Travel Between The Pages

The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Michael Chabon recently shared a very personal project that he worked on during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a serious bout of nostagia, he recreated the science fiction and fantasy section of his childhood bookshop in Columbia, Maryland. During the long days of the COVID-19 pandemic spent in his personal library he contemplated the influence of Page One Bookstore on his life’s work. “As I sat around communing with my tattered old friends,” he writes, “I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection — title, author, cover design — of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.”

Chabon’s digital re-creation “The Shelves of Time” is an impressive feat of memory. Downloadable here in “small” (96 MB), “large” (283 MB) and “very large” (950 MB) formats, the stirring image for any genre lover functions as what Chabon calls a “time telescope,” offering “a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days.”

When Chabon shared the image earlier this month, he posted the image on Threads and wrote:

One endless quarantine afternoon, I was in my Berkeley studio, staring at my old #DAW_SF and #BallantineAdultFantasy paperbacks, and contemplating, in my imagination, the “Science Fiction and Fantasy” section at the loooong-defunct Page One bookstore, back in #ColumbiaMD, where I grew up.

People, I tell you, I fuckin HAUNTED that section! For YEARS! And now as I sat around communing with my tattered old friends, I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection — title, author, cover design — of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.

This — which I finally finished, last night — was the result. Think of it — I did — as a kind of time telescope, a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days.