When you live on the road, you quickly come to appreciate the sheer handiness of a used book. It’s a quiet form of portable entertainment, one which never requires re-charging. And whenever you’ve come across a good book for cheap (or even better, for free), there’s very little hesitation about passing it along to another reader once you’re done with it. I guess that’s why, no matter where I travel, I always do my best to seek out the local used book store.
Sometime in the last decade or so, this traveling circus that I work for had set me up in the small town of Winchester, Virginia for a couple months. It was just short enough of a time so that I couldn’t really get settled in, but just long enough so that I was able to see pretty much everything in town. From the historic Kernstown Battlefield to the childhood home of Patsy Cline, there really are a lot of neat things to do here. And then one rainy weekend afternoon, after I’d spent the day writing at the beautiful Handley Regional Library right up until closing time, I chose a side road back to the hotel, stumbling across Blue Plate Books along the way.
I’d visited my share of dusty, hole-in-the-wall bookshops before, and Blue Plate Books seemed like the exact opposite. This shop was one of the cleanest I’d ever been to, with the books split up into sections that were both logical and well-organized. I’d hate to insult the place by comparing it to a chain store like Barnes and Noble, though it was immediately obvious that this shop was a notch or two above the rest. No stacks of moldy pages here, no heaps of paperbacks chaotically piled up to create gross fire hazards— no, this shop was more like the stereotypical friendly neighborhood bookseller. The polite sales clerk on duty was happy to help when I needed it, or equally happy to leave me be the rest of the time.
I was particularly impressed with their wide variety of Local Interest books, a section which seemed particularly well fleshed out. One book in particular caught my eye, a thin volume called “Deer Hunting with Jesus”, and with a title like that you know I had to buy it. I’d never heard of the author, the late Joe Bageant , but his book offered a fresh perspective on the town of Winchester. It was written in 2007, during the height of the Global War on Terrorism, and offered a great deal of insight into the class politics of Appalachia, as well as those people who’d been left behind by the rising global economy. The book seemed ominously prescient by the time I discovered it, right around the middle of the Obama administration, and I found myself compelled to go back and read it once more during the often-surreal 2016 elections. “Deer Hunting with Jesus” was the rarest of all finds, a used-book store purchase that I just couldn’t bear to part with.
As for Blue Plate Books, it’s a must-visit every time my travels take me back through Winchester. It’s one of those places where you’re not going to be able to leave empty-handed; a store where you might go to find your next favorite book… just as long as you’re willing to take a chance on some “unknown” author.