B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

It's raining, a mix of spit, drizzle, and torrent that changes directions on whim to work around umbrellas and put out the cigarettes of those still bothering. So, a bookstore.

I haven't been to Strand since they reorganized and opened the top floor to catch the overspill of art books (being a block from SVA and having a staff that just can't say no has made them the orphanage nearest the whore houses, so to speak) and an attempt at a proper Kid's Section. My first visit to the store was in the last throes of what some one, somewhere is no doubt calling the Good Ol' Days: the middle of Summer with no air conditioning, no lighting, no room to spread their dozens of lifetimes worth of books out over and the overwhelming sense that water was leaking, even on bone-dry days. The zen bookstore was still wild, then, the sort of place you went in looking for one specific thing only to find, after an hour spent wandering further and further away from the busy avenue outside, not your one particular book but a stack of things you can no longer live without. And that was if you were lucky. The rest, the tourists and jerks, the children and part-time perverts looking for a fourth-hand Marquis de Sade volume were sent stumbling out again into the too-bright noon day light, feeling mind-stomped and mugged. Real time ideaspace, with the same haunted air of the adult section of a local library when you're five and forbidden to go.

But now there are maps, and grids, and an air conditioner; and a sea of florescence greets you when looking out from the mezzanine at that strange bit of air that is both the floor of the upstairs and the ceiling for the ground level. It has the trappings of a proper warehouse-turned-bookstore, like the monsters that used to hunch over the outskirts of Boaz, the outlet store paradise in Alabama. There is a proper staff, not just a collection of strange old men and hollow-eyed children moving like pages caught in a breeze. From standing just inside the door, it looks like the sort of bookstore that all good little Barnes and Noble's want to grow up to be. Having moved to New York just in time to witness the last days and fall of several grand old institutions, the trappings of organization and customer service feel like death knells, like finding the childhood friend you used to shoot off fireworks with and at now drives a sedan and votes Republican. The appeal of Strand was always its terror, the lost-at-sea realization that runs from head to toe at first sight of those paper and print columns reaching to the heavens. It was the feeling that you were sneaking, that you weren't buying books but making off with them, plucking lost tomes from some decrepit, ancient thing's secret library. This helpful grid, these young kids in thick black-rimmed glasses that know exactly where the literary theory section is, it all smacks of grown-up clothes and a proper bed time.

Note to self: If you're going to be wrong, at least do it in a bookstore. Admitting your mistake is one thing, but there's something nice about knowing you could admit it in grammatically-perfect French, if you really wanted.

The suit-and-tie framework that's been laid over Strand hasn't robbed the store of its fangs, but sharpened them. I didn't realize how wrong my assumption was until, three hours and a stack of strange books later, I'm still wandering, still lost, still amazed. Where by accident or design (and even then there's a question of who's design, the owner's or the store's), the chaos that was Strand has been refined into something all the more alluring and dangerous. At first glance it appears the challenge - hell, the art form - of throwing yourself against the store, willing to accept what ever it saw fit to give you has been civilized into the sort of shopping experience we're more accustomed to: that is, quick, clean, and devoid of any appreciation for the building you are in or the contents of its shelves. It isn't until you're inside, until you've sat down to dinner and tried the wine, as it were, that mess you're now in presents itself. Strand feels more organic than ever, a venus flytrap smelling of yellowing paper as opposed to the tangled mass of ivy it was, for the sake of keeping a shaky metaphor clinging to the tracks. The anxiety of before is just as present, only far more subtle, raising the bar from "news reports of kidnappings" to "cold hand on the back of your neck in the dark." Lacking the creepy old man of our childhood library fears, Strand has become its own ghost.

Lost in the store, in the rain, just me and a few thousand pages of strange words. Just haunted and haunting.