Spotlight on Bookstores: *Montclair Book Center* in Montclair, NJ

As you’ll read in a minute, this is cool … today at SITFOB, Laura Morowitz, an art historian turned novelist, offers a post about a bookstore that changed her attitude and helped make connections that changed her life.  You may recall that last week Laura’s co-author of The Miracles of Prato, Laurie Lico Albanese, shared a guest post about a local bookstore that makes magic happen.  Thanks to both these women for putting New Jersey on the Spotlight on Bookstores map!  Guess where I’ll be visiting the next time I’m in NJ to see my sister-in-law?!  Here’s Laura:

I was in exile. I had left behind the land of my upbringing, the culture I had known since childhood. I had moved from New York to New Jersey. 

(photo credit www.montclairbookcenter.com)

It was still the first few weeks of our relocation to Montclair and I could hardly think about Zabars without bursting into tears. On one of those nights, my husband and I took a walk to explore our new neighborhood, just a few streets from Bloomfield Avenue. Turning the corner of Glenridge Avenue, we came upon the Montclair Book Center and walked in. 

“This is cool,” I said to my husband. 

The store was long and narrow and just a little moldy, not unlike a New York City railroad apartment. This was no suburban mall book shop, with its piped-in music and potpourri scent. This was the real deal. Just aisles of books, on simple wooden shelves. No posters, no fancy giftware at the counter. Just books. Loads of them. The books themselves were arranged in horizontal stacks and you would sometimes have to move them to get to more books behind them. You never felt like you had to return the book exactly where you found it: close was good enough. Just like my own slightly eccentric bookshelves. There was plenty of hidden treasure there: new books, but also old, out of print copies, selling for practically nothing, a little “$ 3” or $ 1.50” marking the corner. And if you ever needed help finding something, Pete, the owner, or one of his trusty staff (all of them looking like roadies for the Grateful Dead) was always happy to help. 

When we had our children we moved to the nearby town of Verona but returned often to Montclair Book Center, especially on Saturday mornings after my daughter’s ballet class. They had opened a small café and Gina, with her long black hair, and her long black skinny jeans (10 years before they became fashionable) always had a cookie waiting for us. My kids always headed straight for the back of the store, with their slightly ratty little rocking chairs and fantastic kids books, old and new. One of the best parts is that we weren’t stranded in Children’s Literature; the other side of the cases held books on travel, quirky tomes on esoteric religion, or Marxist philosophy. 

I am grateful to the Montclair Book Center for persuading me that New Jersey could be funky and intellectual, too. And I’m grateful for more than that. Back in the early days, my husband and I decided we would start a book club to meet some like-minded folks. What better place to post a flyer about it than the Montclair Book Center? One of the first people to respond was a writer named Laurie Lico Albanese. So in many ways this bookstore not only made me a better reader, but helped me to become a writer as well.