I live on 96th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. I often take a walk down one side of Madison, and up the other. Every rooftop, every store, every corner has a memory for me, and I sometimes imagine myself as Mrs. Dalloway, and Madison Avenue as my Piccadilly.
The anchor of my walk is The Corner Bookstore, which has been on 93rd as long as I've lived here. Sometimes I don't stop in, but checking out the windows is a sacred duty for me, since I spent my life in the book business.
A couple of months ago I discovered a theme window filled with science books for the general reader. It was the best bookstore window display I've seen in my life. At the top was Mannahatta, the marvelous geological and botanical reconstruction of our island as it was when Henry Hudson first arrived, 400 years ago this October. Then I saw Over the Edge of the World, Silent Spring, Botany of Desire, Greatest Show on Earth, Age of Wonder, A Supremely Bad Idea, Dry Storeroom, The Feeling of What Happens, The Last Fish Tale, Sibley's Guide to Trees, Proust and the Squid, How the Mind Works, American Prometheus, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, The Selfish Gene, The Snow Leopard, Einstein, The Elegant Universe, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Rocket Men, and more.
Because the books were face out, I could read the subtitles to find what some of the more imaginatively titled books were really about. (You can check the list out on Amazon, but please buy them in a bookstore.)
I have read many of these books, but far from all of them (I'm in the middle of Age of Wonder at the moment). Looking at all these books together in one place, I was cheered up. Our reading and writing culture can't be that bad if authors write such books, publishers publish them and keep them in print, and bookstores promote them.
A few days later I learned that the display had been a success, bringing old and new customers into the store.
This window was the creation of a bookseller dedicated to intriguing and informing my neighbors and visitors to our part of town. No search engine could have put it together. It exhibited taste and imagination and experience - the very attributes of many independent booksellers. They have to work extra hard to sell a book, you know, and they constantly think up new ways to bring in the customers. An imaginative window looks easy, but it takes a lot of thought.
Hooray for independent bookstores, and good luck to the people who are fortunate enough to live in their neighborhoods or pass by their windows and take the time to stop, look, browse, and buy.
A bookstore figures on Mrs. Dalloway's walk, as it does on mine. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, and so she was a publisher as well as a writer. Perhaps that's why it's so natural for Mrs. Dalloway to float into the store and pick up a book. Let's all do the same, and maybe we'll discover a new Virginia Woolf on the way.
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