My Pick at Powell's

Half hour? One hour? Two days? How long DOES a family of reading nuts need to spend in the largest book store in the world?

As it turns out, I think we spent about an hour and a half on Portland's Powell's City of Books.



The store web site description of Powell's:

STORE DESCRIPTION
"Powell's City of Books is a book lover's paradise, the largest used and new bookstore in the world. Located in downtown Portland, Oregon and occupying an entire city block, the City stocks more than a million new and used books. Nine color coded rooms house over 3,500 different sections, offering something for every interest, including an incredible selection of out-of-print and hard-to-find titles.

A few facts about the City of Books:

68,000 square feet packed with books
we buy 3,000 used books over the counter every day
approximately 3,000 people walk in and buy something every day
another 3,000 people just browse and drink coffee
our parking garage provides space for 40 cars (ok, so there are bigger parking garages)
we stock 122 major subject areas and more than 3,500 subsections
you'll find more than 1,000,000 volumes on our shelves
approximately 80,000 book lovers browse the City's shelves every day, in Portland and via the Internet. So is our mother ship the world's largest bookstore? Heck, it may be bigger than your whole town."

Awesome!

The whole family gathered in the coffee shop with stacks of books:
Cori and Alli: a pile of Orson Scott Card books
Gene: Biography of Jimmy Hendrix
Me: Bloomsbury Grammar Guide: Grammar Made Easy by Gordon Jarvie
and Garden Anywhere: How to Grow Gorgeous Container Gardens, Herb Gardens, Kitchen Gardens, and More-- Without Spending a Fortune by Alys Fowler.

Yes. I bought a gardening book and a grammar book. How fun it that?

I read the whole 192 page gardening book on the VERY long plane ride back from Portland to OKC, by way of Las Vegas and Denver. (Gotta love Southwest Airlines.)There are lots of pretty full page pictures, so even a read-it-slow-and-savor person like me managed to finish it in 5 or 6 hours.

This is definitely not a book about how to create a Better Homes and Gardens, glossy photo ready design of expensive fences, furniture and saucy plant collections. The key words in the title are "without spending a fortune". It is written by a young woman who is a very well educated horticulturist, a citizen of the United Kingdom, who doesn't mind being photographed with her fingernails full of dirt and hair in a frizztastic knot. My favorite photo is Ms. Fowler standing in a dumpster with her dirty Keds and cute cotton summer dress and snazzy movie star sun glasses hunting for throw-away lumber to build a compost box or cold frame.

Her advice is wise, practical, easy to understand, completely do-able by gardeners in apartments or backyards or whole acres and supremely CHEAP!