What is the world's greatest book store?

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, I would have said Scribner's on Fifth Avenue -- elegant and dignified arid imbued with publishing history. When I was in the Foreign Service, assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. I would have said Brown's or Galignani's on the Rue de Rivoli, oases of lovely Anglo-Saxon reading in the heart of Francophonia. In England, I might have picked one of the fine London stores, or perhaps splendid old Blackwell's in Oxford.

But when I was in the communist world, during six years of service in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, 1 would have settled for just about any bookstore in the capitalist world. The comparison of bookstores East and West led me to a new appreciation of the bookstore as an essential part of the good life. It also led me to worry a bit about the bookstore's future.

My comparison had to do not merely with freedom of the press, although that is central. And, in fact, there are some fascinating book places -- especially used bookstores -- east of West Berlin. Moreover, the ardent appreciation of reading and of books by East Europeans is a phenomenon I wish we emulated.

While serving as ambassador in Bulgaria from 1979 to 1981, I noted that Bulgaria had an active and well-supported literary establishment. Their bookstores were popular spots, with long lines of customers waiting patiently to be admitted. Occasionally, in strolling around Sofia, I would join a line leading to a sidewalk stall, hoping to find imported bananas, figs or some other exotic desirable, only to discover that the wait was for a new book in Bulgarian.

Nevertheless, the world's best bookstore could not conceivably be located in Bulgaria or anywhere in the communist lands. Restrictions on freedom of expression are too stultifying. The centralization of the intellectual and publishing world is too great, so that variety, novelty, spark are often reduced to a minimum. The necessity of stocking shelves with immense collections of official works produces too much sterility. Even the system of subsidization, while leading to cheap books and contributing to making approved authors well off, removes competition and takes away the visual and mental excitement we in the West expect from our bookstores-or expected.

During my ambassadorship, I had the occasion to come home for my son's wedding and thus had the opportunity to immerse myself in the world of books and bookstores with eyes made fresh by time spent in Eastern Europe. The wedding was at Dartmouth, and when we walked into the many-splendored Dartmouth Book Store in Hanover, I thought, remembering Sofia, Prague and Moscow, that l had come to paradise. By the time we left New England, I knew that the good life included access to a great bookstore. Not necessarily the world's greatest, but great.

We stopped in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, and while I found some good bookstores, I also had some sobering visits to what were, in effect, modern bookselling establishments -- not bookstores in the classic sense. During my years abroad in the '60s and '70s, a new approach to merchandizing books seemed to have gained ground. Discounting, computerized marketing, "romance" book boutiques and other modern characteristics of suburban shopping malls were in evidence. The bookshops in the mall had enough variety and color to make a Bulgarian bibliophile weep, but they lacked soul. None could remotely be considered among the world's great bookstores.

Our last stop in the U.S. was in the mountains of North Carolina, where my wife and I were lucky enough to stumble into Cyrano's Bookshop in the pretty resort town of Highlands. It was a cozy shop where the owner cared for the books and knew each volume, where the range was impressive and the atmosphere was meant for book lovers and not just book buyers. Faith was restored. I decided that the good life could be lived in the mountains of North Carolina, with access to shops like this.

However you choose to define the good life, for most of us access to good books is surely a critical part of it. My Bulgarian friends would have been astonished at the literary wealth of our bookstores, flabbergasted at our freedom of choice. I hope that someday they will all have it, all over Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, I look at where our American bookstores are tending, and I worry. It saddens me to think of a day in my own country when there might be nothing but sterile, homogenized bookselling. First-rate writing and free, conscientious publishing will not help us unless we have great, or even good, bookstores to lead us to where the good books are.

Proprietor's Note: It is distressingly unfortunate that one of Perry's favorite independents, Scribner's in New York, has ceased to exist, as have other great independents like the Oxford Book Store in Atlanta, the Book Mark in Tucson, and all too many more.

But we're still here. Our guarantee has always been to make a concerted effort to find the books our customers desperately want and to deliver them as quickly and inexpensively as we know how. We love the challenge of finding books that our customers have been told were either not available or out of print, when often they were neither.

Like our namesake, Cyrano de Bergerac, we can't be judged by our exterior. We live in only 700 square feet between two larger structures on Main Street, Highlands: just a charming hole in the wall, but with ready access to over 1.6 million books in print and an infinite number out of print. We are intentionally small and selective, but with all the services that make reading a joy!

Ran Shaffner, Founder and Former Proprietor
Clair and Arthur Simpson, Current Proprietors
Rosemary Fleming