Tags: books | cafes | English language

Yeah, I miss all-night delis. And yeah, I miss baseball. But most of all I miss American bookstores.

Not corporate dragon chains like Border's or Noble's, but the cavernous academic goldmines I knew in Cambridge and Chicago, where if it wasn't on the shelf it was across the street at Powells, or else it didn't exist.

I miss used book stores so big you can get lost in them, where you emerge after seven hours of dizzying stack macking with a yellowed first edition of Naked Lunch and an old Bertrand Russell screed so long out of print your grandparents don't remember it. I miss that smell of a great used shop, something between dust and woodchuck, that accompanies a collection so big just thinking about it gives you a migraine.

None of that here. There is no Prague equivalent to the Lower East Side's Eight Miles of Books. In fact, if you put all of the English language booksellers together you'd be lucky to get a Canadian kilometer. But considering the geographical location of this nation, I suppose a kilometer of books we can read isn't so bad.

My friend in Bucharest doesn't think so. And taken as a whole, the few shops in this town deliver a good portion of the goods. True, it is difficult to spend more than an hour in each of them, but collectively they scratch Reader's Itch 80% of the time.

The Mecca for piss-broke travelers, teachers, and English majors of all stripes is, of course, The Globe (Pstrossova 6, Praha 1, Tel: +420 2491 7229 Tram 3, 17).

Not only do they not totally ass-rape you on trade-ins, but on any given day they are likely to have six different editions of Jude the Obscure. Literature is definitely the favored animal here, with everything else herded prisoner-like against the back wall. History is thin (with the exception of central European), as is Political Science and Philosophy, and somehow a Self-Help/Psychology section has almost come to surpass them in size. (Inexplicably, there is also half a wall devoted to Supermarket schlock.).

The turnover is a little slow, but weekly checks can bring pleasant surprises to those with good eyes. Be quick though, as everyone and their mother browse here. Price wise The Globe is fair. Dog-eared novels-irrespective of stature-are usually priced around 200 crowns and the cost correlates nicely with condition. The determined can find a fat novel for 120 crowns. Ripped up "as is" copies are sometimes even cheaper.

As for atmosphere: Globe 1, Everybody Else 0. Three plush chairs and a disinterested staff equals hours of free reads as well as a perch from which to watch new arrivals slide across the desk. It is still an extremely relaxing place to be, even after last year's installation of the Globe Panopticon, the store's official surveillance platform. There is also a an occasional surprise in the magazine rack alongside the New York Review of Books -to tantalize you with the variety the kids have back home-but mostly its just MTV on paper.

The Globe serves a purpose, but is annoyingly limited. For a more serious selection of academic titles, find Tyn 4 on your map, right off Old Town Square, and visit Anagram Bookshop. The Yugoslavian owners are friendly as hell and will be more than happy to order any book for you directly from the publisher. The sections-which include Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Art, and all areas of specialized History-are small but tight, and as dense with quality as a jar of gourmet gummy bears.

Major works within a variety of fields appear soon after their release, and older "new" books regularly go on sale. (They carry Literature as well, but you're better off checking the Globe for a used copy first.)

You can expect to drop upwards of 800 crowns for fresh pulp, but the pristine beauty of these new releases help the guilt go down smoother. For those days when 800 crowns just isn't happening, there is an entire six foot case of used books in the back. It's easy to miss, and I probably shouldn't be mentioning it, but its got some great stuff on the cheap.

Again, the turnover is glacial, but you will almost certainly find something each time you mack it. Anagram also has travel books, but, similar to grammar books and kids stories, they don't really count.

Which is why Big Ben is not my favorite. They've been around a long time and I give them props for that, but the selection amounts to third-week-after-thanksgiving turkey. Which is assuming you can find the selection after wading through all the tourist guides and teaching materials.

But again,I suppose this serves a professional, niche purpose, and its worth popping in after a late afternoon game of pinball at the Chap Trap. (It's directly diagonal-2 o'clock-from Chapeau Rouge).

So, by now you have a backpack full of books-an ancient copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from the Globe, the Noam Chomsky Reader from Anagram, and an intermediate Murphy's Grammar workbook from old Ben - the day is over, right?

Together, the Globe and Anagram fulfill most of the vital needs of the reading expatriate, with Big Ben possibly filling in the rare gap. Bookwise, Prague ain't Berkley, but then again, we ain't in California. [Authors note: If you think I have deliberately ignored The Bookworm, you're right. That place is so pretentious and pricey it makes my veins itch. Haven't been in ages, but if my memory serves they are heavy on Art/Design and Religion/Mythology.