Favorite Bookstores

What's your favorite bookstore? Is it an online store or a bricks-and-mortar store? How often do you go book shopping? Is your favorite bookstore (or bookstores) listed as a favorite in LT? Do you attend events at local bookstores? Do you use LT to find events?

Well Marie at the Boston Bibliophile sure brings back memories with this question and her response! I spent many years living in Boston and enjoyed the Harvard Coop but my favorite book store was Waterstones in a fabulous Romanesque Revival building on the corner of Newbury Street and Exeter which originally was built as a Spiritualist Church. It was everything a book store should be, great selection in a beautiful setting and a wonderful place to spend the day. Unfortunately it is long gone. I also enjoyed the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore which is also now gone although it retains an online presence. (Check out its bitter but interesting, “Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores”, scroll down the page a bit). Boston was a great city for antiquarian book stores which were fun to poke around in but I must admit I rarely purchased anything. Boston is also home to my all time favorite book event, the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair where I would drool over not only the interesting and rare books but the amazing fore-edge painting and extravagant book bindings. Once again, never bought anything but I loved looking.

The bookstore that I am most fond of however is the Barnes & Noble in Walpole, MA because I was part of the management team that opened that store. It was quite an experience. Whenever I am back in the area I always go and visit. It is looking older and tired and everyone that I knew is long gone but it still holds a special place in my heart.

Now I live in a location that has no bookstores and no useful library so all of my shopping is online. I use aubible.com for audio books, ebooks.com and others for ebooks and Barnes & Noble.com for paper books. I must admit that I use Amazon to look for books and read all the reviews but I actually purchase the books from B&N because the shipping works much better for me than with Amazon, the price is great since I am a member, plus I get airline miles. I guess I am in the process of selecting books almost everyday that I surf the internet but I don’t actually place an order more than a couple times a month. I haven’t found LT very helpful for finding book stores or book events.