Old Books

Unfortunately, the regular photography section was mostly a bust. It was very small, there wasn't many monographs in amongst dated how-to books, and overall it just wasn't that exciting. I found two Bernice Abbott books. Andy found a couple books and some old Hasselblad brochures. We've been on a bit of a Hasselblad kick lately (that's a story for another day), so he scooped those up. Then we just wandered around for awhile. 

I always feel weird taking photos in stores, because A.) it seems obnoxious, and B.) I know this place probably gets overrun with people trying to shoot portraits in here so it feels like a cliche. But I mean, look at this place. I had my Fuji x100v, but what I did not have was a memory card with much space left on it so I got in an whole 12 photos or so before I couldn't shoot anymore. Oops. I'm sure I had more cards in my bag, but for some reason this place was packed and we couldn't even park in the lot, so we left our car blocks away. Plus I was on the 4th floor when I realized I was out of space. Oh well.

I'm not sure if it was just a typical Saturday (we haven't been here in years) or if someone recently wrote an article or did a TikTok about this place, but the first floor was just absolutely overrun with people. It was literally shoulder to shoulder and the stacks are already so dense that you often have to turn sideways just to navigate down a row. This didn't stop unaware people from blocking the entire aisle and leaving you stuck in a labyrinth with no other way forward. It was a claustrophobic nightmare, but thankfully the upper floors were much less crowded.

It's kind of crazy how old some of the books are that are just laying out here for the public to paw through.

After standing in a crowded checkout line for at least a good 20 minutes, we finally made it to the front. The cashier looked over our cache of books and before ringing anything up (this place is so old school you get a receipt printed on one of those accounting calculators) and asked "Are you interested in seeing the rare photo book section?" Um, yes. Of course we were. Not sure if our wallets were ready, but tell us more.

Turns out the 4 floors and approximately billion square feet of books that makes up the main building is just part of the store. There's outbuildings. Outbuildings which contain a rare photo section. You can make an appt to visit it, but the cashier told us to hang on and he'd see if someone was available and luckily there was. We were led out outside and to another a building where no lights were on and whisked down a hallway to end up in a room that was just full of amazing photo books. I should have taken photos in there with my phone at least. I honestly feel conflicted even mentioning it, because I'd prefer to keep this secret all to myself, but probably no one will read this blog anyway.

But yes, this was the selection I was dreaming of. There were so many titles I wanted. We could have easily dropped hundreds of dollars in this room, but we reigned it in. I found a cleaner copy of one of the Berenice Abbott books I already had grabbed for like $5 more, we found a pristine copy of Mary Ellen Mark's 25 Years, which turned out to be a signed copy, and we scored this hefty Koudelka book. There were definitely some rarer books with steep price tags but there was a lot of affordable books as well.