My favorite bookstore, hands down, would be the Moneytree on Triplett Street in Owensboro, Kentucky.

            I’ve been going to the Moneytree since I was a little kid; eight or nine years old. My dad used to take my brother and me there pretty regularly when he had us for visitation. Back then you walked in and there were floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with used paperback books separated by category, along with comic books and magazines.

            At the Moneytree you could trade books and comics two for one or you could buy them starting at 4 for a dollar with the deals getting better the more books you bought with a brown paper grocery sack filled with as many books as you could stuff in it for five dollars.

            The Moneytree was a dream for an eclectic reader such as myself. Using my dad’s dime, or his fiver, as the case may be, I bought a lot of nonfiction - history, humor and anything on the occult. I stocked up on Gothic romance novels and indulged my taste for a series of pulp westerns starring a cowboy named Edge who ended every chapter with a really bad pun. I absorbed The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker and marveled at the richly illustrated wonders of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I read Phillip Roth like I was reading about life on another planet. I would trade in my old Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery comics and all the Little Lulus, Hot Stuffs, Baby Hueys, Casper the Friendly Ghosts and the Archies, for fresh, unread editions. It was magic. Better than the Library even because I got to keep the books, forever if I wanted, only trading in the ones I tired of in hopes of snagging even greater treasures like the guy who bought the first edition Playboy at the Moneytree for fifty cents.

            When I was in middle school a bookstore opened in Wesleyan Park Plaza, down the row from K-Mart that sold new books. It may have been called The Book Nook, but then again, it may have been called something else. I remember walking into it for the first time; how brightly lit and clean it was, fresh books with unbroken spines displayed on minimalist bookcases like works of art. I purchased books from them that would have a real, lasting influence on me; A Clockwork Orange with a slick, shiny orange cover, The Story of O, the National Lampoon’s A Dirty Book and Another Dirty Book, I Claudius and Claudius the God, Studs Lonigan in trilogy form, a spiral bound book of clever poems, self published, that I remember very little about except for the copious amounts of pleasure they gave me. The Book Nook, or whatever it was called, closed shortly after a Waldenbooks opened at the newly built Towne Square Mall.

            Living in Bloomington, Indiana we would often visit Caveat Emptor which was at its best when it was located, jam packed in a little yellow house and its garage annex just off of Dunn Street. They are still up and running in a larger space on Walnut Avenue across from the Monroe County Courthouse. They still have large selection of used books and a great selection of autographed books and desirable first editions but it doesn’t have the claustrophobic charm that it used to have when books were cantilevered into every available corner. Downtown Bloomington is also blessed with another independent bookstore, this one selling new books, in Howard’s Bookstore, renowned for the fine cats that have the run of the store and the Shetland Sheepdog, G.B. Packer, who stays behind the counter keeping an eye on the customers and the kitties.

            Spencer, Indiana doesn’t have any bookstores; just the Library and whatever you can find at Wal-Mart. In one of the short-lived antique malls that have come and gone during the time we have lived here there was one booth in one store that sold used books and from them I bought a red bound book published shortly after the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and filled with photographs of the devastated city for a buck ninety-five but such scores are rare to find here.

            We still visit the Moneytree whenever we visit Owensboro, a sadly rare occurrence these days. There are still some books and even a few well picked over comics but much of the store has been turned over to music, movies and video games. Today I am more likely to buy my books off of Amazon or eBay. My spouse likes to take twenty dollars and make it rain in the .99 cent Napoleon section of Amazon and I will be kicking myself forever for not buying one of two copies of William S. Burroughs’s Seven Deadly Sins, one signed by the author and the other containing a funeral card that Burroughs dated a day before his death, coincidentally my younger son’s birthday, with the notation in shaky hand, “The author as an old man surrounded by roses and cats” which I saw on eBay last year. Each volume, complete with its distinctive “shotgun art” cover, sold for less than $150.00 and instills in me the deadly sin of lust. I am even considering buying my husband a Kindle for his birthday, along with a fake War and Peace Kindle cover,  after Ray Bradbury finally relented and is allowing Fahrenheit 451 to be published in eBook form despite the author’s contention, with which I more than somewhat agree, that eBooks, “smell like burned fuel,” even though, in my bones I am afraid my purchase will mean that some day some young girl will be denied the wonder of walking into a bookstore and reaching out at random to pick up a shiny orange book written in a language like English, but different from anything she's ever read before.