When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Michael Chabon found himself dreaming of a place that used to bring him comfort: Page One, a bookstore in Columbia, Maryland, which he used to visit as a young man.
The store has long been closed, so Chabon couldn’t visit the science fiction and fantasy section he used to love. So he did the next best thing: He recreated it from memory, crafting an image of four large bookcases with ten shelves each, featuring vintage paperbacks with their covers out. He posted the image under a Creative Commons license for fellow book lovers to download.
The Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay author posted about his pandemic project on the new social media platform Threads.
“One endless quarantine afternoon, I was in my Berkeley studio, staring at my old #DAW_SF and #BallantineAdultFantasy paperbacks, and contemplating, in my imagination, the ‘Science Fiction & Fantasy’ section at the loooong-defunct Page One bookstore, back in #ColumbiaMD, where I grew up,” he wrote. “People, I want to tell you, I fuckin HAUNTED that section! For YEARS! And now as I sat around communing with my tattered old friends, I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection—title, author, cover design—of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.”
Chabon’s recreated section begins with Richard Adams’ Watership Down and Shardik. It features the covers of old paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Ursula K. Le Guin. It contains a healthy dose of Star Trekbooks.
“Think of it—I did—as a kind of time telescope, a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days,” the author wrote. “I’m using it as my desktop wallpaper right now, but my dream is to print the sucker out life-sized, and slap it up on some unsuspecting wall when [wife Ayelet Waldman is] not looking.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
