The Princeton book store has for many years been a personal landmark in the borough and a barrier against the encroachment of the big-box bookstores into my literary world.
Don’t get me wrong, I buy books at Borders and Barnes & Noble — it’s tough not to in this day and age — but Micawber has always been the place I could go to find on the shelves a new poet or essayist I’d yet to read, or an earlier edition of a book with its original artwork.
I can’t even begin to list the books I discovered there, though I did find a signed copy of Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and Micawber was one of the bookstores at which you could find copies of the magazine-CD my organization Voices of Reason.
I’ve been shopping at the bookstore on and off for years — probably since shortly after it opened. I lived in Princeton in 1983, worked there as a reporter for two years in the 1990s, and loved spending time in the poetry section. I still do that — before meetings at our main office, sometimes afterward, and whenever I get into the borough.
That the shop has managed to stand for as long as it has is remarkable given the competition from the big boxes, but its location in downtown Princeton has been a plus — which is why Princeton University is taking over the block and opening a second U-Store location and why another, larger independent (Labyrinth Books) will be opening as part of a larger reconfiguration of the stretch of Nassau Street where Micawber does business.
Citing the university’s dependence on Micawber, Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman said when university officials were notified Micawber’s owners were investigating the sale of their business, it was imperative for Princeton’s academic community to identify “a worthy successor.”
Nearly a year ago, university officials said, they began the pursuit of an adequate replacement.
“It is virtually impossible to be a world-class research university if you do not have a
world-class scholarly bookstore,” President Tilghman said Monday.“This is a community that needs and deserves an absolutely first-rate bookstore, and I can’t imagine a better successor to Micawber than Labyrinth,” she added in a prepared statement.
The Labyrith Web site makes it seem a good fit, similar in its catalogue to Micawber, but for me it won’t be Micawber.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 