It was the bookstore of my dreams – literally. White shelves zigzagging in and out along the walls, on a raised perimeter just a couple of steps above the central space. A treasure trove of wonderful books of all kinds, from fiction to historical. Tables in the centre with delightful companion merchandise. Wherever I was in the dream, I’d make a beeline for the shop like a thirsty traveller searching for water.
I grew up with libraries. When I was a child, there simply weren’t any bookstores in the small city I lived in, so the library was the only source of books to feed my growing habit. It was a beautiful Neo-classical edifice funded by Andrew Carnegie, with a large rotunda that housed the circulation desk, and books on two levels between tall windows. Just the sort of place you might write into a cozy mystery or a children’s book or a bookish adventure.
A library card was a precious thing, but the books were only temporary pleasures. When we did finally get a bookstore, I found that I wanted to buy books and keep them. In effect, I began to establish my own personal library.
I read voraciously. An ex-boyfriend introduced me to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which completely hooked me on epic fantasy. I bought The Exorcist as a teen and couldn’t sleep for a week after I read it. During times of stress, books were my escape route.
Dreams of my phantom bookstore began to arrive after I’d read a wonderful book I’d picked up by chance in a market-front shop in Los Angeles. The book was The Eight, by Katherine Neville, and it blew my mind. A fantastic adventure like nothing I’d ever read before, it centred around a magnificently-jewelled but cursed chess set gifted to Emperor Charlemagne. As soon as I finished it I wanted to read more of the same, but couldn’t find any.
So, I guess my dream mind decided to create a really cool store that had shelves and shelves of such books, and many others too – splendid archeological and historical books, antique tomes, you name it – all just waiting for me to take them home to dive into. I don’t know why it fashioned that particular interior configuration, but in dream-time I spent hours browsing those shelves.
The dream continued for decades, the store appearing in different locations but always easy to reach. It had the mystical allure of the Holy Grail, I suppose because I could only find it when I was asleep, and because reading has been such a piece of my soul ever since I learned how.
One night several years ago, I had a dream that the store was closing. I no longer needed it, it seemed, with so many great writers now populating real and online bookshelves. I’ve never been able to find it again, but…
…a great gift of being a writer is that you can create anything you like. As soon as I began mapping out my strange little town of Llithfaen for my novels (my homage to the town of Collinsport in the Dark Shadows TV series), I knew that my bookstore could live once more.
It became Archimedes Books, run by charming Leonidas Diakos and his daughter Calliope, with the assistance of a crazy cat named Tisiphone.
If you read my Chaos Roads trilogy, you’ll be walking the floors of my dream bookstore many times. I hope you enjoy visiting it. Have you had any recurring dreams of such power?
May is Get Caught Reading Month, and if you’ve let the reading habit slip, this is the perfect time to find that perfect bookstore and reacquaint yourself with the delights of great stories.
“Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.” – Jen Campbell, author