Good morning, all! I have a full day, so I will be off and running very shortly. My first stop is Toyland, which will keep me occupied for several hours. At 2 pm, I'm meeting my college friend Rebecca, whom I've not seen in around ten years. Following the visit, I will head home and see what I can accomplish here.
My hometown never had much in the way of good bookshops and, as the intelligence level in my hometown declined drastically, the bookshops disappeared. I remember as a child hanging out in the book departments of various stores in the Middletown shoppng area like Murphy's and Kresge's, as well as the small magazine and book section of the downtown bus station, where I waited for the bus to take me home from library visits. When I was in high school, the Middletown News Agency opened a shop "Readmore," which was for the mid to late 1960s a very good bookshop. When the Middletown campus of Miami University opened, there was a rather good bookshop opened close to the campus. Those stores are all gone, so visiting my family is not nearly so much fun as it once was because I find they, and friends like DR Ginny and Richard, live in such a depressing shambles of a once rather nice city.
In college and during my twenties, I discovered a lot of Cincinnati bookshops, as well as the Cincinnati Public Library, although I cannot now remember a name of any of them. In 1966, on my first trip to NYC, I found The Drama Book Shop, which became my favorite bookshop until I worked for them. By 1979, living in New York, I discovered many other fantastic shops, many of which are now gone: Patelson's. G. Schirmer, Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side, Eeyore's, and a really beautiful shop on Columbus and 82nd whose name I forget.
