2nd Look Books

Tucked away in one of the nicer-looking strip malls on the South Hill is 2nd Look Books. So tucked away, in fact, that I would never have come across it if I hadn't needed one specific item that only Rite-Aid carried; and the only reason I was even visiting this particular out-of-the-way Rite-Aid is because the barista at The Shop happened to mention it as a less busy alternative to the other Rite-Aid branch down 29th Street.

Thus I found myself at 2nd Look Books. Camera-less, as it happens, because the detour was, like many detours, unanticipated. Which accounts for the unfortunate lack of photos to accompany this post. If I go back — and there's really no question that I will — I'll try to collect some photographic evidence and append it belatedly.

2nd Look Books has been going for 28 years. It began as three spindles of paperbacks in the back of a South Hill laundromat and transferred to the ground floor of its current location a few years later. Its popularity and increasing stock then led it to expand into the basement level, which now houses books on history, media, cooking, gardening, and more, as well as biographies and classics. The classics section also doubles as an alluringly cozy reading room. Upstairs you'll find general fiction, which includes mystery and sci-fi in addition to literary and popular fiction.

2LB operates entirely on an exchange policy, the ins and outs of which are here. Bring in your old books and receive a percentage of the current market value as store credit. The folks who keep the place in business are those who have extreme difficulty parting with their old books when adding new titles to their library and/or those who can't limit their purchases to their 2LB store credit alone.

The great thing about 2LB is that it's wholly unlike the other local bookstores I've managed to visit so far — the ramshackle but colorful Pilot Books, the charmless Auntie's at the Square, and the mundane Rae's Book Exchange — and that, I think, is an encouraging sign of the diversity of Spokane's rather modest pool of bookstores.

There's a pervasive feeling of reverence for the book here. They aren't simply items at one end of a commercial transaction. They're meant to be found, discovered, held, savored, perused, adored, mentally ingested. The shelves are tidy enough to make casual browsing and targeted hunting easy, yet there's just enough peripheral disarray to curb that cold, regimented quality that comes when all the volumes are standing, spines stiff and upright, like obedient soldiers.

It's more testament to the readerly atmosphere of 2LB than my own compulsive book-buying that I went in for a quick glimpse and walked out with two nonfiction books, Niall Ferguson's The War of the World and Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience, plus one novel, Europe Central by frequent Harper's contributor William T. Vollman (his Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, incidentally, is a worthy, albeit imperfect, meditation on the subjects of its subtitle). The total for these two hardcovers and one paperback came to just over $42, which sits on the pricey side of things, but somehow didn't seem as extortionate as my shop at Rae's. Again, chalk it up to better selection — in both quantitative and qualitative terms — and atmosphere.

Directly next door there's an attractive little café called Forza – one of a small Washington-based chain — with Wi-Fi access and an enticing interior in which to spend some time with your new reading material. Time constraints pulled me away, but it gets consistently high reviews and positive comments across the Web.

I was also going to point out that, for anyone who's participating in the Shrinking Violets' December book club, 2LB has a one copy of W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn for sale. But in the two days since I was there, it looks like it's been scooped up. An encouraging sign.