Idlewild Books

One of the most enjoyable days in the week that Jenn and I took off earlier this month was spent wandering from one bookstore to another. We visited two of our favorites: St. Mark’s Bookshop and Forbidden Planet (more Jenn’s thing than mine, though we’ve been going there every time a new volume of 100 Bullets comes out). We also checked out a new one: Idlewild Books at 12 West 19th Street. It occupies a smallish but pleasantly light-filled second-story space, and the well-selected stock is organized not by topic but by geography (in the same way that I organized my Basket of Leaves). I noticed a beautiful one-volume import edition of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on the shelf for Egypt.