Emporium of Memory

In the late 70s, my family lived a few miles outside of Brattleboro, Vermont, and on weekends, we would venture into town where I’d spend the afternoon browsing through a cozy, little, brick bookshop on Elliot Street just off of Main. I was a preteen and my reading consisted mostly of fantasy and science fiction novels. I remember sitting crosslegged on the carpet in the genre nook, studying book after book, deciding which I would buy with my lawn-mowing money. The pile included Tolkien, of course, those Ballantine paperback editions that featured idyllic cover art by the author, Conan books with the grim Frazetta covers of mighty thews, steel blades, and brutal violence, and Doctor Who novelizations with their motley crew of fantastic villains—Daleks, Cybermen, Zygons—that the curly-haired hero readily dispatched. I’d select one, maybe two if the neighborhood grass had been especially persistent, and bring them home to read late into the night. Then I’d wait, the days passing with intolerable slowness, for the next trip into town.

As I got older, my tastes expanded and I began to explore other sections of the bookshop. It started with Star Wars novels such as Han Solo at Stars’ End and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, but quickly moved to books by Harlan Ellison, Madeleine L’Engle, A.E. van Vogt, Asimov, and Heinlein, and then to Stephen King and Robert Ludlum, and then to more mainstream authors such as John Irving and James Michener. I wandered deeper and deeper into the bookshop, my fingertips skipping across dusty spines on shelf after shelf, and it eventually struck me that the interior of the shop was much larger than the brick exterior.

I began exploring and found hidden alcoves and galleries packed with books. I climbed ladders to balconies lined with more books, and descended stairs into vast warrens containing uncountable books. I followed dim corridors to rooms so heavy with books that they seemed to warp time and space, and I squeezed between shelves to find forgotten chambers strewn with books that had been ripped to shreds and shelves torn from the walls. I began to notice placards that identified different regions of the shop. Some were named with colors, the Red Room or the Green, some took the names of constellations, others used the names of tarot cards, and many were named with things I couldn’t identify at all. I learned to navigate the shop by way of these signs. For instance, if you went through the Grey Room, down the Hall of Sagittarius, and past the Seven of Swords, you would come to a small attic-like room with a window looking out over what I think was Victorian London during the winter. I would sit for hours on the padded window sill and watch the snow fall while absently paging through one book or another.

I confided to a friend about the wonders of the bookshop, and he insisted on seeing it for himself. So, one sunny afternoon after school, we rode our bikes into town and visited the shop. We were in the Vault of the Fool, which is pretty deep in the stacks, when a tall warrior wearing a shirt of chainmail, tattered breeches, and worn leather boots, stumbled into the room, bleeding from several gashes along his arms. He gripped a stained sword in his right hand, and in his left he wielded a small, dented shield. He looked at us with incredulity, and in a voice thick with a strange accent said, “Begone from here, lads! Foul creatures lurk in this accursed stygian library.” He then turned and ran into the darkness of a passageway I had never explored. Stunned, my friend and I looked at each other, but I could see in my friend’s eyes that he was already lost. A week later he told me he was going “all the way” into the shop. I pleaded with him to forget about it, but a few day’s later his parents called to ask if we’d seen him recently. The memory of that time is like a dream now, but I never heard from him again.

After that, my visits to the shop became more sporadic, and I would wander the stacks listlessly, occasionally calling to my missing friend. At the end of a long arcade bearing the name Parnassus, I found a window that looked out on a futuristic street of people dressed in colorful capes, accompanied by robots, and traveling in flying cars. Across the street was a restaurant, and in its windows I could see the reflection of the shop I was in. Less than thirty feet from where I watched was an entrance to the bookshop. The sign over the door read “Isher’s Books,” and below that was a banner that said “The right to read is the right to be free.” I wanted so much to walk through those doors and down that street, but no matter how I searched, I could not find the entrance I saw in that reflection.

My family soon moved south and I busied myself with school and later a career and then a family of my own. A few years after my mother passed, I found myself thinking again about those weekly trips, so long ago, to that little bookshop. I looked it up but the shop had closed shortly after we had left, and a candy store now occupied the space. I can’t help but wonder where all of those books went, and if there might be some way to still find them somewhere.

Even now, whenever I travel for work, I always spend an evening or two visiting the few remaining local bookshops scattered here and there. I slowly meander through the stacks, touching the books, remembering. When I come to the end of a shelf, just for a moment my breath catches and my heart skips, but then I turn the corner and there’s a wall or the door to the bathroom. I smile to myself, imagining my long-lost friend bursting through the bathroom door, wild-eyed and unkept, begging me to follow him back into the labyrinth of books. Then I check the time and return to the front of the store as the shopkeeper tallies up the day’s receipts. It’s night and the snow is falling and I hope it’s not too late to call my children.

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash