You Can Find Me in The Bookshop

There's a curious scene in Jim Jarmusch's "Mystery Train" wherein one of the youthful Japanese tourists visiting Memphis takes pictures of seemingly banal elements in his hotel room. When his traveling companion asks why, he remarks that while he'll probably always remember his visit to Graceland and Sun Studios, it's the little things (i.e. the seemingly meritless minutia of his hotel room's bathroom fixtures) that he'll invariably forget, hence his need to preserve them in pictures.

While I'm not quite as obsessive as that character, you may remember a melancholy little post of mine from last week about my never-ending quest for pictorial documentation of since-vanished things like quasi-notable landmarks or age-old storefronts. It may seem bizarre to some why I'd ever need a picture of such things, but for some people, those images have resonance. To my delight, a reader named Douglas Manchee wrote in to express a similar fascination. Doug routinely photographs the vanishing ranks of independent book stores. That's his image at the top of this post of the since-closed Skyline Bookshop that stood for many years on West 18th Street. Check out the rest of Doug's great photos by clicking right here.