Another friend–smart, educated, well-read—announced one day that he was sick and tired of political correctness. Someone else at the lunch table asked what he meant by that term. He did not define it but instead gave as an example Michelle Obama’s speech in which she noted that she then lived in the White House, an edifice that had been built by slaves. Asked by another at the table why this bothered him, he indicated that he was tired of those who feel slighted, abused, or oppressed by what had happened to other people centuries ago. Someone said to the friend, “I watched that speech, and she was saying something else.” He explained that Obama’s statement was not a lament but was instead lauding how far the country had come in racial relations. It turned out that the friend who had denounced political correctness had, in fact, not watched the speech. He had only seen the excerpt on TV news. He was urged to watch or read the whole speech to better understand the context of the objected-to phrase. I am reasonably confident he never did that, for several months later I heard him repeat Michelle Obama’s comment as something that bothered him for its political correctness.

His use of “political correctness” was different from my use of the term. For me, it was a statement by someone who was trying to cut off a topic’s discussion. For him, it meant something that others might discuss, but once he labeled the view “politically correct,” he did not have to, indeed would not, listen to the discussion. Other uses of the term in this fashion can easily be found. For example, not too long ago President Trump labeled the diversity visa program as being “politically correct.” That label meant that others could discuss the strengths and weakness of that program, but he was not going to be part of any such debate. Because the program was “politically correct,” the President would not listen to any debate about it.

“Political correctness” is used in yet another way—not just to denigrate a viewpoint or an individual but to simultaneously self-aggrandize the labeler.  Assume that I support allowing transgender people equal opportunities in the military. Someone might respond, “You are just being politically correct.” That response is, of course, dismissive of my position; it is not a prelude for reasoned debate. But it does more than that. It challenges my integrity by implying that I have adopted my opinion not by reasoned consideration but by simply accepting a herd position. In addition, the labeler is also saying that he has the courage, unlike me, not to follow the crowd but to think for himself which has led him to the courageous, anti-politically correct position. His label is an ad hominem attack on me and also a glorification of himself and, of course, is meant to terminate any discussion.

It is almost always non-conservative positions that get the PC tag, but if political correctness is really an attempt to remove topics from discussion, conservatives, too, can be very politically correct. We can see it when states and federal agencies prohibit or restrict of the term “man-made climate change” because they don’t want that topic to be discussed.

We can see it with gun control. The frequent response to those who wish to restrict sales of guns or their accessories is, “That would violate the Second Amendment.” The responders are really announcing that they will not discuss the wisdom of the proposed rules or even discuss any attempt to collect data about the proposals. The Second-Amendment cry is meant to end the discussion.

Playing that Second Amendment card is also meant to eliminate any discussion of the Second Amendment’s reach. Early in 2017 Congress passed and President Trump signed a bill that made it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns. When Paul Ryan was asked after the Las Vegas shootings whether this was a “mistake,” Ryan insisted that people’s rights were being infringed and protecting their rights was “very important.” End of discussion. There will not only be no discussion of whether expanding the ability of mentally ill people to buy guns is wise, there will be no discussion of whether the Second Amendment bars all restrictions on the mentally ill from buying and possessing guns.

When restrictions are proposed on semi-automatic weapons, the number of guns a person may buy, the kind of ammunition that can be sold, and so on, conservatives will not debate the wisdom of the proposals and will cry “Second Amendment” as a justification for the refusal to consider the proposals. They will not, however, debate the reach of the Constitutional provision. They act as if the Second Amendment was crystal clear and therefore need not be debated, when, in fact, its language is murky, and the Supreme Court has not authoritatively addressed many gun control issues but has implied that many gun restrictions would be constitutional.

This use of the Second Amendment to prevent debate on gun control is political correctness on the right. Conservatives in Congress passed a law a generation ago that restricts federal funding for studies about gun violence. What could be better evidence of political correctness that is meant to shut out reasoned debate than to prevent more information about the issue? To paraphrase the bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ data.”

