I described this vacation as ‘Books, beer, and hiking.’ I think I delivered on all three! I want to spend a post talking about the shops I visited, one in each city. My first stop was Seattle and I visited Elliot Bay Book Company. This amazing store was located only three blocks from my host’s house. He’d never heard of it! Gosh, darn Computer Engineers not reading! If you work for Amazon, you should know about the stores you’re eradicating, haha. I had him meet us there after work and it was hard not to be blown away by this place.
The front door was beautiful and things only got better as I went further inside. I quickly found the store’s “Summer Booknotes 2017” which had a ton of books I’ve seen positively reviewed on other blogs, notable authors with new releases, and recommendations from their employees, all sorted by genre. I also found the July calendar of events including book clubs, story time for children, and author appearances. I just missed Jonathan Safran Foer! The groups and recommendations reminded me of my local indy bookstore, Literati, and I was so excited to continue exploring.
The shelves and display in this place were beautiful! The store was well-lit, well-organized, and had a lot of personal touches in terms of staff recommendations. I always love recommendations and they’ve directed me toward some amazing reads! The store had a coffee shop in the back (where my husband escaped to trying to chase off jet lag while I explored) and an upstairs section with travel and bargain non-fiction titles. But that fiction section, though! I was blown away.
I’ve added a few more pictures below and I want to call attention to one in particular. One of the featured books was Chemistry by Weike Wang. As I said, I’m always attracted to a recommendation. I saw this book facing outward with a staff recommendation below it. (I later realized it was featured in the Booknotes I’d already picked up.) I said to my husband, “Oh, wow! I knew a girl named Weike Want in high school. We were on the swim team together. She got a perfect score on her ACT and went on to Harvard to study some science or something.” I thought that there was no way the Weike I knew was the same person. There was no way she wrote a book that I then held in a bookstore across the country. Well, guess what? I opened to the back flap and was greeted with a picture that looked a lot like the girl I knew from my swim team and a blurb that mentioned the author had gone to Harvard to study (shock) Chemistry. I confirmed it later by contacting her on Facebook, but the author of this book swam with me in high school! She’s agreed to do an author Q&A with me and I plan to read her book right away so I can get it reviewed and get you all some more info about Weike and her book. I’m so excited!
The other two images featured here are the stained glass over the entry door and the book my husband decided to buy. He loves Shakespeare parodies.
I highly recommend this store to anyone visiting Seattle! It was a gem to be sure.
Until next time, write on.
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The first was Book Gallery. I’ve never seen a used bookstore with so many categories and so well-organized! For the first time (I think I can say ‘ever’ here), I found a section on writing AND one on collecting rare books. It was defined down to books about alligators and books about birds and birds in Arizona. I spent an hour looking around and did settle on a book I wanted (an old John Irving that’s out of print). I could have spent even more time looking around, but I wanted to get back to the apartment we were staying in. However, the checkout counter was a glass case filled with old books and the owner was at the register when I walked up and balked at some early editions of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the case. They were from the early 30s! We had a great conversation and he seemed to know I was a huge book nerd when he mentioned 
The other store I went to was much smaller and shared a building with (of all things) a head shop. (In the picture, you can see the ‘BOOKS’ sign above the ‘GLASS JOINT’ sign. There’s also a sign to the right. I almost walked by it three times.) 
My husband and I traveled to Cape Cod, Massachusetts for a family vacation a few weeks ago. We all split up after lunch to explore the town of Chatham on our own and you can bet I headed straight for the bookstore! I’d walked past 
As I told the owners while I was in there, it was one of the cleanest and best organized used book stores I’ve ever seen! This place was crazy organized as far as subject matter and the fiction books, and there were TONS of those, were all alphabetized. I was happy to find the biography and business sections alphabetized by author instead of subject which made things infinitely easier for me to find. The great isle headers were super great, too. In addition to telling you what was in the isle, there were labels on each shelf so you knew exactly where to look. I was in nerdy heaven!
There was a second room separate from the fiction/comic room that held primarily sci-fi books but other odds and ends. I looked through biographies (separated by general, political, sports, and pop culture) and a small foreign language section (mostly French and German, unfortunately for me). Another section that I was really surprised about was a large collection of LIFE magazines dating back to the 50s. My quick inspection left me impressed. It looked like they had most issues sequentially. It was a fun place to look through. There were a few other people in the shop, two looking at fashion books for a friend and another couple looking for vampire literature.
I went back to the front before I left and overheard the employees talking about a kazoo symphony while I looked through children’s and YA. I did find one book I wanted to purchase, 
Taking On a World of Words 