blog: The Myopic Bookstore

On Saturday, when the Django masses went to Wicker Park after the BoF, I got myself a $20 transit pass. Now, seeing as I was going to be in town for another 5 days, and the train rides are $2 apiece, this is obviously something of a waste. So I've been liberally heading down to Wicker Park at night since then. Monday night, I spotted a most interesting looking bookstore, called Myopic, while walking back to the blue line, but I was cold and it was already late, so I resolved to go back later.

Well, tonight I had begged off of a dinner trip with some Django sprinters - thinking that I might go to see the other Django sprinters (there are a lot of us!) at the Green Mill - but by the time I hopped on IRC to get the travel details they had already left.

So, I went on down to Wicker Park again, this time to visit Myopic. After dinner and a couple of false turns - it is, in my defense, a rather confusing intersection - I found the bookstore.

Alive

Bookstores are always interesting places, and used bookstores even more so. But Myopic is really something else. Walking in, tall bookshelves - far beyond the reach of any person - line the walls, and shorter bookshelves are packed in between. The books are ostensibly lined up, but it seems that each bookshelf's top shelf has lost all sense of order, with books stacked haphazardly and rarely in order - a surrender, it seems, to the inevitable entropy of the steady stream of visitors.

Having hardly passed the cashier, my eye catches the "Upstairs" sign and I feel a slight thrill. Multistoried libraries and bookstores always seemed infinitely more interesting to me than those confined to one floor. Seeing that philosophy lives on the second floor, I climb up - only to have my heart jump again as I see that, bisecting the first floor's tall walls in the back half of the store, a balcony filled with yet more books beckons. The upstairs trek can wait: how could I possibly resist a book-filled balcony!

The Cat

Turning the corner around the low wall, I see what I first assume is a purse on the floor. Concerned, I walk closer, only to freeze when it lifts its head at me. It's a cat.

This is what finally forced me to take my camera out.

Of course, it gets better. Looking over the ledge of the balcony, I can see the tall bookshelves (and, of course, the occasional browser), and reach out and pick at the Civil War books that apparently no one wants.

Continuing up to the second floor proper, six men are sitting on a table with three chess boards, some clutching black coffee. I tiptoe around them to get to the Philosophy section. I'm a little disappointed in the selection - I end up picking out something by Mill, as well as "the Case for Modern Man," to try to assuage the pessimism two cynical liberals that I know - one of them being myself.

Worse yet, tiptoeing past the chess players again to get to the Political Science section, I fail to find any Chomsky. His work was also missing in both Philosophy and Linguistics. Used book stores aren't necessarily known for their complete catalogues, but I have to say I was surprised at the omission.

Admonished

Dawdling at the Psychology section before going down to the basement, I notice masking tape on one of the bookshelves, scrawled with "Reshelve your books, or we'll set these crazies on you!" So very different than the public library's polite but firm admonition to not reshelve books... walking down the stairs, I see another reshelve notice, this one threatening to increase by a dollar the price of all books that are reshelved. I can't help but to admire their creativity and their shameless appeal to the communal-help instinct.

The basement is completely empty while I'm down here. A dimly-lit room is dedicated to mystery books, while down a narrow corner lie all the "R" and "S" biography books. On the left side, I can hear water steadily streaming through the bare pipes lining the brick wall.

But here I find results, finally getting my hands on the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell - which I'd been looking for for some time - and the first volume of his Selected Letters.

Finally, I decide to end my spending while I still have enough books to fit in my suitcase when I fly back to Charlotte on Friday. The books are not particularly cheap, either - still better than new books, but perhaps about half of what I'd expect to pay new - somewhat more than I've seen at other used book stores, but given the general awesomeness of the place, I can most definitely forgive it. It's only as I'm paying the cashier that I finally see seemingly a whole shelf filled with Chomsky. I grab his Reader and catch the Blue Line back to Rosemont, eager to get back to my computer so I can get my photos up on Flickr.

Not all of them turned out well, and I was weighing going back yet again tomorrow. But, I haven't really decided what to do tomorrow, and in any case, poking through my photos, I just noticed a "no photography" sign... ironic. So, these may turn out to be all I have.

In any case, it was most definitely the most interesting place in Wicker Park I've found. Hopefully tomorrow will prove to be as interesting.