I am generally opposed to political correctness which seeks to mandate what others must believe and eliminate discussion on topics. I lack the arrogance to be positive that I have found the ‘truth’ on most things. As I look backward I see that the ‘truth’ has evolved on many, many topics. If it has evolved, that evolution has probably not ended. The evolution, however, can continue most efficiently only when the topics are not off limits but instead can be regularly probed with reasoned debate and with the consideration of more information and experiences about the topic. And there is almost always more data to be had about any important topic. Furthermore, telling others what to believe is not a way to convince them. As John Morley, the British statesman, has been quoted as saying, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”

A few comments can be placed out of bounds because they cannot advance a topic’s consideration. Racial and ethnic slurs or dismissive labeling of someone else’s position as racist, for example, do not further a reasoned discussion and should be prevented.

The classroom observer wanted my friend to dictate the right outcome to any discussion on the legality or morality of torture, but is it so clear that torture is always so far out of bounds that it should not be discussed? See if you can come with examples where you say, “Maybe, maybe.” But if you can imagine situations where torture might be appropriately used, could you find a way to limit torture to just those circumstances or will torture inevitably spread if any use of it is allowed? If it would spread, does that mean all torture should be forbidden? Can’t there be—shouldn’t there be—debates on this topic? Are your answers affected by the fact that at least the issue of what constitutes torture has led to important debates in Israel and even to legal decisions by that country’s Supreme Court? Shouldn’t there be debates elsewhere on the topic?

The classroom observer tried to cinch her conclusion about how my friend should have handled the torture discussion by citing comments about women scientists. She was presumably referring to the comments by Larry Summers, who was president of Harvard when he made the comments. Summers was addressing the issue of the underrepresentation of women in the sciences on the faculties of elite universities. He addressed the topic precisely because this was one that many thought should be discussed. He offered tentative hypotheses as to why there was this underrepresentation of women on the faculties. In his comments, however, he never said that women did not have the ability to be outstanding scientists. He did say that the elite universities were trying to hire in the very top echelons of these professions—the one in five thousand—and at those levels, women were underrepresented. Summers then gave a number of reasons for this low representation and suggested that those possible reasons interplayed with each other.

Summers did not give his ideas as authoritative, irrebuttable pronouncements. He was not trying to cut off debate. Instead, he ended his speech with suggestions for the collection of data that could aid further understanding of the situation. In other words, he was trying to find a way to further the discussion.

Go look at his comments. You can find them online. There is a lot to discuss in them. If you care about women in science—and I put myself in this category since the spouse is a woman and was a scientist—Summers’ speech is provoking on many levels. Mischaracterizing his comments as saying that women don’t have the innate ability to be high-level scientists and suggesting that such a statement is “out of bounds” cuts off discussion and is therefore political correctness at is worst. If we cut off discussion of the topic and do not seek more information about it, as political correctness would have us do, we will not get closer to the “truth.”

For me, as I have said, political correctness is the attempt to arbitrarily end discussions about topics that are discussable or could be advanced with more data and research. Others who are oppose political correctness, however, use that term in other ways. (To be continued.)

A friend, a distinguished lawyer who is now retired from his firm, teaches at a local college. The students are not from the privileged classes and are often the first in their families to have attended college. Many are immigrants or have parents who were born abroad or are members of a disadvantaged American minority.

The friend is teaching a course that probes the concept of justice. The class had explored that difficult biblical text about the sins of the fathers. His students had examined the provisions that make torture illegal under international law and the American statute that expressly forbids torture abroad but does not address its legality within the United States. The class discussed whether torture, even in the face of these legal prohibitions, could ever be justified, and, of course, as discussions of torture inevitably do, the ticking bomb hypothetical came up: You know that a bomb will soon explode in a place that will kill many people. You have in custody someone who has the code to defuse the bomb, but he will not divulge it. Would you, should you, torture that bomber to save the lives at the expected explosion site?

One student said it did not matter whether torture under these circumstances was legal or not because the torture would be useless. If the potential torture subject was committed to the cause of the bombing, he would either completely resist the torture, which under the scenario would not be long, or provide false information that would buy enough time for the bomb to explode. After the class had discussed this position for a while, another student, who had hardly ever talked in class and was recently arrived from China, quietly said, “If you want to get the information, don’t torture the bomber; torture his family.” This led to a spirited give-and-take with references back to the class’s discussion of international law and the sins of the father. The period ended with the students still engaged in debate.

