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When I lived in the Northeast, Boston was my Mecca. It's a great city for history, universities, seafood, the arts, and for its traffic, which magically defies not only the rules of the road, but the laws of physics, as well.
For me, however, the best part was the books, mostly the used books. (I'm not rich enough for rare books.) If I ever make it to heaven, I expect to find the used book shopping there only slightly better than in Boston.
Now that I'm in Utah, I can't just put the family in the car and drive to Boston for the long weekend. But I have found a literary oasis in the desert.
Last fall, my wife's imagination conjured up the perfect birthday gift, an "all reasonable expenses paid" trip to . . . no, not to Boston, to a pair of downtown Salt Lake City's finest attractions. "Reasonable" on our budget meant $75.
The fish and chips at the Market Street Grill were excellent, but the book shopping at Sam Weller's was positively Bostonian. Utah may not have Cambridge's Mt. Auburn Street, with its Pangloss Bookshop, its McIntyre and Moore, and others; with Harvard Square's offerings a block away and Wordsworth Books just around the corner. But the used book shopping at 254 South Main Street in Salt Lake City is quite respectable.
Some book shops are small, hole-in-the-wall establishments. Mr. Weller's oasis is not one of them. I like the little shops, too, but sometime a bookworm needs to roam more widely. By the way, between the basement and the balcony, both of which are stuffed full of used books, there is an entire main floor of new books, including lots of local and regional titles.
The greatness of a bookstore is not just in the books themselves. It's in the attitude. You can see that Sam Weller's has the attitude without even leaving home.
The store's history, as set forth at its Web site, samwellers.com, is interesting enough. (Does every great bookstore have a major fire in its history?) But the attitude is most obvious in the small things.
The Web site reports that the store is "staffed by 35 book lovers." Big store, big staff. But that's not the point. I've talked to some of them; the claim is true. They love books. They know books. They walk around thinking bookish thoughts.
In other words, Sam Weller's staff is a refreshing contrast to some of the folks I've met in chain bookstores, who seem to know in a general sense that selling books is a good thing, but not to have any great love for the books themselves, or any significant experience reading or pondering or discussing them.
I'm sure there are genuine book lovers in the chain stores, too. I earnestly hope that the disappointing workers I've met on occasion were really bored mall-lurkers who were pressed into service for minimum wage on an emergency basis, because the entire real, book-loving staff was home with the flu or en route to Ithaca, New York, for the mammoth Friends of the Library book sale.
One bookstore employee I knew, who worked for a certain regional chain, long ago and far away, once unwittingly shelved books by Sigmund Freud in the occult section. I suspect that most, if not all, of the 35 Sam Weller employees know why that was wrong, why that was funny, and why, on some level, that wasn't the worst idea in the world.
The Sam Weller Web site claims, "We have more books than sense." For this to be true is one thing. To wear it as a badge of honor is quite another. These are definitely my kind of folk.
In case you're wondering, that $75 bought a nice lunch for two and an armload of books, including a remarkable modern novel, a deservedly obscure 1966 political thriller, a play by George Bernard Shaw, a historical account from the Landmark series for my son, a thick scholarly tome on modern revolutionaries, a book of commentary on post-Soviet Russian society, and a scholarly treatise (in Russian) on Old Russian literature.
I have advised my wife that this year's birthday idea, like a good book, does not need to be new. Specifically, I'd like a rerun of last year's.
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