How a sigh might look

Had the Chief Inspector been blindfolded he could have described the familiar shop. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. With fiction and biography, science and science fiction. Mysteries and religion. Poetry and cookbooks. It was a room filled with thoughts and feeling and creation and desires. New and used.

Threadbare Oriental rugs were scattered on the wood floor, giving it the feel of a well-used library in an old country home.

A cheerful wreath was tacked on the door into Myrna's New and Used Bookstore, and a Christmas tree stood in a corner. Gifts were piled underneath and there was the slight sweet scent of balsam.

A black cast-iron woodstove sat in the center of the room, with a kettle simmering on top of it and an armchair on either side.

It hadn't changed since the day Gamache had first entered Myrna's bookstore years before. Right down to the unfashionable floral slipcovers on the sofa and easy chairs in the bay window. Books were piled next to one of the sagging seats and back copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic were scattered on the coffee table.

It was, Gamache felt, how a sigh might look.

— from How the Light Gets In, by Louise Penny.

In case of emergency

This weekend I was sucked into the vortex that is eBay, a world I haven't visited this past decade and which I'd almost forgotten existed.

The world is full of beautiful and mysterious things, I learned, and there is a treasure trove of obscure editions of Simenon titles in New South Wales, Australia.

Maigret and Hannelore Headley

I'm at my mother's this week and not reading much at all, but I did manage to duck out of a downtown shopping-for-home-decor boutique visit to check out the used bookstore down the street.

Even though I've only ever been there a couple dozen time in my lifetime, I think of Hannelore Headley's as an institution. Most of those times were 25 years ago, in my last days of high school. Conveniently located a 10-minute walk from the school I went to and beside the park, I recall stopping there while cutting calculus and on my way out for coffee. Definitely I spent more time at Hannelore's than I did money.

It's hard to describe just how jam-packed this shop is with books. Floor to ceiling, but then you start scanning a shelf, step up on a stool, and reach for something and you realize the books are shelved two, sometimes three, deep. And then you shift your foot and knock over the 3-foot-high stack that sits on the floor in front of the shelves at the end of the aisle. Those at the ends and around corners are really the only ones in danger of toppling; the rest are so tightly packed, they prop each other up. You shuffle along sideways and bump into some boxes stacked two or three high, all crammed full of more books — fresh hauls waiting to be "shelved."

I'd given up all hope of finding anything I'd had in mind when I went in — books are organized by genre and arranged vaguely alphabetically, but I believe it uses a slightly different alpahbet than the standard English, with some of the letters swapping places and a couple extra letters thrown in — when a stack fell away to reveal the stack behind it, and three Simenon novels fell into my hands, which led me to explore the shelf beside and the boxes in front, and I found three more. My haul:

The Accomplices (1955)
Maigret Goes Home (1931)
Maigret at the Crossroads (1931)
Maigreat and the Hundred Gibbets (1931)
Maigret at the Coroner's (1952)
Maigret in Vichy (1968)

I'm most excited about The Accomplices, the only non-Maigret novel of the lot, but I love the look of Maigret Goes Home. Also, it's interesting to note that three of these books were originally published in French in 1931. Three books in the same year! And that's probably not all Simenon did that year.