The friend was pleased with the class. The students had confronted the material in thoughtful ways. The friend was pleased not only that the newly-arrived Chinese student had spoken up, but that he had given a perspective not before considered by others that may have derived from his cultural background or experience. This seemed to be the point to the diversity often ballyhooed in academia. Since the class had gone so well, the friend was especially pleased that this was the day that a member of the fulltime faculty, who would report to the Dean about the part-time teacher, was there to observe his class.

The friend respected the observer, who had been born in Algeria and had done human rights work in various countries requiring tact, insight, and courage. The friend, however, was taken aback when she castigated him. “You should not have let the class leave without making it clear that torture under all circumstances is wrong.” The friend replied that he did not think it was the job of a liberal arts teacher to tell students the “truth,” but she maintained, “Torture is against international law and is wrong, and it is your duty as a teacher to tell the students that.”

When the friend told me about what happened, he was still upset by it, even though it was days later. I said that this sounds like a form of political correctness, but usually, I continued, political correctness seems to be about identity politics. He smiled and said, “To try to convince me that what I had done was not right, she said that surely I would have corrected any student who said what that college president had said, ‘Women don’t have the innate abilities to be good scientists.’” This made me think more about political correctness.

In talking with the friend, I had used “political correctness” as an epithet. The PC term is always a denigration. No one ever says “I have adopted my opinion because it is the politically correct one” or says unironically, “I agree with you because what you said is so politically correct.” But the term does not have a simple, single meaning.

For me, the classroom observer was inappropriate because of her dogmatism. She was positive of the only correct conclusion to the debate and therefore, felt that this certitude had to be communicated to the students. She was in essence saying that any reasoned debate had to lead to this conclusion and that outcome should be made clear.

The problem with the observer’s stance, however, is that there is only a small step from it to saying that there is no point to a reasoned debate on a topic. If the conclusion is so obvious, then there is really no need to discuss the topic at all. Instead, just present the patent outcome. Indeed, the topic should apparently not be discussed at all if there is any chance that some will come to the “wrong” conclusion. In this view, “political correctness” is an assertion that seeks to cut off debate because the topic is outside the bounds of any reasoned discussion. (To be continued.)

“And all the hilltops soft and glowing

With winter’s brilliant rug of snow—

The world all fresh and white below.”

Alexander Pushkin (James E. Falen, translator) Eugene Onegin

A friend floated the theory that a male always wears a style of underwear different from that of his father. Raised with a boxer-wearing father, the son wears jockeys. If the father wears tighty-whities, the son wears boxer briefs. And so on. There is a lot of merit in this theory. This is another reason that a fatherless family has problems. They boys don’t know what underwear to put on.

She was part of Celtic Woman, which I am only aware of from PBS fundraising programming. Attractive, strapless dress, playing the violin, sort of dancing but certainly moving as she played, with beautiful, flowing red tresses. And I thought, “Does anyone ever say ‘tress’?”

I am of the belief that many Irish songs consist of but a few bars that are incessantly repeated. The song only ends when the musicians need a break.

Several corporations announced one-time $1,000 bonuses for their workers after the tax cut bill. This gave the corporations good publicity and gained them credit with the President. But the tax cut had not yet taken effect, so, apparently these companies had this money just lying around even before the tax cut. So why weren’t the bonuses given before? And the corporate tax cuts, unlike the individual ones, are permanent. Why, then, just a one-time bonus? If that corporate tax cut is going to be so good for workers, why haven’t the wages been raised permanently?

If it is unpatriotic to take a knee during the national anthem to bring attention to police violence against others (a selfless act), isn’t it unpatriotic for the President, promoting his own self-interest, to bash the FBI, a law enforcement agency?

Has the TV been on too long when you find yourself watching pickleball on an obscure sports channel?

At 6PM on Christmas day, the daughter and I were walking home from a movie when a woman stopped and asked us if she was walking in the right direction for the supermarket. We said, “Yes.” I asked her what she was looking for and she replied, “Oatmeal.” Both the daughter and I pointed across the street to a neighborhood store that was open and said, “They must have oatmeal.” “Not the kind I want,” she said. Even though she knew that the supermarket may not have been open, she headed off for it. It seemed like an unlikely search for a Christmas night.

Lose weight. (Oh, as if you haven’t made this self-indulgent, unlikely-to-be-fulfilled resolution in the past.)

Play better golf. (Oh, as if many of you haven’t made this self-indulgent, unlikely-to-be-fulfilled resolution in the past.)

