Store

“Emporium” is a wry choice of name for a shop about the size of a large driveway -- which is, in fact, the provenance of Open Books. The word calls up images of warehouses and grand bazaars, not a narrow room in which you’re never more than a few steps from a book-lined wall.

But like its stock, in which world-sized ideas are captured in 10 syllables or less, Open Books is rich for its size. At 500 square feet and 9,500 titles, it holds a measureless number of charming, sad, funny and (or) instructive lines. Old formalists, new formalists, language poets and world poets from this century and the last are all represented, in both new and used editions.

The store also gives shelf space to essays, letters, anthologies (love poems, war poems, and just plain Good Poems); journals (from the very local Seattle Review to the very national Poetry); chapbooks; poetry for the ear; and first and signed editions. As new titles come in, the old overflow into an ongoing indoor “sidewalk sale.” The stock is comprehensive and diverse, with a strong Northwest flavor. This is a place for browsing titles known to the rest of the world by special order only.

Open Books has informal connections to other local poetry institutions, supplying, for example, books for sale at the Seattle Arts and Lectures yearly reading series. The shop’s own readings are a mix of the choice and the opportune — poets pursued, and poets passing through.

One of only two poetry-only bookstores in the country, Open Books is the carefully tended ward of Christine Deavel and John Marshall. The standard story to tell about the store is that it succeeds at something very difficult: turning a profit by selling verse. But neither rarity nor unlikely success is the story that draws customers. It’s the joy of the emporium — everything under the sun, under a single roof.