THE statistics are staggering: one million books covering 3,500 subjects in 70,000 square feet, and 450 employees.
Not for nothing does Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon style itself a City of Books. Commanding an entire block it is a place where getting lost is a badge of honour with stickers proclaiming “I got lost in the City of Books”. Although officially founded in 1971, this summer Powell’s held a quirky 41st birthday party celebrating their claim to be the biggest bookstore in the world selling new and used books. When you walk in you are handed a folding map to help navigate your way around the maze of nine colour-coded rooms spread over four floors. For even the most seasoned bibliophile, the scale of the operation is daunting.
The owner Michael Powell says on a busy day they sell 10,000 books – an astonishing figure in an era when the doomsayers are frequently predicting the end of the book is nigh. Borders bookshops closed all their stores in 2011 and branches of Barnes and Noble are hard to find in many American cities, but Powell’s bucks the trend.
A stroll through the literature section begins with Edward Abbey, known as “Cactus Ed” and an American iconoclast. Without pausing, it takes 120 seconds to walk the full A-Z length of the five tall literature aisles until you reach the novels of Stefan Zweig where a Hemingway quotation is chalked on a blackboard: “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” And the people of Portland have been loyal to Powell’s. The store is a combined living room and community meeting place that is part of the city’s cultural lifeblood hosting a monthly programme of events. They encourage a love of the printed word and of the lost art of reading. On the ground floor parents and young children can be seen in rapturous immersion over Else Minarik’s Little Bear stories.
In the quietude of the rare book room on the second floor I stumbled across a small cache of Irish titles. One shelf contained a first edition of Rossa’s Recollections 1838-1898 by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in its original green cloth and published privately in New York in 1898. The book describes “The Customs, Habits and Manners of the Irish People”. Inscribed and signed by the author on the front free endpaper, it was presented to “my veteran friend Denis O’Riorden of Ireland and of New Britain with the regards of the author, May Day 1907, New York”. It was found last year in a box of books of otherwise little value during a house clearance in Portland and is priced at $400.
Alongside, under P, are Parnell’s Penal Laws and Personal Recollections of an Irish National Journalist by Richard Pigott. Robert Lloyd Praeger’s Beyond Soundings, his collection of Irish as well as foreign travel essays published by the Talbot Press in 1930, is also on the shelves.
The oldest book for sale is De Bello Judaica or The Jewish War by Flavious Josephus, printed in 1480 and with a price tag of $12,500. The copy is an incunabulum, or book produced during the first 50 years of modern printing – from approximately 1450. But it is far from being the most expensive title. That accolade rests with the two-volume first edition of the epic of exploration Journals of Lewis and Clark published in 1814 and a snip at $350,000. Of 1,417 printed copies, only 23 remain and its original large folding map is miraculously still intact.
Each room comes with a recommendation guide listing titles selected by staff. The books are well organised with helpful cross-referencing. If, for example, you are searching for rivers and lakes in Western Americana, signs on shelves suggest you try the purple room for geography, water and hydrology, or the rose room for environmental studies. Writing themes are grouped appropriately. Bike stands outside the front door bear titles such as Round Ireland in Low Gear by Eric Newby, Metal Cowboy by Joe Kurmaskie, Spokesongs by Willie Weir, and Miles from Nowhere by Barbara Savage.
Customers push trolleys or carry overflowing red baskets as though in Walmart and there is the merest hint of a warehouse-cum-shopping centre feel to it all. One of the pleasures is to select five books and browse them in the shop’s cafe over coffee or lunch, making sure you don’t spill any dressing on your Doris Lessing. Book lovers congregate and caffeinate here with conversation and reading rivalling electro-chatter.
Paul Kubik, a self-styled book scout, comes every week to check the sections on adventure, mountaineering and travel as well as to buy and sell books. “It is book heaven and a comforting place for many people,” he says. “Powell’s is an island and there’s nowhere else like it in the US. The golden age of bookselling may be coming to an end but this is one of the last great bookstores in the world.” Even the restrooms are places for scribblers. Graffiti artists have scrawled their own catchy titles in the grouting between the tiles above the urinals: Grout Expectations, The Grout Gatsby, and Fifty Shades of Grout are some of the offerings.
Armed with a heavy bagful of purchases on my way out at 10.59pm, I thank the member of staff at the information desk for helping me spend too many dollars. He replies with one simple, if over-used word that perfectly sums up the shop: “Aah-some”.