Southern Bookstores

There is something hauntingly seductive about old Southern second-hand bookstores that pulls me to them like honeybees to nectar. I descend a step that is not quite where I expect it to be, to enter what some would see as just an old, many-roomed house filled with books. 

There are several doorways but I am drawn upward to an attic where the air inside holds the heat of a summer day and sunbeams slope through dusty window panes. Perhaps there is only a straight-back chair, or footstool—or just the plank floor—to sit upon, but look at the books! I am ecstatic.

I will spend hours there, turning the pages of antiquated literary treasures, brittle and yellow with age. Covers are scuffed, soiled, stained, torn; often, gauzy mull cloth shows through where book spines are loose or missing. The black-and-white images are all too often grainy or blurry, the protective tissue-like papers placed on top of illustrations as fragile as a soft breeze. Yet, I delight in the musty, damp odor of those antiquated books. I thrive on some long-ago writer’s lyrical words, while nearby, the whisperings from some shadowed nook carries over to my own dim-lit corner.

There is something intimate in those rooms stacked with testimonials of the past. I move along narrow passageways of small interconnected rooms, running my hands lovingly along the dusty spines of unremembered, out-of-print books. From their wooden shelves they seem to wink slyly at me, as though we share a naughty secret. Weighty tomes, such as Fifty Years History Of The Temperance Cause (1880, J. E. Stebbins), are stacked high on scuffed floors. The covers bear elaborate engravings and decorative handwriting. The day’s weary distractions fade and I discover pure, unadulterated joy.

I especially delight in books written about the South, notably by authors of a particular period of which I read. These writers of times long past bespeak southern history, literature and culture as only writers of those past eras can.

Hence, I delight in Charles Dickens’ vivid accounts of plantation grandeur, his sharp descriptions of mid-1800 Washington. He evokes the feel and flavor of that earlier time as only a writer of that time can. Through his undiluted eyes I see not only the explicit, but the implicit.

Once, in a Southern bookstore in Alabama or Mississippi, I discovered Jonathan Daniels’ book, A Southerner Discovers The South. This travelogue, written in 1938, is a marvelous read decades after its first printing. Daniels writes with unsparing depictions of life as it was actually lived in the early 1900s. Because of this, I saw what he saw, felt what he felt when I read his travelogue.

Daniels describes a small Southern town seeming “as ended as the dark store behind the window wearing the legend: Miss Lizzie Yelverton—Millinery and Notions. The spider lives in this window now and beyond the spider’s web the hat block and the old form adjustable to bust measure sits like an old, rusted and outmoded weapon in the economic war.” This written image of an empty millinery store describes a failing town as no printed image can.

As I waited to pay for the book, a man of a refined and gentlemanly appearance, waiting also, noticed my intended purchase. In a soft and articulate voice that carried a hint of Southern cordiality befitting an antiquated bookstore, he spoke to me. “A Southerner Discovers the South,” he said, waving at the book. “It’s historical. I’ve read it twice. You will enjoy it.” Then, nearly as an afterthought, “Jonathan Daniels served as press secretary to Franklin D. Roosevelt, you know.”

Perhaps you also have discovered the charm of an old, many-roomed house filled with books. Perhaps, also, you have been drawn upward to an attic where the air inside holds the heat of a summer day and sunbeams slope through dusty window panes. And, perhaps—if you were fortunate—a Southern gentleman of a refined and gentlemanly appearance and with a soft and articulate voice that carried a hint of Southern cordiality befitting that of the antiquated bookstore you were in, spoke to you.