Build a wider readership. (Got any ideas?)

Remember more of what I have read. (Got any ideas on how to do that?)

Pare down my possessions. (Then I can justify buying more stuff.)

Get better gas mileage. (Yes, self-indulgent, but good for the rest of you, too.)

Figure out what gun Jesus will carry if (when) He returns.

Not re-use dental floss too often.

Watch less football even if Aaron Rodgers is playing.

Hook up my backyard intensive burner that I bought to fry chicken. (But I first will have to get over my fear of it.)

Not complain about the slings and arrows of my age. (Fat chance.)

Look for conclusive documentation to establish that Mike Pence does not have joint American-Russian citizenship. (And assume that he does until those records are found.)

Be as nice as pie to the spouse every minute of the every day. (The spouse wrote that.)

I recently purchased a hardcover version of God: A Biography by Jack Miles at Strand. When I got it home, a credit card receipt fell out indicating that someone had bought it shortly after it was published in 1995, paying list price of $27.50 (not an inconsiderable amount for a book two decades ago) at a book shop in Pasadena, California. I wondered how the book had made its way from Pasadena to Manhattan’s Broadway, but, of course, had no clue. I found signs in the book of a careful and interested reader. Numerous penciled underlinings and check marks were on every page, but they stopped mid-chapter on page fifty-eight. Why did the attentive reader stop at this point? I could imagine answers, but I will never really know.

I also bought at Strand Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. It was a first edition, quite worn, from Great Britain. Inscribed inside was what I took to be the first owner of the book. The handwriting was artistic, but I could not decipher it. Who was that person? On the inside back cover was something perhaps even more intriguing—faint writing. The spouse looked at it and said, “It might say Siegfried Sassoon.” I looked at it again. It was possible. Was I holding a book once signed by Sassoon? If so, the original owner became even more intriguing, but it will all remain an unsolved mystery.

The third book I recently bought at Unnameable brought back memories and presented mysteries. The first page of Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York the Last Two Hundred Years, published in 2000, had a stamp that it was placed in the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, public library on February 15, 2001. Seeing “Manitowoc” brought back memories. You might not be very familiar with this small city, but it was the next town north of where I grew up. I still have memories as a child of visiting a submarine there. You might not know that submarines were built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, but they were—you can look it up. Manitowoc also held another memory. It was the place where I scored the most points for me in my undistinguished high school basketball career.

The book, however, brought not just memories but also mysteries. I could imagine why the book had been withdrawn from the Manitowoc Public Library—no one was checking it out—but why had it been purchased? Was there a suspected strong interest in the history of New York City’s garbage in this small town on Lake Michigan? And how did this book get from Manitowoc to Brooklyn’s Vanderbilt Avenue?

I do shop at a number of different bookstores, but mostly my bookstore heart now belongs to Greenlight. I thought that it made no sense that two people opened a bookstore in my neighborhood in what had once been an antiques store. I had read those stories about the deaths of independent bookstores, and my neighborhood was an obscure part of Brooklyn where few outsiders would breeze into the store, so opening this new bookstore seemed, to put it charitably, unwise.

I went into it shortly after it opened, and my first reaction was that it was too small. I thought it unlikely that I would find many books I wanted to purchase there, and at its beginning, I did not patronize Greenlight much. However, I had a tradition of reading the New York Times’ best books of the year list, finding selections for Christmas gifts, and heading off to a Barnes & Noble megastore to make the purchases. One year the daughter suggested that I buy locally and get them at Greenlight even if the local place did not offer the same discounts as the chain store, and for several years, I did buy the Christmas books there, but little else.

Over time, however, when I wanted a particular book, I would check out the convenient Greenlight before seeking another bookstore. Greenlight may have looked small, but now I realized that it had a surprising number of books that I sought. I became further impressed by the array of authors it had speaking at the store. And finally, much later than I should have, I found it was a wonderful store for browsing, that crucial factor for a great bookstore. Three or four tables in the center of the store are topped with a carefully arranged set of books, and almost all of them look interesting to me. Now almost every time I go by the store, which can be several times a week, I stop in to browse, and this browsing has led to many purchases. It is a remarkable store, and I am lucky to have Greenlight a five-minute walk from my house. It is in the neighborhood and an impressive store. Who could ask for anything more?

I hope that you, too, can find such a good bookstore.

