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| Co-managers Maureen Disimile and John D. Ynsua at Montclair Book Center in New Jersey. Photo: Bryan Anselm for The New York Times |
A ramshackle throwback to a funkier, more literary time, the store has shelves handmade from raw lumber. And its customers and clerks are often just as eccentric as the shelves.
I’ve
been shopping and snooping there since 1995 and still haven’t exhausted
all of this biblioscape’s labyrinths and warrens — some of which, I
suspect, lead to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.
Stuffed
with hundreds of thousands of best sellers, worst sellers and
everything in between, the store is a haven where you can ferret out
that certain book (or vinyl record) you don’t know you need until you
see it. I’ve stumbled across Italo Calvino limited editions, a hardcover
of William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” and a stash of musty,
black-and-white comics magazines from the 1960s and ’70s that included
Eerie, Creepy and Savage Tales.
The
store, which sells both new and used books, is three floors and 9,000
square feet of nooks, alcoves and cul de sacs. Wooden floorboards creak
and groan, and the owners have preserved the tin ceilings from the
building’s decades as a hardware store...
John D. Ynsua, a co-manager and owner,
says the store has hundreds of regulars, including many “who come from
far away.” But some are more memorable than others. There’s the
customer, for example, who anchors himself at the checkout and mutters
in what sounds like heavy-metal vomit vocals. On one visit, he’ll ask
for the Christian Bible; on others, the Satanic Bible.
More
often, customers are like Fabrice Nozier, a senior at Drew University
in Madison, N.J. “I like the feel of this place,” he said as he sat on
the floor and pored over filmmaking volumes. “It’s like a time machine,
coming here.”
