Beckham's Bookshop New Orleans

Decatur Street in New Orleans is one of the few thoroughfares in the French Quarter that isn’t pockmarked and doesn’t share the squalid conditions found on the back streets.

 

Matter of fact, this broad street has quite a few wonderful spots worth a visit, some of which I wrote of earlier:  Café du Monde, Jackson Square and the Red Slipper breakfast spot. There’s also the old Jackson Brewery, now a high-end conglomeration of shops.

 

On my last trip to New Orleans, I found a gem on Decatur Street, and what for me is a very special place, Beckham’s Bookshop.  I confess I’m addicted to bookshops, especially those dusty places that have a cluttered, backroom ambiance, with a fabulous array of used books, stacked carefully on worn and a seemingly endless array of book cases and also stacks of books on the floor by wooden chairs that creak when you sit down.  With all this and more, Beckham’s has found a proper spot near the top of my list.

 

Two older men, seated in their own creaky chairs looked me over when I walked in, or at least one of them did.  The other one was involved with a magazine and in a battle to overcome poor eyesight. The one who wasn’t involved was bald, wore glasses and had on a dress shirt and jacket.  He smiled.  I smiled.  End of conversation.

 

I looked around. At once I knew I was in a place to linger, to marvel.  Paperbacks, leather bound classics, best sellers of yesteryear.  It’s the kind of place where, no matter your level of education, you are overwhelmed with how much you don’t know and how much you want to know.  I asked myself how long has it been since I’ve read the authors of the twenties.  Too long. Then I found a biography of this and that well-known classicist, whose names I recalled.

 

You have to understand me to understand my passions.  I’m stuck in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.  Books and music. Wit as well as somber novels.  Raymond Chandler, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, to name a few. Writers and artists from their most productive years in Paris and London and New York.  I spotted a book: a bio of Dorothy Parker.  Remember her and the Algonquin Roundtable, meeting at the eponymous hotel in Manhattan?  Care to read a few lines from her pithy mind ?

 

“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible.  This was terrible with raisins in it.”

 

“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

 

“Tell him I was too fucking busy -- or vice versa.”

 

And one of my favorite bits of Parker verse:

 

By the time you swear you’re his,

Shivering and sighing.

And he vows his passion is,

Infinite, undying.

Lady make note of this—

One of you is lying.

 

I asked the clerk, Do you have any books in French?  Yes?  Plenty.  Upstairs in the back, left corner.  Ah, yes.  Books that stretch my memories of high school when I swore I would learn French, while my grades offered different options.

 

A bookstore, especially an old one, like Beckham’s, on a passible street in an old and crumbling city, is like a diamond of a thousand facets, sparkling in every direction.  A place of dreams, wrapped in clouds of self-promises.  Or maybe it’s an older woman, face streaked with ancient wrinkles, and yet whose beauty shines through the years and the pages.

 

Yes, I bought some books, a couple of them in French.  Hope undying. Vive l’espoir! Long live hope!