August 21, 2016

Freewheelin’ at Oxford’s Square Books

Leaving Memphis for the day, I head South to Ox ford, MS., a town billing itself as “the cultural Mecca of the South”. As I walk around the town square…

August 19, 2016

I’ve been to Memphis… and did not find Tournier

So here I am in Memphis, and I did not find Tournier. No “Midnight Love Feast”, nor any of his other books – but, more surprisingly, no “Confederacy of Dunces” either….

August 16, 2016

Grounds for New Hope and small press

That weekend, the road initially led to Sculptor’s Way, in Hamilton, NJ, for a summer tour of Grounds for Sculpture, a park created in 1992 by J. Seward Johnson. Sometimes…

August 10, 2016

The ‘kindfulness’ of bookstore signs

For this first in a series to be continued, three bookstores signs – coincidentally, all from Powell Books, in Portland, Oregon. Where we find a recommendation for my old nemesis…

July 24, 2016

My frontier for this trip

When I reached Prineville in the late afternoon, there was no bookstores to be seen, though there were books in one of the windows of the block-long “Neat Repeat” store….

July 23, 2016

A parenthesis… or not

When I left Klamath Falls this morning, the bookstore, Basin Book Traders, was still closed; a lone reader sat on the bench placed outside the strip-mall store. So, I thought, this…

July 22, 2016

Tournier spotting in Eugene

The table outside J Michaels Books, in downtown Eugene, looked promising (the anniversary edition of Eloise’s adventures!); the carefully curated collection inside confirms the promise. For the first time since I…

July 21, 2016

Eat, sleep, read, and a talking raven

A hand-written note at the Cloud and Leaf sent me on my next journey: it mentioned the owner of the Cannon Beach Book Co who liked a book so much that she sold it…

July 20, 2016

Incipit for a trip

So we start this book roamin’ at the margin of these United States: three blocks from the Pacific Ocean, at the Cloud and Leaf, in the small coastal town of Manzanita, Oregon. The…