Blue Bicycle a treasure trove of hard-to-find books

Although I was born and raised in the Lowcountry, I did spend three years in Boston in the mid-'90s. When asked if there is anything I miss about living in that historic Northern town, one of the immediate things that comes to mind is the comparable lack of quality, used bookstores in South Carolina.

Charleston used to host the great Atlantic Books on both King Street and East Bay Street, but generally, and unfortunately, such stores are not as common in the Lowcountry as they seemed to be in parts of New England. Thankfully, Charleston has Blue Bicycle Books to help make up the difference.

Founded as Boomer's Books on King Street in 1995, local writer and longtime employee Jonathan Sanchez changed the name to Blue Bicycle Books when he bought the store with his wife Lauren in April 2007. Boasting over 50,000 volumes in stock, Blue Bicycle features plenty of new, rare and used books on Charleston as well as history, architecture, military history, the Civil War, eastern religion, science, philosophy, gardening, poetry, hardback classics, literary fiction and just about anything else you can think of. The store itself is much longer than the facade might indicate and one can easily get lost for hours examining Blue Bicycle's extensive selection.

As an example of the importance of used bookstores, one of my favorite books on my own region is "I'll Take My Stand," a collection of essays written in 1930 (including Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren of "All the King's Men" fame) that defended the agrarianism of the South against the more industrial North. I picked this book up at random in my early 20's at a small bookstore in Provincetown, Mass.

Although I had heard of its existence, I had never actually seen this book's sequel "Why the South Will Survive" until I came across it at Blue Bicycle a few months back. Published in 1981, this book combined a few of the original writers featured in "I'll Take My Stand" with new Southern authors who touched on the same themes. Such books cannot be found in the major retail chains, nor are they typically still in print.

But they can be found at a place like Blue Bicycle Books, which is the real pleasure of used bookstores - you never know what you're going to find, and you might even find something you never thought you would.

Lowcountry bookworms should be glad they have a place like Blue Bicycle Books to peruse and those who haven't visited should do themselves a favor by peddling down to King Street the first chance they get.