Myopic Books
At work, during slow summer Friday afternoons dedicated to doing the work we’ve been procrastinating all week, my co-workers and I often play the “If you could do anything for a living, what would it be?” game.
There are several versions of this game. In some, you aren’t constrained by your own skill level, and so my co-workers all become rock stars, actors, and pro basketball players. In others, you don’t have to worry about making money, and so my colleagues transform into beer makers, poets, and dog groomers.
But no matter the version of the game, my answer is always the same. I’d run a bookstore. If skill level was no issue, I’d open something enormous – something on a Strand scale – and feel confident in my ability to make it a success. If making money didn’t matter, I’d open a quiet shop in a Brooklyn brownstone from 10-4 on weekdays and spend most of that time reading behind the cash register.
A few months ago, when I walked into Myopic Books in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, my first thought was that it was the “If you could do anything” answer for someone who couldn’t decide between opening a bookshop like me or running a record store like my co-worker Matt.
This is the Empire Records of bookstores – surly staff, late night hours even on Sundays, prices scrawled inside front covers in serial-killer handwriting, and live music on Mondays. Its owner is perhaps most famous for banning The Real World from filming in his store during the show’s Chicago season, accusing the show of glamorizing the neighborhood and changing its essential nature. One news outlet dubbed it “The Battle for Wicker Park: MTV against its target market.”
Myopic Books is also a maze – three stories of creaky staircases and narrow aisles stacked to the ceiling with 80,000 used books, an anarchic organizational system that relies on arrows thumbtacked into the wooden edges of bookshelves to direct people, and the smell of paper decaying that I love the way some people like the smell of chlorine or gasoline. The store has ‘house rules’ that include checking backpacks and purses at the door, putting your cell phone away (sorry!), and only buying books during brief windows of time on Fridays and Saturdays. This is a bookstore that doesn’t bend to you – there’s almost nowhere to sit, no public bathrooms, and I overheard a staff member gesture broadly to the room and unhelpfully say “Probably somewhere around here” when she asked him where to find Zadie Smith. And yet I’m not mad at it. Myopic Books has a vibe, and that vibe is 90s and flannel-clad. I’m happy to sacrifice creature comforts and customer service for a trip back in time.