If I wanted to be a licensed New York Sightseeing guide, I had to pass a test. I knew little about the test except that for a single fee I would get two chances within a year to pass the test. I developed a strategy. I would read as much New York City history as I could, take notes, then review the notes, and take the test. Having taken the test and failed it, I would know what I needed to bone up on, and I should be able to pass the test on the second try.

The Strand was integral to this plan. Each time I was near it, I would go to the bookstore’s extensive New York City section. I would scan the titles for something that looked interesting or about which I knew little and then look at the price. If the book cost less than $10, I would buy it. If it cost more than $10, I would re-shelve it. A glance at a bookshelf behind me as I now write indicates that I bought sixty or so books this way.

A day before I was to go into the hospital to have my right shoulder replaced, I took the test to take my mind off my coming months of pain and inconvenience and self-pity. I answered multiple-choice questions on a computer, and I got my result a few minutes after completing the test. Do you think I would be telling you this if I had not passed? I now have a card with my smiling picture that announces I am a licensed guide, and the Strand gets part of the credit for that.

Having re-established touch with the Strand, I continue to go there regularly. I still buy New York City history books, but I also look for books that will be useful for the spouse when she leads a book group. Other bookstores are also in my life. The Mysterious Bookstore in Manhattan’s Tribeca seems to have every mystery story ever written. Often when a friend convinces me that an author unknown to me has an enjoyable mystery series, I head to Reade Street, and I find it at Mysterious. But I confess there is another reason I love that bookstore. The walls are lined with shelves ten, twelve feet high or maybe even higher. Attached to the bookcases is a railing. And attached to the railing is one of those ladders that slide along the railings. I always wanted one of those, and this is as close as I get to having one. And the ladder is not just for the store employees; I get to climb it. When I am looking for something there, I am disappointed if I the book is not above my standing grasp. I want to climb that ladder.

Whenever I am near Unnameable Books in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, I go in and almost always find on its shelves of used books something to buy. I was there two days ago and bought three books, with each one reminding me of some advantages of used books and their stores. Of course, there is the price. One of my purchases was of a book that I had first seen in the book shop of the New York Public Library, where I was doing research. Although the book had been well reviewed, I was not sure that I wanted to read about the subject matter, as indicated by its title: Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. But now at Unnameable, I found it at a fraction of the list price and consequently thought I might give it a try.

The stocks of used and new bookstores often overlap, but they will also differ. I will find books in a used bookstore that look like they may interest me that I would not find in a new bookstore. In that last foray in Unnameable, I found a history of science published in America a decade ago about the advance in scientific knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. I read a few paragraphs and thought it was well written. I have started reading and enjoying it. I doubt that I would have found the Age of Wonder in a new bookstore.

And used books sometimes tantalize me with mysteries and glimpses of stories not contained in the book. A few recent examples to come. (To be continued.)

A white Christmas for me growing up was not simply that snow had blanketed the ground by Christmas, but that it actually snowed on Christmas. By either definition, I don’t remember many white Christmases. It was often bleak and cold on December 25^th in our part of Wisconsin, but at least in my memory the snow, or at least the snow that did not melt away, came later in the season. And since winters did not depart Wisconsin easily, I saw more Easters with snow on the ground than Christmases. In the shadows that the sun never reached behind the garage, there could still be pockets of snow in May.

Even so, however, there was one white Christmas (by my definition) that I have always treasured. While it had to snow on Christmas itself, I had a somewhat expanded notion of “Christmas.” Christmas day was largely for playing with new presents and ended with a boring family get-together at Aunt Hazel’s house. I remember little about it other than that the sister and Cousin Margaret lit into the olives at the first opportunity. Instead, as it is for many Germanic and Germanic-descended people, our main focus for the Christmas celebration was not Christmas Day but on Christmas Eve.

