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Powell’s Books in Portland (short observations)
I went to a bookstore in Portland as part of a short vacation trip with my Dad. It was Powell’s Books which is truly a great bookstore. Three or four stories of anything you could want but Limbaughs’ latest book. The new-age shamanistic ritual section was especially fun and expansive.
By far my favorite was the Northwest section; they really did have lots of hard-to-find books about the local history, architecture, and sheer uniqueness of the Pacific Northwest. It was refreshing to find a selection of books that wouldn’t be readily available in any other part of the world. I hope a visitor to Chengdu Sichuan can visit a bookstore filled with odd books about Sichuanese stuff that she has never heard about before.
What I found peculiar was that every section of the bookstore had a section that highlighted books by LGBTQ and people of color. You would think that Portland was filled with nothing but black and brown same-sex couples hugging in a sentimental fashion. Also, I seem to recall that people of color didn’t include Asian people for some reason. This is odd because from what I saw, Asians were a significant minority of people in Portland. According to Google, 8.06% of Portland’s citizens are Asian and 5.51% are mixed race. (Asians have a high rate of intermarriage.)
Thankfully, they did have a nice section of Asian-American literature — including a book I am very interested in reading.
Portland did have the homelessness I heard about. About every three to five blocks there was someone or someones who were homeless. That wasn’t great but I didn’t see any human waste or used needles.
I liked Portland and Powell’s. I wish I could have spent more time perusing the vast shelves of human thought made manifest. Though I have only watched a single episode, there is a scene from “Game of Thrones” relevant to my wonder of bookstores. An illiterate wilding is talking to her lettered husband.
Gilly: “You know all that from staring at marks on a paper?”
Sam: “Yes.”
Gilly: “You’re like, a wizard.”
Likewise, the Nez Perce considered the white man’s “talking paper” as extra powerful medicine and wanted to adopt the white man’s power. I read somewhere that the Nez Perce were attracted to Christianity because it had so much talking paper that all the whites used.
I read every day and I’m writing more and more. I am endlessly affluent in a stream of the English language and I usually approach such luxury with the typical indifference of the wealthy who never had to work for something. Yet somehow, when I am in a bookstore, I become aware of the great efforts of humanity to create what I am an undeserving heir to. Generations of scholars going back to Phoenicia and Athens all the way back to the city of Ur attempting to strike against ignorance by preserving the best of what they thought and saw in the form of paper that could speak to generations after they have died.
Maybe the Nez Perce and the wildlings have a point.
Published in General
I visited Powell’s back in … 1998? … on a business trip to the area. It was impressive, and reminded me of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.
I think it was Stephen King who referred to writing as a kind of telepathy. That would apply to all speech, of course, but writing adds the ability to share thoughts across time, as you noted. It’s pretty fantastic, isn’t it, that our brains are able to encode all that chemistry and electricity of thought into static markings that some other brain can then decode back into chemistry and electricity — chemistry and electricity in a different brain yet somehow conveying the same abstractions?
Beggars the imagination, really.
Nice post, Henry. Thank you. And Happy New Year!
I used to order books from Powell’s mail order and phone order back in the early 1990s – B. A. (Before Amazon. Yes chillins, Amazon has not been around forever.) They were lefty, but sane back then.
I like Powell’s too. I’ve been there several times and, like Seawriter have ordered books from Powell’s. The main store is huge, but they also have several branch stores in the Portland area most of which carry only certain types of books. For example, most of the technical/engineering books are at a building several blocks from the main store that would be a good-sized bookstore on its own. Here’s a link to Powell’s Books.
What does ‘lefty but sane’ mean? Did they had a very large African-American and Gay section but you could still sold Ann Coulter’s best seller in the back of the best sellers on the first floor?
I’d love to know the details.
Hell if I know. All my contacts were by mail or phone. Never saw the layout of the store. All I know is I could get just about any book there, including stuff unavailable elsewhere. This included stuff on the Founding Fathers and early US history that stores like that would not admit having in stock today. They always came quickly and in good shape.
My dad had loaned his copy to a friend and never got it back. I found another copy for him at Powells.
Another thing worth seeing in Portland is the USS Blueback. A diesel-electric boat with the teardrop hull. When I took my dad to see it the tour guide had my dad conduct the tour and he spoke to the group about his WWII experiences, and daily life aboard a submarine, both in war, and after the war.
As our children (and now our grandchildren) learned to read, Mrs. Tabby and I did marvel that, until you get it, reading does seem like magic. “You get meanings about real things from those little marks on paper?”
I visited The Tattered Cover several times when I was building a restaurant in Cherry Creek Mall. This must have been in the late 80’s early 90’s before the mall opened. Pretty impressive bookstore.
My google-fu may just not be up to the search, but if anyone happens to run across a complete Kipling while browsing, I’d be interested. I found one 30 years ago in Australia, but didn’t have the money for both the books and the shipping.
I loved my visit to Powell’s. I picked up a great book all about wordplay with different games, celebrity quotes, etc. They had a great section of math/logic puzzle books which I also love.
Starting tomorrow, the first day of 2020, I will make a standing exception to a long-standing rule.
If Castaigne wrote it, then I shall read it! even if it starts with So.
Can’t wait to read this article, sounds very interesting.
Escape Clause:
If So is gone by tomorrow, through some act of authorial clemency (or if it turns out that it’s actually a CoC violation, as it well should be, and our vigilant Mods redact the foul syllable) this resolution is null and void. And the New Year will be off to a promising start.
I can’t take seriously a store that touts itself as “legendary” on its own sign.
How flush do you feel?
Check this link out. There seem to be a few complete sets near the bottom of page 1, and on page 2.
You can also get a kindle version for $1.99. 8900+ pages.
Even electronically, that’s alot of pages.
Hey, its $0.0001 a page. And it’s Kipling’s complete works.
Thanks for the link @seawriter. I bought the 11 volume set. I think it’s the same one I saw 30 years ago.
Edit: redundant, removed.