Well, Hello There, Antique Bookstore.

In sudden panic that I might have missed out on a treasure, today I stopped by a bookstore close to my home. I came away with some new purchases and a fresh appreciation for the local character that many a Charlottesville business offers.

Now, if you said to me, “Groceries and bourbon,” I would reply Jeopardy-style, declaring, “What are things you put in brown paper bags?”

To that ordinary yet life-giving list I now submit the addition of “stuff from Heartwood Books.”

Heartwood Books offers its gracious little stoop to Elliewood Avenue, a leafy side street which itself offers quiet respite from the bustle of the U.Va. Corner. Ever the gentlemanly establishment, however, No. 5 Elliewood does not insist on one’s notice, but waits patiently until the wayfaring customer recognizes what she was missing. Too often, Take-It-Away Sandwich Shop played the harlot across the street, luring me away from Heartwood with promises of exotic potato chips and sunlit picnic lunches. Today, however, was different.

Stepping across the threshold, I noticed first the four-foot-high stacks of books about the Civil War, Jefferson, and Albemarle County obscuring the facade of the clerk’s desk. I got the message: Local heritage gets prime real estate

Nostalgia, however, isn’t the place’s only forte. Past display tables in the front, the room extends a good thirty feet, opening up to the left and to the back of the store to reveal further caverns of books. With its own antechamber, History is an unsurprising specialty, but I still wandered goggle-eyed through the rest of the shelves, tilting my head uncomfortably, the better to scan neat rows of titles on every topic.

I was in the fiction section when I saw it – a hardback edition of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf from the year it was published. I flipped its gorgeously yellowed pages, finding them unblemished by listless undergraduates brandishing ballpoint pens. How this lovely thing had escaped annotation, vandalism, and overpricing was beyond me. I marched to the cash register, picking up along the way a P.G. Wodehouse anthology and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, and I paid a whopping $16 for the lot.

I practically skipped back into the sunlight, clutching the brown paper bag the clerk had used to wrap up my purchase. What a joy it was, later gifting Woolf’s masterpiece to my seminar friend Danny, who had labored for a year on an undergraduate thesis with Mrs. Dalloway at its center. Needless to say, he was ready for a clean copy.

Heartwood Books restored dignity to my paper-bag associations and depth to an acquaintance. I sought out the humble and, as is usually the case with both emporia and people, I encountered the priceless.