Gardner's inventory of used books is so large that it must housed in four airplane hangers somewhere at the airport. Richard Gardner, an eccentric local accountant, founded Gardner's in 1991, but it feels like the bookstore has always been there, the store seems ageless, maybe because it's piled so full of discarded, dead things. After all, no one talks about a "new" cemetery. But, it's not cheerless at all, it's like someone pried open the door to a crypt, and has begun shouting out to all and sundry that for a small fee you too can resurrect the dead.
The first time I went to Garderner's was in the summer of 1999, and I had just gotten back from spending my junior year of high school abroad, and it was absolutely amazing not only the number of books available, but the number of serendipitous finds you get from just browsing. In fact, it is very difficult at Gardner's to find what you want, books are shelved haphazardly at best, and their division between "fiction", "classics", and "popular fiction" is debatable.
IN 1999 Time magazine published their list of the 100 best books written in English of the 20th century (interestingly one of the books on the list was written in German, not English) and Gardner's taped up the list on the side of one of the bookshelves. It's still there, ten years later, the newsprint strangeley preserved, almost new.
I wanted to get as many of the books on the list as possible, unfortunately, I couldn't seem to find any of the books on it. I gave up on trying to find something specific, and started wandering up and down the aisles, looking for what would jump out and gab me.
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