Pentimento book store
After seeing the reptiles, we had some time to kill before lunch, so we visited the Pentimento bookstore in downtown Clinton. They’re a locally owned bookstore that sells new and used books.
Inside Pentimento
The picture above shows most of the shop. There’s a few small rooms in the back for children’s books (their children’s book room has quite a few nice books), clearance books, and a stock room. You can see a doorway leading to those back rooms in the middle of the picture, and there’s a bookshelf there that contains the few photography books they had alongside some art and architecture books. I think the photography book section was half a shelf’s worth of books. But look what I found in that small collection of 15 books or so:
The loot!
They had Karsh: A Sixty-Year Retrospective and The Snap-Shot: Aperture Volume 19, No. 1 for $20 and $15 respectively. Both paperback but still! Karsh is a collection of some of Yousuf Karsh’s best portraits printed very large, and the Aperture book has essays and photos from an incredible Who’s Who of photography including but not limited to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, and more. The fact that I totally didn’t expect to find anything of value photography-related in this store made this find all the sweeter.
So the moral of this story is to give your local bookstore a chance. You never know what you’ll find. And to reinforce this, here’s another book I found a couple weeks ago at a local Jackson bookstore Lemuria:
More phat loot
W. Eugene Smith Photographs 1934-1975 (hardcover). Also out of print, sells for $130 and up for “very good” condition copies. Got mine for $75. Not cheap, but considering it was high on my wish list and the cheapest I’ve seen it go for in this condition, it’s a relative bargain.
Hmm… I seem to be on a roll. Maybe I should hit up some pawn shops and see if somebody is selling an old clunker of a camera like an early Leica for cheap.
Pentimento book store
302 Jefferson St.
Clinton, MS 39056
(601) 925-4662
Lemuria
202 Banner Hall
4465 I-55 North
Jackson, MS 39206
(601) 366-7784