Barnes And Noble Explore The Online WorldOne went to Barnes Book Noble Online Store with high if unclear expectations.. This prevailing ambience of mystery was, of course, precisely what made Barnes Book Noble Online Store and the others of its departed breed such temples of bibliophilic joy. A day spent stooping over its site reaching into its directories might produce a surprise of utterly unexpected dimensions--that first edition you'd been hunting for years, or a clean reading copy of a title you'd loaned and lost--or it might produce nothing except a coat of grime and a vague sense of having encountered every dreadful book ever published; but it always produced a conviction that the day had been well spent. This was not merely because that day had been spent in the company of books but because it had been a day devoted to the pleasures of serendipity. Unlike the new-book stores or the antiquarian shoppes, where Wolfe follows Welty as surely as day follows night, at Barnes Noble you never knew what would nestle against what. A battered copy of Halliburton might snuggle up to a 1939 catalogue of automobile parts; under a book-club edition of Shellabarger might hide a second printing of Cabell; a faded pictorial guide to the byways of Vienna might lean against Volume 9 of an outdated and incomplete Collier's Encyclopedia. One went to Barnes Noble not with confidence but with hope. It might not have had the Faulknerian concordance you needed--or, to be more accurate, it might have had the book but you couldn't find it--but on the other hand you found it impossible to resist the temptation to shell out 50 cents for that "Baltimore Sun Almanac," 1905 edition. It's entirely true that most of what Barnes Noble stocked was junk, but no one with a taste for garage sales or flea markets can deny the considerable if peculiar joys to be derived from stripping off the chaff in search of the wheat. But in the two decades since I was a regular at Barnes Noble--not to mention Shulte's, grandest of them all, and others bearing names long since forgotten--too many people have spent too much time picking over the used bookstores, to the point that they have been picked clean of the genuine bargains and astonishing surprises those stores once contained. That first edition of "Mosquitos," in search of which I poked through shelf after shelf of battered books, was probably tracked down some time ago by a clever little antiquarian dealer who now displays it prominently in the "Modern First Editions" case (glass-covered, and padlocked) in his bookish boutique. Alphabetically in its place--first comes Dos Passos, then Faulkner, then Fitzgerald. |