By Christmas Eve, the tree would have been up for a week or so. The buying and mounting of the tree was always a difficult process. Now all the Christmas trees I see for sale seem to be nearly perfect—symmetrical with needle-laden branches everywhere and a straight trunk. Not so back then. Finding an acceptable one without too many flaws was always a difficult and time-consuming task, and when it was brought home, much discussion would ensue about which portion of the tree should face the wall to hide the most defects and whether the tree stood as perpendicular to the floor as the often wavering trunk allowed. Rarely did the family agree on the accepted solution. But the tree was up and decorated well before Christmas Eve.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Nothing was placed under the tree (except for a toy train and a miniature village) before then. I believe that we (I was the youngest of three) were sent to our rooms for a bit. Then there was a “Ho! Ho! Ho!”– now I wonder if that could have been my father—followed by a cry, “Santa’s been here!” One year the family ran to the kitchen window overlooking our backyard. Pointing to a deep, starry sky, one of the parents shouted, “There he goes!” My sister, the eldest of the children, said “I see him.” (Was this the only time she lied to me?) I looked and looked, but I saw no sleigh, no reindeer, no Santa. I had missed him yet again.

Before the presents were opened, however, we went to a Christmas Eve service at the church. This church-going was highly unusual because both parents attended. As far as I can remember, this was the only time of the year my father went, and my mother, at most, went only a few other times a year. (My father drove us kids to Sunday school and then picked us up afterwards. In between he went somewhere else.)

And then one year it happened. We walked into church on crisp winter night. Even though I can’t sing one note on tune, I have always liked Christmas carols, and, unlike on many Sundays, I enjoyed this service. The last carol was “Silent Night,” then my favorite, and it always gave me a peaceful feeling. We left the church, and there it was: A blanket of snow. During the hour of the service, an inch or two had fallen, and the church steps, the sidewalk, the lawns, the road were all white. The snow was continuing, but it was not so much falling as floating. It was the kind of snow that compelled you to catch some on your tongue. The snow almost hung in front the streetlamps causing a light that seemed otherworldly. Every pine tree looked like a Christmas tree. It was a white Christmas the way I had imagined a white Christmas should be. It seemed the correctly beautify and peaceful way to welcome the baby Jesus into the world.

Merry Christmas!

Bookstores were at the core of a cherished day. I had finished law school and was living in New York City where I had been working for a while. The college alumni magazine had published a list of books, in effect a syllabus, for studying the American revolution. Most of the books had been published a decade or more ago. My recent reading had been largely aimless; I had never taken a course on the Revolution; and I thought that it could be interesting to read as many of the books on the list as possible. In those ancient days, you could not simply go online to order the books; you had to physically find them. I had set the next Saturday for my book hunting, but a winter storm hit with seventeen inches of snow stopping at four on Saturday morning. Being then young and full of vim and vigor (what is vim?), I decided to carry out my self-appointed task in spite of the storm. Many streets were yet to be plowed, and many walks were uncleared, but the local subway was running.

I got to Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and started walking east. The sky was a brilliant winter blue. A nippy wind made everyone’s cheeks rosy, but tramping through the drifts and mounds of still-pristine snow kept me warm. Without traffic, it was quiet, and we few pedestrians treated each other reverentially as if we were the deepest friends on a meditative retreat. It was the kind of day where I was thrilled that there was a winter and I was in it.

A few wonderful bookstores still existed on Eighth Street, and I stopped in each of them, but my real destination was Fourth Avenue.  On and around the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue from Astor Place to 14^th Street had been what was called “Book Row,” New York City’s used-book district. The heyday for this book center had been the 1940s and 1950s, and by the time I headed there decades later, many of the stores were gone, but a sizeable number still remained—enough so it took me hours to go through the ones still there.

Most of these stores had a loose organizational layout at best. I might find a handwritten sign on a bookcase that said, “US History” to aid my search. The shelves had no apparent structure, and I would have to scan all the volumes to see if there were any on my list. The stores, it turned out, had a surprising number of them, and every time I found one, I got a bit excited as if I had found something much more than an out-of-print book, but some sort of little treasure that could only be found after an effortful search—the kind of thrill a seeker does not now get on the internet.

After I finished on Fourth having found many but not all the books on the list, I doubled back to Broadway and 12^th Street to Strand Bookstore, what was billed then and now as the City’s largest used book store, and I found a few more sought-for volumes.

That day can no longer be repeated. The Fourth Avenue used book stores are gone; only the Strand, which started on Fourth Avenue, but moved to Broadway in the 1950s, remains. When I came to New York, I was told that Strand Bookstore was the place to buy review copies. Book reviewers and others who got advance copies of books brought their booty to the Strand where they were paid one quarter of the book-jacket price with Strand then listing them for half the jacketed price. A lucky buyer might find a recently-released book that had just been given a great review for half price. I, however, never snagged one of those bargains. I assumed these holy grails disappeared quickly and were found only by those who scoured the store once or twice a day, and I did not.

