Lost in Place

I just returned from a long weekend in Baltimore, The City That Reads, and although I did not have a chance to visit any indie bookstores this time, I finally got around to creating a map of Charm City literary spots, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile:
This map of independent bookstores in Baltimore is [...]

I promised myself I would wrap up my Boston bookstore visits before another month began. So now, finally, here is the last installment — a brief mention of the MIT Press Bookstore that I had a chance to browse through on my way out of town. After a quick meeting with my rep, I headed [...]

(Slowly continuing my recap of visits to some of Boston’s independent bookstores.)
They worship Planet Earth in style at The Globe Corner Bookstore on Mt. Auburn St. at Harvard Square. Case in point, this elegant “map altar” to the gods of geography nestled near the rear of the store. Travel guides, memoirs, narratives and essay collections [...]

Although I’ve been to Cambridge about a 1/2 dozen times in my life, the trip I took earlier this month included my very first visit to the Harvard Book Store. It’s a beautiful shop with eye-catching window displays and tall wooden bays of books that hug every wall of the store. I was fortunate to [...]

This is the first in a series of posts about my recent visits to several Boston-area indie bookstores.
My Boston bookstore visits began with a St. Pat’s Day stop at Brookline Booksmith, just a short walk from the Coolidge Corner “T” stop. I strolled around the neighborhood for a bit first — Brookline is a walkable [...]

My most recent bookstore visits included stops at Taschen’s stylish SoHo outpost on Greene St. (where I snapped this photo of the Atlas Maior) and the tiny mind-body bookshop inside the New York Open Center on nearby Spring St.
At Taschen, I was temporarily transported to Barcelona, and other lands, while flipping through glossy pages, many [...]

Let’s call this step one in the spring cleaning of my writing life, that gets underway today. We’ll start with this — à la George Steiner (but without any deep or important reasons for my lack of writing) — here are shortened versions of blog posts I intended to write in February, yet never got [...]

This is the third bookstore visit from my recent travels in DC. Other shops I wrote about: Olsson’s and Candidas.)
After spending last Saturday and Sunday with friends in Chevy Chase and Pasadena (two Maryland ‘burbs), I returned to Washington DC on Monday morning for one final bookstore visit — this time with Mike Giarratano, Events [...]

My meeting with Tony Ritchie of Olsson’s ended with a nice lunch at Mai Thai* and just enough time to visit one more bookstore in the neighborhood. I’ve already been to nearby Kramer’s on several occasions, so this time I set out to find Candida’s World of Books, an internationally-focused shop that I’ve been eager [...]

Lots of bookstore folks are on their way to Louisville right now for the ABA’s Winter Institute (including the Executive Manager of my bookshop.) But I took a different path to professional development last week, thanks to some colleagues in DC who were kind enough to spend some time “talking shop” with me. This [...]