Reading in the Arroyo: An Occasional Column About Books

"You like Gilda Radner?" asks Peggy Frank from behind a black mask. Her glittering eyes peer up at me from her perch at Book Mountain's checkout counter.

"Sure," I say, a little bewildered.

"Here, you can have this for free," Frank replies, expertly dislodging a hardcover copy of Radner's 1989 It's Always Something from a stack.

"Oh wow, thanks," I murmur, flipping through the book. "When did she write this?"

"Before she died," Frank says.

I grin wildly behind my own floral-print mask. This type of human interaction—a random freebie, a tart crack—just doesn't happen when you're buying books on Bookshop.org, the new-ish online shop we're all supposed to frequent now since it supports local independents with 75% of profits.

Later, I look over the seven paperbacks I bought at Book Mountain (1302-A Osage Ave., 471-2625) for less than $32 and realize her gift wasn't so haphazard. Five are memoirs: a 1967 mass-market of Elizabeth Taylor; Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman; Lit by Mary Karr; Barbarian Days by William Finnegan; Personal History by Katharine Graham. Frank doesn't know me, but she guessed better than any algorithm what else I might want to read.

More importantly, in the tentatively reopening world of retail, she offers the kind of therapy I crave—the socially distant embrace of bookstore browsing.

Last weekend, I checked into a few other favorite haunts to see how bookslingers were faring. On Saturday, I made a mandatory appointment to shop at Big Star Books & Music (329 Garfield St., 820-7827). That meant for half an hour, I had the converted cottage to myself. I felt both crazily free and pressed for time, like I was in a nerd episode of Supermarket Sweep.

A wave of focused calm swept over me during the 20 minutes I spent poking through one of Big Star's best sections—local literature. My fingers danced over Mylar-covered and reasonably priced signed first editions of Fray Angélico Chávez, Stanley Crawford and Oliver La Farge. I mentally filed away the presences of other authors for future visits: E.A. Mares, Ruth Laughlin, Sharyn Udall. As I scanned the shelves, the whole diseased world receded into a blurry, distorted roar. I left with one vintage treasure: A 1966 first edition of The Man with the Calabash Pipe by La Farge, a collection of columns written for The New Mexican between 1950 and 1963.

The next morning, I wanted one of Ken Kordich's impeccably made cappuccinos maybe even more than I wanted to lose myself in his well-curated, clean and organized selection of used, remaindered and new books at The Good Stuff (410 W. San Francisco St., 795-1939). But he said he was only on his second day open again and wasn't doing coffee for the time being. I was cool with it (he was playing Donovan's "Season of the Witch," which felt personal) and it just seemed so long since I'd been in his mellow store, which now features newly labeled book sections and more used records, including a bunch of 45s. He said that, like Book Mountain, he'd managed to secure a small-business loan and has very modest expectations for the tough tourist season ahead. He's just happy to be there to see what happens.

So am I. On a quick perusal of the music section—I stop by The Good Stuff once every few weeks and am pretty familiar with what Kordich has—my eye snagged a Nick Tosches spine. Could it be? It was! Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, an out-of-print book I'd been seeking for five years since my old well-loved copy fell apart. Even better, the cover on this 1982 Dell paperback was way cooler than the clip-art nightmare 1998 edition I used to have. I paid Kordich, who said he'd put Hellfire on the shelf a few weeks ago, roughly four cappuccinos worth of dollars for it and practically skipped out down the sidewalk.

I headed for op.cit. books (157 Paseo de Peralta, 428-0321), the used and remainder emporium where I worked several years ago, gaining the equivalent of a graduate education in bookselling. I resolved not to buy anything there, especially since op.cit. is the kind of place you need to have willpower to shop. It may not have the book you want, but you'll literally stumble over tons of better ones you just realized you needed.

I wound my way around the teetering stacks of books to be shelved or priced, once again feeling strangely intrepid: A Lone Shopper in the Pandemic-era Bookstore. Another weird, almost emotional bout of acquisitiveness gripped me in op.cit.'s world-class cookbook section, organized by cuisine and then author. I flirted with a pristine hardcover of John T. Edge's The Potlikker Papers, caressed a pretty paperback of Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking. It took all my willpower to walk back into the lonely mall empty-handed.

On Memorial Day, I looked at TMZ photos of shoppers lined up at Ross Dress for Less stores around the country and felt not disgust, but a cousin-like kinship. We just wanna buy. We've been melancholy for that moment of attraction to a useful, beautiful, enrapturing thing, a glittering token you alight upon and pick up by design or by chance, feeling it is your destiny to buy it and allow it to enrich your existence.

It's easier to pull out your wallet when it's a book, handed back to you by a kind-eyed, masked fellow Santa Fean who understands just what you need to fill the void—whether silent or chaotic or blissfully ignorant or just Gilda Radner-less—in your soul.