Have you ever stumbled upon a place so strangely familiar and right that it feels as if it was created just for you? I found my heaven on earth today, no more than ten minutes from our place.
Rows upon rows of used vintage and modern books, carefully curated-over 100,000 of them, all arranged in alphabetical order by categories upon thousands of shelves in a large space within a quirky red corner building with intricate purple doors and a name belying the literary voyages within-Iliad Bookshop. It was not hard to part with my Christmas money as you can see what I came home with in the pictures below!
It is no ordinary used bookstore and I’ve stepped into plenty in my lifetime- the owners of this one have carefully culled away large genres of books to include only interesting, unique and useful titles. There are no shelves of fluff to sieve through and multiple copies of bestsellers read once and discarded-instead there are thousands of volumes of GREAT reads, art books, architecture books, film books, cookbooks and my absolute favorite-several shelves full of contemporary and vintage ILLUSTRATED books.
Growing up in a small, obscure town on the other side of the world, there were no big box bookstores, and new books from across the oceans written in the English language were hard to come by. Instead, I spent my milk and adolescent years thumbing through the collections of older relatives, libraries and small used bookstores-books bought during the British Rule, decades before my time. Thus, vintage books with their beautiful and lovingly worn covers and pages of intricate illustrations, yellowed with age and perfumed with mustiness from long term storage are as familiar to me as treasured family photographs.
Iliad has a whole section dedicated to children and young adult books-not just contemporary works in their slick gaudy covers but beautiful old tomes that delighted children from yesteryears-old hardback vintage editions of the Bobsey Twins, Little House on the Prairie, an ENTIRE shelf of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and many more obscure titles with beautiful covers and intricate illustrated plates. They have entire sections of paperback mysteries and fiction from another time. Some people may say that any printed edition will do but I for one will disagree. A tastefully printed edition with the right typeset and a beautiful cover will do more for your literary adventure than a poorly executed publication.
And have you ever seen a prettier bookmark? It says something about a bookstore that has a beautifully illustrated bookmark to hand out!
So,what found treasures did I return home with? A stack of obscure L.M. Montgomery paperbacks (there are only SO many times one can read Anne of Green Gables and I’ve moved on…slightly), a beautifully old children’s book called the Young Adventurer complete with yellowed pages and lovely vintage typeset, a wonderful large, shiny almost-new Maurice Sendak hardcover art book and two yummy cookbooks, one which was already on my Amazon wishlist, all together for little more than $50, such a bargain.
The Iliad Bookshop is absolutely worth a visit if you delight in reading previously-loved books seeped in memories over new ones!