It was a damp fall morning in 2007 when I wandered into one of the many antique buildings lining Broadway Street in a section of old San Antonio. The day was balmy; the suffocating humidity of the afternoon was still hours away. I was new to the city and the historic shops and houses on Broadway Street called me to come and explore them. I parked in the windswept alley behind the row of old, historic shops and walked up the wet pavement for a while, seeing what this new place had to offer me.
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At the end of the leaf-blown alley, a small, permanent children’s carnival peeked out from behind masses of overgrown trees and bushes. I immediately thought of any number of horror stories taking place at this strange, sad little fairground. Surely, phantoms of the past must come out to play here on nights with a full moon.
I passed several apparently empty offices and a hair salon. The black and white charm of the high-end hair salon evoked an atmosphere of old Hollywood glam and glitz. The ornate carving on the Victorian eaves juxtaposed nicely with the taco trucks across the street, a combination that proved to be a very fitting introduction to this strange city that was now my home. I came, to my delight, to a shop front boasting a beautifully painted sign on the door that read “Cheever Books.” A second-hand bookshop!
Finding Home in a Used Bookstore
I admired the dark blue and white painted front porch and tried the door. As soon as I stepped inside the serenely quiet, carpeted shop, I breathed a huge sigh of relief…this place felt like home. The scent of yellowing pages, dust, and mildew comforted me and transported me to a long-ago place and time that now existed only in my memory. They say you can never go back, but certain old bookshops seem to offer a multi-use time machine for those who know how to look for it.
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Rows and rows of books in all conditions lined tall shelves in all three of the rooms and along the cramped hallway in front of the checkout counter. Some shelves had books stacked horizontally on top of the rows of neatly packed-in books. The many tucked-away recesses of the eccentric store seemed to each offer a well-constructed world of its own; this one for poetry only, one for yarn crafts of all types, one for sex topics, including education and several copies of the Kama Sutra, and another one for the plays of ancient Rome.
A well-worn leather armchair sat unassumingly in one corner of the shop. An old blanket was draped over it giving the whole alcove a very lived-in, comfortable feel. It was really a refuge of nostalgia and I realized, for the first time, that my new apartment didn’t feel homey because it didn’t have any of these touches.
I selected a worn, dog-eared copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (always a favorite) and gingerly sat down on the old chair, sinking into its cushioned embrace and inhaling the scent of the leather, like an intoxicating perfume. Now, I was a child again, playing with dinosaurs on the floor of the living room in the evenings while my father leaned back into his comfortable, brown leather chair and flipped pages in the book he was reading.
He was a collector of old books of all kinds, and the shelves in our home were always overflowing with haphazardly arranged volumes. Our living room smelled exactly like this bookshop I now found myself in.
I admired the over-crowded shelves in Cheever Books for several hours that morning and left with a paper bag full. The owner of the shop, a woman I took to be in her late 60s, rang up my purchases and told me to be sure to come back soon. I assured her I’d be spending many days here in the future.
Cheever Books Helped My New Apartment Become Home
Back in my new apartment, I set the books in a tall stack on my nightstand. I hadn’t bought any bookcases yet. Suddenly, the bare bones apartment and my impersonal IKEA bed, rickety white nightstand, and modest 4-chair dining set appeared slightly more familiar. I breathed in the musky scent of my new treasures and settled into bed with a yellow-paged novel published in 1961. My loneliness gave way to the story, and it was hours before I thought to look up from the gently worn pages of the novel. That night in my dreams, I was beside my father again surrounded by books that had each lived a life of their own already before finding a new home in our house. I was like one of those old books too, and I realized now that home would always be with me.
*Cheever Books is located at 3613 Broadway, San Antonio, TX 78209
