Book stalls, used books and other pleasures of New York City

One of my favorites urban pleasures has long been buying books on the street. In New York, this means book stalls – and more specifically, the Strand’s book stall, at the southeast edge of Central Park, across Fifth Avenue from the Hotel Pierre.

I know this corner of the city intimately; as a kid, I used to go to dancing school here. But it was only when the Strand stall opened that it developed what, for me, is something like an inner life.

The Strand, of course, is one of New York’s bookstore landmarks: “18 Miles of Books,” its slogan declares. I used to hate the original store, on lower Broadway, until I realized it was best engaged with a sort of Zen-like detachment – don’t go in looking for something specific, just see what you might find.

This, of course, is one of the key joys of browsing, and it’s why I hope the brick-and-mortar bookstores never go away. Just try browsing with, er, your browser, and you quickly come up against the prime limitation of the digital world.

The Strand stall is a smaller, more manageable simulacrum of the larger store, and I am always glad to see that it remains. It’s changed over the years, now sells gifts and tchotchkes, but the prime draw are still the tables – half-price paperbacks arranged in a soothing random order, George R.R. Martin juxtaposed with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Here, we get a glimpse of how the inside of a reader’s head looks also, everything we have ever read and everything we have never read all jumbled up in our imaginations, like a crazy quilt book sale.

I scored one of my best finds ever at the Strand book stall: a Calder & Boyars hardcover of Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1971 novel “The Room.” This was in the fall of 1984, when I was working in midtown and would browse there nearly every day.

Selby is remembered, if at all, for 1964’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” a tour de force of violence and urban degradation; he published five other works of fiction before his death, in Los Angeles, in 2004. His books have never been especially easy to come across, but in those pre-Internet days, it was hard to uncover even the most basic biographical material; I had no idea, for a long time, whether he was even still alive.

I had read “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” had found British editions of two other novels, “The Demon” and “Requiem for a Dream.” I knew “The Room” existed, but I had no particular hope of finding a copy; it had been out of print for a decade or more.

Then, one afternoon on my lunch break, I wandered over to the Strand stall and there is was. Two copies, in good condition, a white dust jacket with the image of an eye widened in terror: a vivid evocation of the dislocation at the center of the novel, which involves a criminal slowly going mad in solitary confinement, a set-up inspired by Selby’s own run-ins with the law in the years after the publication of “Last Exit to Brooklyn.”

You won’t come upon a book like that at the Strand stall any longer; the days of such revelations are largely done. We have search engines and sites to help with that now, Google and Wikipedia, in an age when mysteries such as the provenance of a book or writer are routinely settled in the interplay of binary code.

That’s a fine thing, but I also miss the other way, the random edge of discovery, the heartstopping thrill of finding something you weren’t sure was real. I remember holding that book in my hand, not quite believing it – not just my good fortune, but also in some strange way reality itself.

Yet the Strand stall is still there, with its half-priced Murakamis and Vonneguts, its novels by J.D. Salinger and Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie. I have all these books, but it’s reassuring to see them in such familiar surroundings, a reminder of what doesn’t dissipate.

And so I browsed for a few minutes, running my fingers across the well-worn covers, before continuing on my way.

Twitter: @davidulin