Used books in Red Hook--

"The used bookstore is a unique business model in which inventory is, to a good extent, determined by the direct participation of its customers. The customers' cultural awareness, preferences, age, education, careers, and direction of curiosity at certain times and places in their lives defines what stocks the shelves, and so the used bookstore becomes a reflection of its customers, if only at slight angles. This is not simply the nature of selling used merchandise. Most used goods, the kind you might find at a pawnshop, don't have enough variation or cultural encoding to bear the residue of their previous owners. A camera model in a certain condition says something, but nothing we can decode. An old ring with inscribed initials is missing its Rosetta Stone. But an underlined segment of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets points to a reader's epiphany, and what sort of person he or she was to be moved by such imagery: And you see in every face the mental emptiness/deepen/leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about. "