Today’s TTT is ‘bookish places’, which will be a hard one, but let’s see what I manage. But first, the Tuesday Tease!

“A little polis living orderly in a high place is stronger than block-headed Nineveh,” the Assyrian capital destroyed in 612. A city-state of middling citizens governing themselves through common, publicly available laws and institutions would outlive the larger, mightier cities controlled by kings and nobles who ruled through private whim and self-interest and who lorded it over impoverished, disgruntled masses.” – GREEK WAYS, Bruce Thornton

(1) The Very Large Array. I visited this science station on the plains of San Agustin in New Mexico because of Contact, both the movie and the book. 

(2)   To be honest, all of New Mexico: I visited it because of Ed Abbey’s writings about the Southwest and Tony Hillerman’s The Great Taos Bank Robbery. The land of enchantment lives up to its name.  I’ve been longing to go back for ten years now (!) but between medical crises and COVID it just hasn’t happened.

(3)  Broad Street Books and its successor, Fairoaks Books.

  A friend of mine opened Broad Street Books back in 2020 or 2021 because he felt a town Selma’s size needed a proper bookstore; a half-aisle in Walmart selling the latest airport fiction didn’t count.  BSB quickly became a gathering place in town, both on purpose and on accident; David would host events like discussions with authors (his nephew is Lars Brownworth, who you can imagine I got a kick out of meeting), but  the bookish community in Selma would also gather accidentally.  Back when the library was still closed on Saturdays in the COVID and immediate post-covid era (it took us a while to reopen – like 2022, I think), I’d go by there every Saturday morning and got used to spending a few hours sitting and talking with either David or other people who came by.   David had hoped that its position on our downtown thoroughfare would lead to lots of foot traffic, but most tourists were happy to walk right on by.

A year or so back he made the decision to switch venues, buying a small cottage in the Fairoaks district: it allowed for more room for both books and conversation, and since then he’s hosted events there as well – including a series in which mayoral candidates talked about books that had inspired them.  It’s harder to casually drop by Fairoaks, though, and parking is more challenging because it’s surrounded by narrow residential streets.

(4) The late, great, Eclipse Books

The Eclipse was the place in Montevallo to go when I was a student there, at least for my crowd. (I think the jocks had a sports bar some place.) It was a bookstore, bar, and cafe with a huge wraparound porch. I had no spending money whatsoever, but when someone asked you to hang out at the Eclipse, you went there. Unfortunately, the philosophy professor/astronomy club guru who owned it got tired of running the place, and it closed down These days the building is a tasty Mexican place with a more varied menu than I usually see, but as far as I know the Eclipse’s status as a bookish spot has never been filled by anyone else. There was a small coffee shop that tried for a while — and it had chess sets, board games, etc — but I think it folded.

(5) Monroeville.

Monroeville bills itself as Alabama’s literary capital because it was home to both Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Once while going to visit the historic courthouse (now a museum), I happened to arrive on the same night the Players were staging a production of the play based on To Kill a Mockingbird!

(6) Parnell Memorial Public Library

Would you look at that library? Isn’t it cute? And it has a park with a storywalk, and then there’s a baseball field. You can sit there, as I did this very April, reading a book and listening to kids play ball. It is a key member of a ridiculously picturesque scene. If I created it in a story, people would go, “Oh, how mawkish and absurd, places like that don’t exist!”. But it does, dear reader, it does. When I was a student at the University of Montevallo, I had the weekly pleasure of strolling just a few blocks here and picking up a stack of books, and then I could sit and read outside, if I wanted to. My girlfriend and I have met at this park more than a few times. The library has a larger building attached to it that also hosts a community theater group known as the Montevallo Main Street Players. It’s so gosh-darn wholesome.

(7) COAS Books – Las Cruces, New Mexico

COAS Books comes to mind because it was literally the first independent bookstore I ever went inside of thinking of it as a bookstore; the Eclipse was more like bar/cafe that also sold books. As I remember, I found an Asimov title in here. COAS was one of the few high points of visiting Las Cruces, and I don’t say that to diminish LC: it just happened that it was raining and gloomy the two days I was there, and Google maps was very misleading about the hotel I’d picked out. Instead of staying in a cool place surrounded by restaurants, I stayed in a definitely-gone-to-seed place surrounded by recently closed restaurants. My first meal in Cruces was a truck stop Taco Bell, because I’d been driving all day and needed something, and every place was closed, and — one of these days I’ll go back to Las Cruces. (Looking back on my post of it, I have to smile at the fickleness of memory: all I remember now is driving into town in the rain, getting frustrated about not being able to find any place to eat, and feeling down because the neighborhood, but judging by my post at the time I came away enjoying the experience in general.)

(8) Roswell, NM.

Why is this turning into a New Mexico post? The Land of Enchantment strikes again! I have to mention Roswell specifically because it was a place I became interested in via Roswell High and then the first WB Roswell show. When I first began planning a New Mexico trip, Roswell was a must: not because I believe there was an alien encounter there, but because in middle school I had alien posters and my best friend Gil and I were obsessed with Roswell High. I wasn’t in Roswell very long, and I was too tired from spending most of the day at the Living Desert zoo to go looking for Roswell High School (I’d planned to send Gil a picture of it), but what I saw that Sunday afternoon was absolutely charming.

(9) St. Augustine

When I came back from New Mexico, I was newly fascinated by the Spanish colonial heritage in America, so within a year of visiting the west, I started exploring the Spanish gulf coast — first in books, then in person. My coworker and I made the mistake of going on Memorial Day weekend, so it was packed, but good lord was that a beautiful city, and I hadn’t seen the Gulf in ages. St. Augustine particularly intrigued me because it’s the oldest European settlement in America — bar the claims of Pensacola, which maintains it is the oldest city in America, and it doesn’t count that the town was abandoned for a while and St. Augustine was founded in the interim. (I’m a big fan of P-Cola, and it’s a lot easier to get to than St. Augustine.)

(10) The Selma-Dallas County Library

Can’t very well write about bookish spaces without mentioning the library I grew up in, the library I grew up with — it added a second wing in the mid-1990s — and the library I’ve worked in for close to fifteen years now. Reading Freely began as “This Week at the Library”: that library has been the Selma library, because at first I was literally blogging about my weekly trips here. A slight plurality of the books I’ve read on this blog over the years have come from this library, and before I worked here I loved sitting in its courtyard, reading, or holing up in local history; now if I try that it’s “Hey, Stephen, could you help with ________”. I still do a HUGE amount of my reading here, but it’s mostly in the lunchroom. In addition to our own programming (books, cooking, arts and crafts, etc), we’re also ground zero for community events: our meeting spaces are almost always in use. Some photos: