The best bookstore in Milwaukee is at the airport. I don’t mean that hyperbolically—Renaissance Books in the Mitchell International main terminal is, in my mind, the pinnacle of book shops.
It’s small and cramped, terribly organized, and sometimes birds get into the terminal and fly around above the shelves. The intercom often interrupts your browsing to let you know that someone parked their Lincoln across two lanes of traffic outside Arrivals. Travelers with comically oversized suitcases, neck pillows that border on saddles, and overflowing caramel ribbon crunch crème frapuccinos occasionally block off entire sections, standing in front of a shelf staring at their phones.
And yet…
The shelves are packed. The book are pressed tight together, stacked on top, hidden behind each other, spilling over into other sections.
The selection is immaculate. With a little searching, I can find Flannery O’Connor, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Vonnegut, and it seems like every other pretentious classic an insufferable snob like me might want in multiple editions—and at the same time you can still find all the tragically mediocre new releases and saccharine self-help tomes that keep the publishing industry alive today.
The books are genuinely used. I love old books, with their cracked spines, yellow pages, and that unmatched smell. A visit to Renaissance has me sniffing them pages hard—I have to restrain myself lest airport security get involved.
The prices are amazing. I bought The Bonfire of the Vanities for four dollars! Are you kidding me? I paid five for a crappy freaking coffee that same day.
All that makes me like Renaissance, but there’s something else I love about it, something it shares with great used bookstores around the country: a remarkable lack of efficiency.
I think my greatest book-buying experience happened when I was nine years old. I was visiting family in New Hampshire, and we stopped by The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, where I found a copy of Montmorency on the Rocks. You likely haven’t heard of the young adult novel by Eleanor Updale, the second installment in a detective series, but I had been searching for it over a year. The library didn’t have it, no bookstore in southeastern Wisconsin had it, and my parents didn’t understand (or trust) online shopping yet.
Finding that book was nine-year-old Archer’s Moby-Dick—and then there it was, dusty and mis-shelved in the history section of that small shop in New Hampshire.
I was ecstatic. It was nearly as thrilling as the time I said hi to a girl and she didn’t run away.
Now let’s jump ahead to late 20s Archer. He’s a little uglier, a little chunkier, pretty much the same height.
Just a few days ago, I went to Renaissance, and while I was browsing the messy stacks I found a first edition of Walker Percy’s The Second Coming, one of my favorite novels ever, for only nine dollars (mis-shelved, of course). Aaaand I found an early edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-fiction collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, which I had never heard of, despite considering myself a Vonnegut fan.
I was ecstatic. It was nearly as thrilling as the time I said hi to a woman and she didn’t run away.
In my haul, there were books I loved and always wanted, books I discovered while wandering, bargain paperbacks hidden behind hardcovers. There was a sense of exploration and excitement that came from perusing those unruly stacks … which brings me to this week’s installment of Archer Writes About How Much He Hates the Internet on the Internet.
I buy crap on Amazon all the time: coffee filters, deodorant (believe it or not), socks, fungal cream (don’t ask), and yes, books. I don’t have to explain how convenient and easy it is—everyone knows. In fact, there are multiple copies of Montmorency on the Rocks available there right now.
At the same time, it’s antiseptic, a couple taps on the screen and someone tosses a cardboard box on my doorstep. The process is so efficient and so streamlined that it streams right past the entire experience of buying books.
My recent visit to Renaissance reminded me of how much enjoyment is to be found in a good used bookstore, in the sensory experience of searching messy stacks, the smell of aging paper, the crease of a folded paperback cover, finally finding a novel you always wanted and stumbling on a new one you’d never heard of, in the hunt and the discovery.
As I increasingly fall prey to the lure of easy, convenient internet alternatives—whether that be buying books on Amazon, watching Reels for an hour at a time, getting news on Twitter, etc.—I need reminders like that to keep me in the real, physical world, where an inefficient experience of wandering through poorly organized shelves brings immeasurably more joy than its efficient, streamlined alternative.