Avenue Victor Hugo - An Adventure unto Itself
Written: Dec 31 '00 (Updated Dec 31 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: rare books, fun to explore
Cons: can be pricey, difficult to browse through all books in a section
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| quasar's Full Review: Boston |
When you step into Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, you are doing more than just entering a used book store. You are signing up for a short adventure delving through unusual books, sidestepping piles of books that don't quite fit on the shelves, and navigating a maze of bookcases, all under the watchful eye of Blue, the resident cat.
In case you haven't gathered this yet, Avenue Victor Hugo is not your typical used book shop. Located on Boston's prime shopping street, Newbury Street, the shop is understandably small. Real estate of any type in Boston is expensive - Newbury Street is astronomical. To make up for the lack of space, bookcases are wound around each other in an intricate pattern designed to cram as many as possible into the set space on the second floor. Shelves go all the way to the ceiling on both floors, so step ladders and stepping stools abound, further restricting the space, especially on the first floor which has narrow aisles.
The first floor is home to most of the non-fiction and academic books as well as some of the more popular fiction sections. You can find everything from rare cookbooks to a wide assortment of history books to a surprisingly good science section to books on every country known to man. You can also explore a nice selection of poetry books (both anthologies and books by individual poets) and a subset of the children's books (the rest are upstairs). The first floor also houses an excellent collection of pulp fiction. The entire first floor is one room with narrow aisles formed by the extensive book cases. By itself, the first floor is worth a visit to Avenue Victor Hugo, and I know many people who never bother to go upstairs.
However, in my mind, the real treasures are upstairs. To get upstairs, there is a narrow staircase with some creaky steps and a rickety handrail. Atmosphere is half the fun of the upstairs section. When you disembark from the staircase, you immediately see the fanciest bookcase in the entire store directly in front of you. This is the "just in" section and the store makes an effort to make it visually attractive - most of the books here are older hardcovers with intricate designs in a variety of colors. You must turn right immediately, and are then faced with choices. Dead ahead is the corridor, a narrow strip lined with bookcases on both sides that was once a hallway opening to the other rooms. You can instead continue to the right and start exploring a series of interconnected side rooms containing science fiction, mysteries, westerns, and general fiction titles. Many of these rooms also directly connect to the corridor. Along the left side of the corridor is a series of small shallow rooms, probably once closets. These rooms contain the rest of the children's books and my absolute favorite section - movie and television tie-in books. They have novelizations of movies you've forgotten about and of those movies that were so bad you wished you could forget about them.
Space is so tight upstairs that not only is every millimeter of wall space covered by bookshelves, the shelves are fanned out in the various rooms making them like a large maze with dead ends and a lot of sharp turns. I'm never quite sure where I'm going to end up, but I know I'll have fun. This is magnified by the fact that they are always changing the layout, hoping against hope to come up with a configuration that provides more space for books, I assume. Alas, that doesn't seem to happen, and the cases, chairs, and in some cases, the floor are all piled high with books that just don't fit. This adds to the charm and maze feeling, but makes it almost impossible to browse through every book in a particular section if you are looking for something specific. Books get blocked by other books piled in front of them.
Avenue Victor Hugo is a great place to go browse and find rare older books or cheaper-than-new newer books. Unfortunately it is a tad on the expensive side for a used book store, although not so much so that you won't buy. Most paperback books are in the $1.50-$3.00 range, tending toward the higher end of the range in general. Newer and rare books can be a little more. The price of the hardcover books varies greatly. I tend not to buy many hardcover books at Avenue Victor Hugo due to cost, but they really aren't out of line, just more than I like to pay. They do have an excellent selection, probably better than any of the other used book stores I've been to in the Boston area.
Avenue Victor Hugo is at 339 Newbury Street, about two blocks from the Hynes T stop on the Green Line. Stop by if you get the chance.
Recommended:
Yes
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