Chapter Three: Nashville's BookManBookWoman

The last stop on my trip was Nashville, Tennessee. I had an awesome time visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame and the world-famous Ryman Auditorium, a.k.a the Mother Church of country music.

As you can see, it was much warmer in Nashville than it was in
Boston and New York

The bookstore I visited in Nashville was BookManBookWoman. As is suggested by the title, the store is owned by a man and a woman and sells both new and used books. Before they opened the store, Larry and Saralee Woods were well-known book collectors in Nashville, but they wanted a place to expand their collection of books, so they opened a bookstore.

 The store is just one level, but it consists of a series of interconnected rooms that are all full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Even though it's a smaller space than the other two stores I visited, it's definitely not lacking in books! There was handful of people in the store when I visited, and most seemed to be college-aged (the store is right between the Belmont and Vanderbilt campuses).

There's a cart outside of the store where kids can
pick a free book each time they visit!

Nowadays, the books come from things like estate sales and private collections. In fact, as I was talking to one of the employees, the "bookman" was unloading boxes of books from his car. The employee told me about the history of the store that I mentioned earlier and also a little bit about how the store works.

Since the store carries both new and used books (as well as some textbooks), it caters to most customers. In fact, there is a special shelf of books that students often come in searching for, housing titles such as The Bell Jar, The Giver, and 1984. However, I was interested to learn that if a customer is searching for a particular book that BookManBookWoman doesn't carry, they will actually refer them to other stores, even the Barnes & Noble at the Vanderbilt University campus down the street. And, even more interestingly, the Barnes & Noble will sometimes also refer customers to BookManBookWoman if they don't carry a more rare book! The relationship between independent and chain bookstores, at least in Nashville, is much less straightforward that I had thought.

Of course, I couldn't leave the last bookstore on my trip empty handed, so I picked up five books. The Wise Man's Fear is the sequel to The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (an amazing, beautifully written book that you all should read), so I'm super excited about that book. I picked up The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman because I had just finished one of his other books and fell in love with his writing. I picked up the two books by David Eddings because he is probably one of my favorite authors (The Belgariad and The Malloreon were my first "real" fantasy reads that I would recommend everyone reads). Finally, I picked up A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon because I read his first book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, last year and loved it, so I'm excited to see how his second book compares (which I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying thus far).

I hope you enjoyed my bookstore-hopping trip! It was so fun to see how the different bookstores were shaped by their cities' cultures and histories. I'll be back tomorrow with a post about my first week working at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, but until then, happy reading!