Byline: Patrick Kurp Staff writer
One way to judge the civility of a city is by the quality of its bookstores.
So when I moved to Albany four years ago from a city in Indiana where the only bookstore around specialized in bestsellers, which usually are not to my taste, I felt delivered.
Within a few weeks I had picked up a two-volume Walt Whitman - for $20 - at Bryn Mawr Books in Albany. At Bibliomania, a used book store
in Schene ctady, I found Jelly Roll Morton's autobiography. And from The Boulevard Bookstore I scored some nice paperback reprints by Ishmael Reed.
The good news is that good books are on the shelves of the Capital District. The bad news - well, inconvenient news - is that you have to hunt and hustle and dig to find them.
Albany has no single, definitive, indispensible bookstore - whether new or used, chain-owned or independent - comparable to The Strand in New York City, The Aberdeen Book Shop in Washington, D.C., or O'Gara & Wilson in suburban Chicago. Rather, it has a spectrum of booksellers, reflecting a variety of tastes, from scholars and bibliophiles to devotees of "bodice-rippers."
Three outlets of Waldenbooks, the largest chain of bookstores in the United States, which is owned by Kmart, are here. So is B. Dalton Booksellers, nationally and locally in second place, with two stores.
Beyond the chains, however, with their computers, high-tech marketing and mall locations, the Capital District hosts a number …
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