There is something hauntingly seductive about Southern bookstores that pulls me to them like honeybees to nectar. From the moment I enter some old and perhaps many-roomed house and descend a step that is not quite where I expect it to be or ascend another into some ancient attic room only to discover some secretive place where the air inside holds the heat of a summer’s day and where sunbeams slope through dusty window panes and where there is only a straight-back chair or footstool or bare plank floor to sit upon, I am ecstatic. If time allows, I will spend hours shuttered there fussing happily over the antiquated literary treasures within: turning pages yellowed and worn and no longer in print; straining to see pictures, long faded and grainy; fingering dusty, broken spines; delighting in the stale scent of musty texts while allowing the rhythmic motions of pages turning or the weak breeze of voices somewhere nearby carry to my private and dim-lit sanctuary.

There is something curiously intimate and familiar in those rooms of stacked books. From their shadowed and silent places they seem to wink slyly as I marvel over their antiquated testimonials to our past, trying to decide on those I can take with me, regretting those I must leave behind. The day’s weary distractions fade and I discover pure unadulterated joy.

I especially revel in those books about the South written by authors of the particular period of which I am reading. Those writers of eras long past tell of Southern history and literature and culture, not simply with researched facts, but with first-hand knowledge. Their long narratives and flowery prose bespeak of the times in which they lived as only those who have actually lived them can.

Hence, I delight in Charles Dicken’s vivid connotations of plantation grandeur, or his simple observations--as with the offensive habit of tobacco spitting for example, or his sharp descriptions of mid-1800 Washington. He evokes the feel and flavor of that earlier time as only a writer of that time can, and through his undiluted eyes I see not only the explicit, but the implicit.

Once, in a cluttered old bookstore in Alabama or Mississippi, I discovered Jonathan Daniel’s A SOUTHERNER DISCOVERS THE SOUTH. This travelogue, written in 1938, is a marvelous read decades after its first printing. Because Daniels writes with unsparing depictions of life as it was actually lived in the early 1800’s, I can see what he saw and feel what he felt--“sheets on the beds (that) were only rarely changed,” “men sitting in idleness as if there were nothing creative to be done.”

Contemporary scholars, for fear of giving offense, sometimes use language that is wooden, even farcical; likewise, for the sake of concision they often shove lovely prose and minute details right off the pages. So it is that when I run across an old Southern bookstore and discover, tucked away inside, shelves upon shelves of out-of-date Southern treasures, my soul is filled with joy. I feel a sense of continuity with those bygone years and a kindred-like connection to those great authors of the distant past.