Yesterday I did a daytrip to New York City to join a dear friend’s birthday party. I managed to squeeze into my schedule a pilgrimage to The Strand. Any trip to New York without going to the Strand, the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, or The Met is a wasted trip.
I recently noted that navigating the stacks of used books requires a different frame of mind than when one is inside the bookstore, where everything is organized by subject. For used books, one has to open up their mind to discover new things. Judgement and discernment must be dialed down to allow discovery and serendipity. Give each book a chance. When one is in a bookstore, one explores with increased focused and discrimination. One is interested for a specific book, author, or subject.
The used books section was endlessly intriguing. After tinkering titles for a while, I settled for two gems: Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Benjamin Franklin and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language for $10. The former was on my wish list for a while now, a long overdue reading since I moved to Philadelphia in 2019 to attend the University of Pennsylvania, one of Franklin’s institutional legacies.
The other is more of an essential item to have for anyone learning any language. The peripheral learning one gets from reading neighboring entries is similar to that of discovering new books when perusing the book-stacks. Modern technology simply cannot reproduce this experience.
I looked like a casual chic girl carrying a brick and an adobe block in the streets of New York. It was pure bliss.