Destination: NOLA Book Stores

New Orleans’ French Quarter, known for jazz and Mardi Gras parades, inspires words as well as music. A walk along the balcony-hung streets can set the senses reeling. Narrow building fronts painted salmon, lime, rose, and aqua line up like sample chips in a paint store. The sharp spicy aroma of gumbo conjures crayfish and okra. When the rough wood doors of Beckham’s Book Store swing open and the dusty paper exhaled by thousands of books drifts from the dim interior, bibliophiles swoon.

Long after the Mardi Gras parades have faded away and the hangovers have found cures, the bookstores remain. New Orleans, particularly the French Quarter, boasts more independent book sellers than any city of its size. Pick up a map at any of the dozen or so book stores and visit them all.

Old Absinthe Bar, New Orleans

In days past, watering holes like the Old Absinthe House (still in business) drew the likes of Mark Twain, O. Henry, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. A few decades later Sherwood Anderson attracted friends who started literary magazines and a tradition of pens dipped in southern atmosphere. Gertrude Stein, Ring Lardner and Carol Sandburg came to visit. But many authors stayed and made this their home.

Since my tour guide, Kenneth Holditch is also a retired professor, he handed out a reading list at the end of the tour. His list of 65 authors covers a couple of hundred years and includes Walker Percy, whose The Moviegoer is must reading for New Orleans fans. John Biguenet’s short stories in The Torturer’s Apprentice captures the spirit. Mystery writer James Lee Burke joins others including Julie Smith, Barbara Hamblin and Christine Wiltz who spin tales of murder and mayhem in the Big Easy. Anne Rice’s vampire sagas, set mainly in Louisiana, work their magic on thrill-seekers. Rice’s followers still celebrate at a Hallowe’en Ball, even though Rice herself has moved on to new forms of expression.

New writers move in as fast as old writers move out, and a fan of New Orleans could keep reading them until the lamps go out in the Vieux Carré.

For more on New Orleans see a book on survivors, Faulkner sketches, Galatoires and food in New Orleans, book lovers’ New Orleans, Faulkner and Williams, Faulkner to Ford.

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