Uncommon Bookshop

You know, all you fellow book lovers, I’ve been thinking lately about Jorge Luis Borges` infinite library. Not because I have found myself surrounded by several tall shelves of vintage books and signed first editions that all whisper their stories in the quiet. But, because of what these collected objects say about our collective journey through time.

Here inside the walls of the Uncommon Bookshop, I’m not dealing with only books — though I do have plenty of those, their pages marked by time and previous readers notes. Each object in here tells a story bigger than itself.

Take this first signed edition of a poet by the name of Martha Serpas, I hold in my hands. The title, “ The Dirty Side of The Storm.” Poems from her 2006 collection that explores Louisiana’s coastal erosion and environmental destruction, deeply rooted in her experience growing up in Bayou country.

Or the vintage t-shirt hanging in the corner from a 1998 band whose name never quite made it to the mainstream, but oh, what a sound it was back in the day. They’re all connected, all these artifacts and objects in this room, a shared cultural memory.

Between the shelves, I have placed found treasures that defy easy categorization: ephemera that slipped from between pages of books, and ticket stubs, love letters, pressed flowers — each one a tiny capsule. The vintage pencils that wrote stories we’ll never know, the pottery shaped by hands long forgotten, and the thousands of CDs from musicians who painted their dreams in sound but remained just outside the spotlight.

Like Carl Jung said about synchronicity, “nothing here is random.”

Each item found its way inside my four walls. Some waiting for the right person to discover it anew, others that will remain in my collection for a while. A rare book, a piece of ephemera that connects someone’s story to something else, everything here has a purpose.