter-skelter world of ours, you never know how long an opportunity will persist: The pandemic did in that history bookshop in Sidney a couple of years ago, though the town still has five bookshops to enjoy.
So any bookstore catches my eye. More than one is delightful; a half-dozen constitute a feast.
London’s Bookworm District
That’s why, a year ago in London, as my travel partner and I disembarked the Underground at Putney Bridge on our way to watch a rowing competition, I was snagged by a bookstore fronting the neighborhood high street. Inside Hurlingham, books spilled off shelves; books were piled higher than ladders; books marched along planks on the sidewalk. Down the street was a coffee shop (yay!) and, the other way, a boxwood-hedged riverside park. Across the bridge, two mainstream bookstores with new titles and, oh, jigsaw puzzles, even a portable puzzle carrier. Nearby, on both sides of the Thames, lie Hanshan Tang Books (specializing in books on the art of Asia); Oxfam, a store supporting its eponymous charity; a used bookstore similarly supporting Amnesty International; and several other general-interest bookstores of varying character.Putney’s a book town, you see. It’s a district in London, yes, but draw a circle around its famous bridge—home of the annual Cambridge-Oxford rowing contest called, in quintessentially imperial British fashion, just “The Boat Race,” as if there are no other aquatic races on this planet—and any traveler can have their own race from store to store, with stops for coffee, scones, and, later, fish and chips at a wonderfully named pub such as The Coat & Badge.
The east bank of the Seine leading toward the Louvre bears a similar character, with the added benefit of croissants and Édith Piaf posters.
America’s Own
Are there U.S. book towns? One could never accuse American society of being overly literary, but Hobart, a hamlet in the Catskills, fashions itself “Hobart Book Village,” with eight stores of sundry descriptions. Larry McMurtry’s old hometown of Archer, Texas, once had four stores holding almost a half-million titles collected by McMurtry, author of “Lonesome Dove”; now just one remains: Booked Up. Grass Valley and Nevada City are twin historic mining towns in California with seven bookshops and supposedly the oldest continuously operating saloon in California.However, in typical American fashion, our most notable version of a book town is neither town, nor an urban district, but a single store. Portland, Oregon’s Powell’s City of Books is the world’s single biggest independent bookstore, with more than a million titles on hand. It encompasses an entire city block at the edge of the Pearl District, occupying what once was (so American!) a car dealership.
Powell’s is so big that customers pick up maps on their way in to navigate the 68,000 square feet, nine rooms, three floors, and 3,500 sections (Tarot, transgender, and Turkish, for instance). Every category covered by separate stores in Hay-on-Wye is here. Wandering Powell’s is like navigating the halls of an old East Coast college building, with stairs and landings and back ways and elevators and cupboards, shelves, stacks, and rafters hither and yon.
There are, indeed. Despite techno disdain, about 3 million new titles join the shelves each year—three times as many as a generation ago.
For the Love of Books
As for “Stalingrad,” having read it voraciously—yes, I bought it, I’m obsessed with World War II history—I agree completely with the lavish praise accorded the book, which further convinced me that Hitler’s loss in this famous battle was the turning point in human history. But I couldn’t say this had I not read Beevor’s book, and I wouldn’t have done that had I not wandered into that bookshop in Canada’s only book town.One need not go to Sidney or Hay-on-Wye or Powell’s or Putney to browse books. Dire predictions notwithstanding, books and bookstores are alive and well and providing 21st-century illustrations of Mark Twain’s famous response to his rumored early death—that is, “an exaggeration.”
Book towns and their kin are special evocations of an art that a half-millennium ago transformed human civilization. Visit a book town and you find the rare opportunity to travel twice simultaneously—geographically and metaphysically. And those are the best journeys of all.
