Let’s reminisce a bit about one of the great literary bookstores in the United States, whose site now sadly houses, what, the gazillionth night club in Pioneer Square?
Alas. Elliott Bay Book Company, one of the first gaddings about the town that I did when I first moved here, where my mother grew up and my extended family still live, in 1994.
Spacious upstairs and down, the creme de la creme of English-language thought, something for everyone. Downstairs there was a cafe and reading area where my writers group, Los Norteños, put together gobsmackingly beautiful readings that seeded the careers of many, myself included. We OWNED the Day of the Dead, with art exhibits, music, candle processions, and an audience to capacity and overflow.
The very space and setup where that took place is gone, no doubt a casualty of Amazon, and rightly, but we are wearied of everything coming to the porch in a cardboard package. Books cannot really be evaluated by four hundred reviews, some of which are not even legit.
You need to paw the book, flip through and read a few pages, check out the author’s pic, and feel it. You need to compare it with the books around it, and try them out.
It feels like an affirmation of your town to buy the book here and not from the vastness of everywhere.
To sit down in the café with coffee and a pastry, and read for a bit. People mill around. Children romp. The person next to you is tapping away at a laptop.
You go home and sit in your easy chair under your lamp and immerse yourself in the great stream of wealth that is the cultured class. Most of these authors do not make a living writing these books, and sadly not a book that is well-researched, painstakingly written, and a part of a passion in life, yet they devote hundreds of hours to doing it, to writing, rewriting, thinking, getting their friends and the co-writers called editors to think, then to brave being awash in a giant stream of books, more and more all the time -- and which are actually worth not just the $25 but the ten hours?
Here we have our literary bookstore to make the call, to curate what is good enough and what should be a pass.
Elliott Bay is gone, but the impulse to fund the marketplace of ideas is not. It’s also a few miles north now, with just as ghastly parking, a tad smaller, but a hub of pleasant and fulfilling activity.
The reading was held April 25 — but the book is still for sale. It was gratifying to see a serious author fill a reading to standing room only. Tara Ebrahimi is a local who dallied elsewhere then came home. She is involved in content creation in digital settings and Historic Seattle, as well as being an award-winning author in creative nonfiction.
Street Trees of Seattle comprises a set of walking tours organized by neighborhood detailing and discussing trees of various species in public areas, complete with her witty sketches and maps, thirty-three walks in all, a veritable “walking tour de force.”
I sampled three of the walks, complete with street or cheap eats.
