Every Saturday morning, almost without fail, I go to the market to buy food for the week. Yesterday when a friend texted me about meeting up instead, it felt great to break with routine and swap the usual vegetable run for a bit of book browsing and a pub lunch. It was the first time I'd been to Red Bus Books, Budapest's biggest second-hand shop for books in English. The place has the unmistakable smell you always get in second-hand bookshops, and a tangible sense of unhurriedness. As well as Gormenghast, the second of the Mervyn Peake trilogy, I picked up Bobby Kennedy's memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1969 edition of The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, a seminal text of what was to become the civil rights movement, about the experience of Afro-Americans at the turn of the 20th Century. In a new bookshop I'd never have looked for these. It's this prospect of stumbling across something unexpectedly that is the point of second-hand shops, and also of routine-breaking.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
SECOND-HAND BOOK SHOPPING
Every Saturday morning, almost without fail, I go to the market to buy food for the week. Yesterday when a friend texted me about meeting up instead, it felt great to break with routine and swap the usual vegetable run for a bit of book browsing and a pub lunch. It was the first time I'd been to Red Bus Books, Budapest's biggest second-hand shop for books in English. The place has the unmistakable smell you always get in second-hand bookshops, and a tangible sense of unhurriedness. As well as Gormenghast, the second of the Mervyn Peake trilogy, I picked up Bobby Kennedy's memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1969 edition of The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, a seminal text of what was to become the civil rights movement, about the experience of Afro-Americans at the turn of the 20th Century. In a new bookshop I'd never have looked for these. It's this prospect of stumbling across something unexpectedly that is the point of second-hand shops, and also of routine-breaking.
Every Saturday morning, almost without fail, I go to the market to buy food for the week. Yesterday when a friend texted me about meeting up instead, it felt great to break with routine and swap the usual vegetable run for a bit of book browsing and a pub lunch. It was the first time I'd been to Red Bus Books, Budapest's biggest second-hand shop for books in English. The place has the unmistakable smell you always get in second-hand bookshops, and a tangible sense of unhurriedness. As well as Gormenghast, the second of the Mervyn Peake trilogy, I picked up Bobby Kennedy's memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1969 edition of The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, a seminal text of what was to become the civil rights movement, about the experience of Afro-Americans at the turn of the 20th Century. In a new bookshop I'd never have looked for these. It's this prospect of stumbling across something unexpectedly that is the point of second-hand shops, and also of routine-breaking.
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2 comments:
it's a bit hit and miss for me, but i have found a couple of good things there recently. went to an enormous bookstore in bangkok today - a japanese chain full of english books in thailand. go figure.
That thing you correctly identify sets me off dithering... (I'm not explaining it very well)... but the sense that you would NEVER have chosen or thought of *that particular book* anywhere else, but because it's the best of a rather random, or mixed lot, in a second hand shop, you select it. More than once I've put it down and walked out at the last minute, thinking "I don't need this. I don't even particularly want it. I'm just buying it cause it's a second hand shop and one feels one should and it's the most interesting thing I've found".
Having said all that, I do enjoy looking around second hand book shops, I really do. There's a particularly good one in Ryde on the Island. Ryde is so grand and gorgeous. It has a particular appeal right now. I feel like the character in the Michelle Shocked song "Last seen hitching on the edge of town/With a sign that said 'anywhere but here'"...
This is getting out of control. I'll email u x
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