Moomin Light: The Book Exchange and Downtown Durham

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Rethinking Walks with the mp3 Player

The Book Exchange and Downtown Durham

February 03, 2009

Earlier this week, I read that The Book Exchange, a really interesting bookstore in downtown Durham, is going to close on Valentine's Day. How to describe it...

It's a labyrinthine bookstore where most of the books are shelved by publisher. They have used books going back decades. We don't usually go there to find something in particular; we go there to wander and see what we can find. It's on three levels: three rooms downstairs, another room of long aisles on sort of an in between level, and then a very large room (right) with long aisles upstairs. Looking at one publisher, you can go from classics to some very dated 1970's sociological book to something more current.

The first time we went there was right after I became a Catholic so we were very happy to find the Ignatius Press section. It had a better selection of high quality Catholic books than I think I've ever seen again.

They're selling books by the shopping bag - $10 a bag. We got our bagful (below). The classics are daughter's, the science fiction books are older son's, and mine are the left-over quirky ones.

There were more cars downtown than I'm used to seeing on a weekend - probably mostly people in the Book Exchange. It was nice to see so many people who like to browse! It took me a while to take the inside photo because I had to wait until an aisle was mostly free.

We parked a few blocks away from the store, which was nice because I don't usually have a reason to go to this part of downtown Durham. The architecture is very interesting, and I've included a few photos of some of the buildings we liked. Dear husband took them because my knee didn't like standing in the store so I had to keep moving.