About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.

I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.

Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.

The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.

They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.

They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.

Think they’d give me a job?