Like many stores and other vendors, most bookstores have gone the way of the mainstream. Amazon.com can sell special interest books at a portion of the price, while Barnes and Noble and Borders generally stock only the most popular titles they can find. It's bestseller or bust.
Despite the looming online stores and big-name chains, several small sellers have sprung up in downtown Madison. They've taken root and are not letting go, providing Madisonians with a place to sit, discuss, sip tea and pour over titles unavailable anywhere else.
Whenever you yearn for a place without that corporate edge, or have a bit of book money left over after textbooks, the State Street area is the perfect place to replenish your biblio-lust. Take heart, Madison. These small stores have your book.
Paul's Book Store
670 State St.
Whenever the door is open at Paul's, the air smells of old books. Inside, it feels like a Hogwart's library; plants adorn the front shelves, dust covers the floor, calligraphy signs mark the sections and the edges of every bookshelf are bedecked with olden postcards and pictures. Billie Holliday-style jazz plays down over the shelves that hold second-hand Cliffs Notes, a fiction section, and aisles and aisles of pure, academic nonfiction—everything from women's studies, philosophy and socialism to medicine, law and mathematics. There is even a bowl of butterscotch candies reminiscent of grandma's coffee table right next to the cash register.
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative
426 W. Gilman St.
Founded in 1989, this progressive bookstore sells titles from small printers and is run by a full-time staff of four with help from 25 volunteers. The tiny shop is littered with peace flags and posters promoting social justice.
The sections on the crowded bookshelves are a bit haphazard, but display an amazing diversity of topics and titles. This sort of stream-of-consciousness shelving system files books on activism next to anarchism and drugs right over social theory.
The co-op also sells textbooks, postcards, T-shirts, politically-minded bumper stickers, magazines and buttons, as well as the national Monthly Review, for which it also hosts discussions—a prime place to brush up on or gear up for activism.
Shakti
320 State St.
Find a new side of spirituality in Shakti, a boutique that smells of incense even from the street and touts its sale of ""books and music for spiritual awakening,"" though books and music are just two of the many items lining their shelves.
The progressive atmosphere is similar to that of the Rainbow Cooperative, but tarot cards, jewelry, incense, and supplies for yoga and meditation give it a slightly more popular twist. Two lofts with small sitting areas make this a reader-friendly stop, though the books are shelved in seemingly random sections and concentrate primarily on spirituality.
Avol's Bookstore
315 W. Gorham St.
The bright red dAccor inside Avol's is almost as shocking as the perfect calm sitting just inside the double-glass doors. The music is almost inaudible, as if the vintage books have asked to keep the volume turned down.
There are shelves and shelves of older books and quotes from C. S. Lewis and William Hazat hang from the walls. Fiction is toward the front and, through the two painted arches, nonfiction books fill the back two sections.
The nonfiction topics include political science, Judaica, business, archaeology, anthropology and ecology, and share the back section with an area dedicated to children's books—complete with two thrones, a child-size wooden chair, carpeted bench, and a mural of historical leaders such as Queen Elizabeth I and Sitting Bull.
A Room of One's Own
307 W. Johnson St.
Stop for coffee and some political awareness at A Room of One's Own, a feminist bookstore and coffee house right off of State Street. The Two Degrees Coffee Shop sits in the middle of the bookstore and separates the fiction—including sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, poetry and graphic novels—from the non-fiction sections. The store offers many feminist, political and liberal titles, but sells textbooks and books on academic, international and other non-fiction topics as well. Overstuffed chairs and tables in each part of the store allow patrons to read comfortably while they are serenaded by crooning female voices playing over the sound system.
Shakespeare's Books
18 N. Carroll St.
Just inside the door, past the cart of ""outside books,"" a display of vintage books greets customers at Shakespeare's. Established in 1933, the store sells very expensive older books from behind glass cases, as well as thousands of other fiction and nonfiction titles.
Fiction—including a vintage children's book section—fills most of the first floor, while nonfiction titles span almost the entire downstairs area. There are marble-topped tables all around, wooden chairs and a small sitting area downstairs, where the jazz piano music is a bit more faint.
