Books and Baskets

While I was upstate, I visited Books and Baskets in Saranac Lake, a store that combines well-chosen used books with handmade baskets, including the distinctively potbellied Adirondack packbasket. The place is just as warm and inviting as the photo on its home page shows. It’s a challenge to make a living in the Adirondacks at all, and I admire anyone who can do it selling books. (The trick, here as elsewhere, is to have some other revenue streams.)

I was especially happy to find Herman Melville’s Redburn in its fifty-year-old Anchor paperback edition, with cover illustration and typography by Edward Gorey. I had that edition once and somehow lost it. The first person I ever heard praise the book was Maurice Sendak, who was taken by its scenes in 19th century Manhattan. In The Thoreau You Don’t Know, Robert Sullivan mentioned that Redburn describes “the horror of a famine ship in transit,” making it—along with Thoreau’s Cape Cod -- one of the few works of American literature to mention the devastating famine that drove so many of the Irish to America.