Coming of age in Oklahoma City wasn’t always the all-out adventure I know I tend to make it seem. Actually, more days than not, I was trying to find something constructive to do with my dwindling time. With the futuristic era of cyber-jacking info-loads onto the neural-net still about fifty or so years down the dark timeline, chances are you’d probably find me just hanging out at a bookstore.
Back in the days before Amazon, before Borders, before even Barnes and Noble, in the Metro, we only had two bookstore chains: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, both in the various malls around town. While they were great for shoplifting copies of The Crucible for school and maybe even a Playboy for yourself, at the time, there were actually a few great independent stores around the city that usually garnered much more of my respect and even more of my cash, and are still fully deserving of my respect today.
When I first moved to OKC in 1990, I was pretty dang excited that a bookstore—Jean Barnes Books, actually—was at the end of my street, on N.W. 50th. That very excitement deflated, however, when I learned it was a weird self-help bookstore offering weird self-help books. I couldn’t tell you what they really did in there or why, but no section of books about the Beatles? They said hello and I quickly said goodbye.
Traveling across the street to Mayfair Village though, by the ol’ barbershop where I used to get my sides buzzed, there was a used bookstore with the wondrous name of Aladdin Book Shoppe. At first, of course, I quietly hoped it was the type of antique book store that would sell me a dusty tome of mystical tales that’ll transport this lonely child to Fantasia. Instead, after digging around like a nosy hound in the back of the store, the various stacks of men’s adventure paperbacks and sleazy sci-fi rained down upon me, giving me a new passion for rank, rotten and ribald literature.
Paperbacks became a slight obsession for me sadly, where I was stopping at just about every thrift store, garage sale and library dumpster from here to, well, a few blocks from here, collecting as many as I could. But, I told myself, who needs all that running around? This was the 90s and the book market was still an embarrassingly booming business. And few places took as great a pride in it as the Book Rack, a paperback home for unwanted reads down on May in the ancient Lakeshore Shopping Center.