Because I rarely found a review copy of something I wanted, for me Strand was a giant used bookstore, and since I went to other ones that were more convenient for me, I rarely visited Strand for decades. That changed a few years back for two reasons: An increasing number of my doctors had offices near the Strand. And I decided that I was going to get a license to be a New York City sightseeing guide. (To be continued.)

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore in my early New York City days, but I did not restrict myself to it. If I had the time, I would check out the bookstores in whatever part of New York I was in. On the Upper West Side, I would go into a Shakespeare & Co., with its creaky floors and classical music. (I have heard classical music in other bookstores. I don’t remember, however, ever hearing country music in one.) Near Manhattan’s Columbus Circle was the Colosseum, with its multiple levels. On a tony part of Fifth Avenue was Scribner’s, with its balcony and the feeling that a spinster librarian was shushing the present patrons and the ghosts of hosts of distinguished writers. I would frequent Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore and other places on Brooklyn’s Fifth and Seventh Avenues. A marvelous used book store at 15-17 Ann Street, with sloping floors and bookcases that were steadier than they looked, was a great place for spending lunch hour when I worked around the corner on Park Row. I think it was then called the Old Ann Street Bookstore, but it was once named the Isaac Mendoza Bookstore after its original and longtime owner. That store, I have read, started in 1894, closed in 1990, and was at the same location all that time.

When traveling, I try to drop into any local bookstore I see. Forty years ago in New England, it was a barn bursting with used books. It was an amazing sight. I said to the spouse, “We aren’t leaving until we buy something that we otherwise would not get.” I don’t remember what she bought, but I purchased a volume that contained several Mr. Bunting novels, which I had never heard of. The books are about an everyman in WWII London and were delightful. This purchase was so successful that now, whenever I am in a bookstore on a trip, I try to buy a book unknown to me. And thus, in Lisbon or maybe it was the Madrid airport, which had a small English-language section, I bought what is a classic to many but not then to me by Jerome K. Jerome. Three Men in a Boat.

Bookstores are, of course, for buying books, but if you know the title you want, online ordering has advantages, and I have done at least my share of that. A bookstore, however, offers the chance for browsing. You buy a book you were not looking for because you see it and remember it got a good review or your friend Dean enjoyed it. Or you buy it because the jacket copy or the back cover makes it seem interesting or because you pick it up and read a few enjoyable paragraphs or because you are looking for a biography of P.T. Barnum and you find it shelved with other books about nineteenth century characters that appeal to you. In a good bookstore I can easily find the book I seek, but in a good bookstore the displays lead me to books that I did not know I wanted but end up finding provocative, thoughtful, interesting, enjoyable.

Recommendations are another advantage of a good bookstore. New York City bookstores are staffed with reams of bright people with liberal arts degrees who still have dreams of making a living somehow in a literary world. They read and often have to demonstrate that they read to get a job in a bookstore. As a result, they frequently have good recommendations for what you might like to read. Online stores try to mimic this by having on a webpage something like “Others who bought this book also bought. . . .” This does not come close to a conversation with someone who can ask if you have read and liked certain books and then makes recommendations based on that knowledge.

The spouse got a great recommendation decades ago. She told a Barnes & Noble clerk that she was going on vacation and wanted a good summer read. The clerk made inquiries about whether the spouse had liked certain books and authors and then recommended The Age of Innocence andWomen in White. We had not heard of Wilkie Collins before, who was largely forgotten then. But the spouse bought the books, read them, and loved them. She passed the book to me. I read and loved it, and we both went on to read other books by Wharton and Collins.

Bookstores have systematized recommendations by printing out what their sellers thought about some books. These aren’t as valuable as a personal recommendation stemming from a conversation, but I have still used them. Early in the trend, I saw a stack of books in a store above Union Square with a big card saying “First Novels,” and then smaller cards each containing a brief employee write-up of why a certain book was particularly noteworthy. I read an effusive one that was a mystery about racial relations in the Northwest. Based on those comments, I bought the book. Later, Snow Falling on Cedars was a big seller, but it was this recommendation that had me read and be impressed by it well before that.