Culture

At Home Among the Stacks

How seeking out used bookstores helped me find my way through unfamiliar cities.
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division/Mark Byrnes/CityLab

This essay is the third in a series called “Finding My Place,” which explores how people make cities feel like home. Read the first and second installments here.

In Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, the shelves are tall and crammed with paperbacks. Between them, there’s barely room to move; people turn and shrink themselves to let others pass by. I’m among them, crouched low, scanning the fiction section, looking for nothing in particular.