Amazing Books Offers Literary Care Packages

PHOTO BY SEAN COLLIER

Among the activities stopped by the pandemic, browsing store shelves is not the most dramatic loss.

The use of that humble verb, in a physical sense, has been utterly obliterated in recent weeks. We can’t browse through used records at a music store or peruse the clothes at a vintage shop. A trip to the grocery store is a tense in-and-out affair, not a time to let one’s eyes wander over novel varieties. And the immensely satisfying act of browsing at a bookstore — wandering among the shelves in search of an enticing tome — is impossible.

I love browsing at bookstores. Anytime I’m within a mile of a favorite, I can’t resist the urge to wander the aisles for an hour or so, reading the blurbs on anything that catches my eye.

To put it another way, I am very fond of judging books by their covers.

Amazing Books & Records is a good place for browsing. The shop, which has locations Downtown and in Squirrel Hill (and had a gone-but-not-forgotten outpost on East Carson Street), specializes in interesting old paperbacks — titles you’re not likely to have ever heard of but are immediately intriguing. With the prices (written in pencil inside the front cover) usually at $10 or less, I can’t enter Amazing Books without making a purchase.

Right now, I can’t browse. Fortunately, Amazing Books has an alternative.

For $37, you can receive a care package of books from the in-store selection in the mail. It’s an excellent replication of the surprise of browsing; when I walk into Amazing Books, I don’t know what I’m going to leave with. That’s the feeling I had when a large parcel of books showed up on my doorstep; I didn’t know what was inside, but I was sure I’d like what I found.

That confidence went beyond trust in the store’s inventory. After I made my purchase, I got an email from Eric Ackland, the store’s owner, with a simple question: “What do you like to read?” I answered in a few sentences, naming the two longer books I had finished recently.

Unsurprisingly, that was all the information Ackland needed.

I opened the package to find four books. The largest was a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s “From a Buick 8,” a novel that The New York Times recently named as one of the best for King fans who have gone beyond his most popular works (which describes me perfectly). I was thrilled to find a novel by Haruki Murakami, “A Wild Sheep Chase.” I like Murakami’s work; more importantly, this is a deep cut that I’m thrilled to read but probably wouldn’t have picked out on my own.

The package was rounded out by a pair of science fiction paperbacks. I’m a bit intimidated by Greg Egan’s “Diaspora,” which belongs in the subgenre hard sci-fi; I’m pretty sure the main character is physics itself. I really like the sound of “Ark,” a space epic by Stephen Baxter; I love science fiction but never want to commit to the often sprawling series that seem to make up much of the genre; as a standalone novel, “Ark” fits the bill well.

Amazing Books is far from the only independent bookstore working hard to keep customers happy during the pandemic; Riverstone Books, for example, has launched a local delivery service and is holding Zoom consultations with readers to recommend new titles. Many stores and libraries are hosting storytime sessions for kids. Contact-free pickup and curbside service have become the norm.

The program at Amazing Books, however, goes a bit above and beyond. Because the experience is both surprising and personal, it’s much more valuable than any title I could stumble upon while scrolling on a Kindle or a new release I could order after reading a review.

It’s not quite browsing. But it’s pretty close.