A Vanishing Species

(Warning: Nostaligia will be wallowed in during the course of this post.)

I had to go to Dallas today, something I do only on rare occasions, and I thought that on the way back I'd do a little booking and stop at a couple of used bookstores between here and there. I used to visit one of these stores on a fairly regular basis, and they always had a good stock of old paperbacks. But I don't go that way very often anymore and the traffic getting there is usually bad, so I hadn't been in a couple of years. The other store I'd only been to once.

You can probably guess where this is headed. Both stores were gone. In one case, the shopping center space was vacant. In the other case, the store was not only gone, so was the building and all the other buildings on the block as well. I guess somebody's going to build some other business there, or the state's putting a road through, or something.

But this got me to thinking about all the used bookstores in this area that have vanished over the years, stores where I spent lots of enjoyable hours and bought lots of good books. The Book Rack. Book-a-teria. Echo Paperbacks. Lone Star Paperbacks. The Book Swap. Thompson's Bookstore (both locations in downtown Fort Worth -- the one on Throckmorton was the first used bookstore I ever went to). The junk store on the west side of Fort Worth a couple of blocks from the bomber plant. The TV repair shop on the north side that also sold paperbacks (my wife will remember it as the place where the floors moved under you when you walked). Harbinger Books. MegaBooks. Bricktop Books. Books Etc. The Pirate's Den in Austin. Collector's Bookstore in Corpus Christi. And all the places with names I've forgotten, places that had no name, places that I visited only once or twice before they disappeared. I remember a time about 25 years ago when Livia and I made a list of all the used bookstores in one area of town and spent an entire day going from store to store, coming home late in the afternoon with sacks and sacks full of books. And it pains me to think that those days are gone and will likely never come again.

I know, I know, we have the Internet now. I can go to ABE and search for a copy of Richard S. Prather's DEAD MAN'S WALK (the first Shell Scott novel I ever read), and a few mouse clicks tell me that more than 50 copies are available, starting at $1.50. I could buy one in a matter of seconds. But could it ever mean as much to me as the copy that I bought for a quarter at Thompson's in 1967 and read during one long, lazy summer day?

Somehow, I don't think so.