Portland Landmarks
Powell’s City of Books
In the Pearl District, Powell’s City of Books waits for our rendezvous with more than a million books. Legendary, the bookstore occupies an entire city block.
The store has a vast selection of new, used, and rare books across all genres and topics, from fiction and non-fiction to poetry and children’s books. The bookstore is organized into color-coded rooms, making it easy to navigate.
One of the unique features is its Rare Book Room. It houses rare and collectible books, including first editions, signed copies, and limited-edition prints. “A treasure trove for book collectors,” said an employee, “and anyone interested in literary history.”
Bookstores
Bookstores are like everything else — cities, cathedrals, side streets, cafes, and lovers — they require alignment to one’s disposition. This requires discovering a certain corner where you can read unperturbed a book’s opening chapter or go from shelf-to-shelf judging books by their covers. Personally, I love the utilitarian art of covers and typefaces. If language is a distinct and distinguishing characteristic of humans, then a book is equivalent to a woman’s eyes, as common wisdom somewhat coyishly equates to windows to the soul. Souls, another distinctly human invention, are inhabitants of bookstores.
People often ask me, “How can you visit the bookstore every day?” There are, as I’ve mentioned, a million reasons. A million worlds encapsulated within 200 or 2,000 pages. “Who has the time or stamina to read 2,000 pages?” someone may ask. It might have been a professor or a taxi driver who taught me about the length of a book: “I’ve read 20-page booklets that I found unfinishable and a 1,500-page novel that was way too short.”
Powell’s fills our dates with the simple pleasures of having coffee while looking out the window, waiting for a pedestrian to write into my work in progress or contemplating another nearby book lover, chin resting on a fist, lost in thought. And there is more. My preferred corner in the store lodges old literary magazines, including early editions of the Paris Review and Granta, the magazine of new writing. Not too long ago, I picked up Granta’s issue 120: DO YOU REMEMBER. “We are what we remember,” reads the back cover, “and even when we invent, we write what we remember. Every line is a fragment of something else; that is the great collective project we call culture.”
Sections
Another favorite of mine is the literature section. Here, you’re bound to find improbable friends left behind in cities that once caught our attention and retained us for three, ten, or twenty years. Moving without your books is like dying a little each time, but fortunately, Powell’s will bring you face to face with a beloved friend at the least expected moment.
Just the other day, I stumbled upon Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, a novel that revolves around the convergence of two colossal German geniuses from the Enlightenment era. In the late 18th century, the two men embarked on a journey to measure the world. Alexander von Humboldt, an aristocratic naturalist, explores jungles, travels down the Orinoco River, samples poisons, climbs the highest known mountain, counts head lice, and surveys every cave and hill he encounters. In contrast, the reclusive and socially awkward mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss demonstrates that space is curved without ever leaving his home.
Philosopher Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety was another find. The Seattle Times heralds it: “His richest, funniest, most heart-felt work yet, packed with erudition and briming with an elegant originality of mind… An informative joy to read.” Here are the opening lines to the chapter Our Need for Love, Our Need for Status:
“Every adult life is said to be defined by two great love stories. The first — the story of our quest for sexual love — is well known and charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second — our quest for the love from the world — it’s a more secret and shameful tale.”
Of course, new books arrive, and along come the authors to engage in noted Powell’s conversationists and meet booklovers. One new book I must get against the wife’s objections that the apartment is too small for more books. The World: A Family History of Humanity. “A world history,” reads the blurb, “unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families. By Simon Sebag Montefiore, the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs.
The official word
Powell’s Books has been recognized as one of the best independent bookstores in the country by publications like USA Today and The Guardian. The store has also been featured in movies, television shows, and documentaries, further cementing its status as a cultural icon.
Anything I add at this point would be redundant. Interesting word this redundant. I head to the second level for an etymology dictionary. The literature section is located in the red room, while languages, references, sociology, politics and travel are in the purple room. Redundancy derives from unda, Latin for wave. The original Latin redundare meant, literally, overflow, pour over. Figuratively, be in excess. The current usage of the word in English implies excess or unnecessary repetition. One synonymous is circumlocution — using half a dictionary to express what could be said in three words.
“It’s getting late, anyway. Portland’s Pearl District is beautifully foggy, and people are hurrying to happy hour. I too hurry. Jusqu’à demain, mon amour — ‘Till tomorrow, my love.’”
