Of Bookstores . . . .

For the past 25 years, ever since I met my Dear Husband and we have been traveling to visit his family, we have driven by Givens Books.  It sits on the corner of a busy intersection in Salem, Virginia.  The store is on the right corner and we are always making a left turn there.  I've wanted to stop in that bookstore every time we've driven past it.  I know I've mentioned that to said Dear Husband on numerous occasions.

Well, he finally heard me!  He surprised me by first telling me he needed air in the tires at the gas station next door and then he pulled right up to that front door pictured there.  He told me I could take as much time as I wanted!

And we all went in!  It was jam-packed with books - old, new, current, ancient.  They were stacked on each other, on the shelves, on top of each other on the shelves, in large piles on the floor; a  book lover's dream, a biblioholic's bar.  I was in heaven, but not breathing too deeply because, well, ya know, old books can sometimes be, well, a little like old ladies who forget to bathe and wear moth-ball perfumed clothes.  You still love that little old lady, and you just accept her as she is because she is filled with wisdom and treasures.

The first aisle I wondered down had books on England, all kinds of non-fiction.  Being the huge Jane Austen/Elizabeth Gaskill fan that I am, I snagged G. M. Trevelyan's English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria.  Trevelyan was a Master of Trinity College and the Late Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge.  This little treasure was published in 1942!  I don't even need to read the book because the best part is a wonderful, color map of England with all the counties labeled.   A couple shelves over, I found An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray, no Cambridge scholar but who can resist the Regency period - alas, not I.  My Dear Husband found The Jane Austen Book Club for me which I had, surprisingly, never heard of!   Are you sensing a theme in my selections?

I browsed the other sections and found a couple of books that will be handy in our homeschooling: The Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia and the Usborne Internet-linked Introduction to Asia.


I also found a section with college textbooks.  It seems Givens does a lot of business with the local community college and business school.  I love to look at the literature ones, just to see if the short stories and plays in anthologies have changed much over the course of 20+ years.  Interesting enough, they haven't!  I picked up Literature and the Writing Process because it had the entire script of M. Butterfly, something I have never read but want to.  My all-time favorite short story is Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and it's in there too; honestly, no anthology is complete without it.

The last book I got was the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha.  For those that don't know and I had to look this up too, just to be sure, the Apocrypha are "texts which were included in some canonical versions of the Bible at some point, and other texts of a Biblical nature which have never been canonical."  How we got the Bible we read is very fascinating to me and this will help me learn more about that.

Just in case you are wondering, I did pick up several volumes only to then put them back down; it is a sad moment when you realize you just cannot buy all that you want.  There was a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea but it was a little too water-warped for even this intrepid used book buyer.

During my check-out, I was pleased to be able to chat with the owner, Mr. Chip Givens.  He was so delightful and I really enjoyed talking with him, about all kinds of things.  Plus, he had some pretty funny, clean jokes!

If you'd like to take a virtual tour of Givens Books, you can search their stacks here or here. All in all, a very productive and fun little stop!  I hope I don't have to wait 25 more years for another book-shopping adventure!