Don't Judge a Book(store) by its Cover

What this picture doesn't show is the 

attitude of the place as I walked in.

It wasn't negative but a, "what are you 

doing here?" type of reaction.

My bike broke yesterday. The parts holding the derailleur to the frame fell to the floor while I was leaving my building. Luckily, I could still roll it on the sidewalk. Together, me and my peugeot walked up LaFayette to Bicycle Habitat. My bike is old and they didn't have the parts to fix it. What's a boy and his broken bike to do?

I remembered a bike shop near my apartment on Avenue C last year. Landmark Bicycles specializes in bikes from the 1950s to the '80s. My bike fit snuggly somewhere in that range. And, best of all, a quick phone call said they had the parts I needed... and, wait for it, they could repair it on the spot while I waited.

Dashing out to the shop, I quickly realized that they would need time to fix it. I didn't have anything with me. "It'll be an hour," they said. All my stuff was 20 minutes away, not worth the walk back and then back to shop again. I asked the owner if there was a book store nearby. "Go back to first, take a left, there's one a block or two down from Houston," he said.

And so I headed that way. I found myself at Bluestockings radical bookstore, fair trade cafe and activist center. What kind of activists? Here's its mission:

We actively support movements that challenge hierarchy and all systems of oppression, including but not limited to patriarchy, heterosexism, the gender binary, white supremacy and classism, within society as well as our own movements.

I didn't know this walking in, and I don't mind, but I'm not much of an activist, at least in this sense. I noticed right away though, from the punk clothes and sections on queer, feminist, socialist, communist or other non-typical signage for a book store.

Even though I didn't "fit in" I checked the stacks and found a really cool book in the Middle East section: Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, by Riverbend, the blog's author. She wrote a blog during the earlier periods of the war, now it's a book. I'm not through the introduction yet but it's already the perfect showcase of blogs' potential legitimacy. It even won the Lettre Ulysses Award for Literary Reportage. Imagine that, a blog won a literary reportage book!

Anyway, I sat and read for a while, the place was bright and I had a good (but way too hot) Moroccan mint tea. A group of five sat a few tables over, I couldn't catch their conversation and someone sat next to me and said "bless you" when I sneezed. All in all, I'd go back again. It might not seem like my kind of place but I've bet they've got plenty more books that will help connect me to issues that face NYC and the world that don't get sold in Barnes and Noble.

My derailleur broke, I bought a book, and found a cool hang-out spot that I lived within walking distance of for a year, but never knew about until now. How's that for an afternoon?