Unnameable Books, Brooklyn

I live in Park Slope, and for a long time, I did not understand a strange pedestrian phenomenon that was observable outside my apartment.

People walking down the street in one direction mostly scowl at me, and people walking from the other invariably wave and nod at me. I put this down to my unscientific observation, but quite quickly, after noticing this, I realized it really was the case.

I was intrigued.

My first panicked reasoning was that my profile view was not symmetrical on either side. Did I look evil when viewed from one side and gentle when seen from the other? I have always had such doubts. I decided to investigate this phenomenon a little more deeply. I started observing people from the window of my apartment on the first floor. However, I noticed the same pattern from here, too. The downstream wayfarers ignored the upstream pedestrians and tourists when greeting the latter in passing.

After many failed theories, some of which included studying types of establishments on either side, traffic, and road quality, I took it up as the resident mystery to solve.

When at Berkeley Place, and even now, at nights, whenever I need to clear my head, when I am alone, when Mira and Neha were home, or even before Mira was born, I walk to Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt Avenue.

I moved out of my apartment in Berkeley Place recently, but that short walk along Berkeley Place, through Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, and down Vanderbilt Avenue is one of my favorite routes.

“I am going out for a walk” generally means walking to Unnameable Books.

Park Slope is picturesque, and the brown-stoned streets and housing exude a casual and comforting opulence. It is the kind of neighborhood I would love to hate had I not lived here. It is an enclave of super-rich, white, bohemian families who can afford to be nice to each other and worry about the world. Like reformed supervillains, they have an air of renounced evil about them.

When walking up the streets during the daytime, the shades of bricks that give the houses their warm, brown feeling, reflected from the sun, remind me a little of Europe. The stoops run up to elegant doors, and the smaller doorways hidden under the stoops are Hobbit-like in their beauty.

Tolkien would have said, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Park Sloper. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a Park Sloper-hole, and that means comfort.”

It is, however, at night that the walk’s secret is revealed.

As the ambient light dims and the warm yellow lights start popping up from within the houses, the insides of the apartments are brought into sharp clarity. Inside are bookcases amidst tastefully furnished residences, lining the walls that have subtly curated artworks hung upon them. Every house features excellent specimens, with well-worn books stacked and overflowing. I know they are well-read for a couple of reasons. Spines of library books, most probably from the nearby formidable Brooklyn Library,  with their oversized zebra code, show a rotating flow of books in the house. Then, there is the placement of the bookshelf, which indicates that the bookshelf is built for use and not just aesthetics. Such clues generally align, and I have concluded that readership is rife in the area. I consider myself well-read, but I would be hard-pressed to claim I am above the average in Park Slope.

It also talks to the advantage of the rich that reading and books have such a place of prominence and status, already giving the young inhabitants of these houses a leg up in a society where the facade of deep knowledge has its unquestionable social premiums.

The walk to Unnameable Books along Berkeley Place ricochets off of Grand Army Plaza. Berkeley Place walks right up to the Grand Army Plaza circle, with the classical Arc of Triumph, the entrance to Brooklyn Prospect Park, and the massive gold-etched doorways of the Brooklyn Public Library visible in the distance.

During winters, the whole circle takes on a ghostly quality when the fog sets in.

The silhouettes of the tall structures appear menacing. Combined with the pitter-patter of runners’ shoes through the gray swirling surroundings, I am reminded of walking through the street of Old London on damp gray evenings.

In this whole series of recordings of some of the walks to my favorite bookstores, I hope I will have the opportunity to come back to the beauty of Grand Army Plaza again when I write about the Brooklyn Public Library.

Walking down Vanderbilt Avenue from Grand Army Plaza might have felt like an anticlimax, like walking away from Trafalgar Square in London down an unnamed cobblestoned alley, if not for the two small rolling carts filled with books on the pavement in the distance. They mark the entrance of my destination.

In the five-odd years I have frequented Unnameable Books, I have stepped into the bookstore only at night.

A tinkling bell above the front door announces visitors to this cozily cramped space.

There are piles of books neatly stacked on the shelves and precariously towering up from the floor.

I always feel trepidation when walking towards Unnameable Books. It seems too perfect a space to exist among frighteningly costly real estate, and its existence almost feels as fragile as that of a snowflake on an afternoon pavement. Whenever I walk down Vanderbilt Avenue, my brows unfurrow only when I catch sight of the warm lights and the books inside the store.

I have always wondered why I write about all these spaces in so much detail. Maybe it is my homage to a refuge, a way of immortalizing these spaces in a temporary world. I have seen many venerable bookstores closed and forgotten within weeks, new shiny and impersonal businesses replacing these erstwhile small family-owned establishments.

I’ve lingered inside Unnameable Books as much for the smooth jazz music from the local radio station playing inside the store as much for the books.

Unnameable Books is that kind of a bookstore where, if there is more than one reader inside the space, you cannot move anywhere inside without a couple of “excuse me”s. They don’t have a loyalty program, they don’t have a resident cat, they don’t attract millions of tourists, nor do they advertise how many miles of books they have. What they do have are piles of books on creaky wooden boards awash in tungsten light and a coffee shop next door.

Both the bookstore and the coffee shop are open till 11:00 pm.

I dread the day when one of them closes down, leaving the other widowed.

One wintry night, as I was shaking the frost off my jacket and stamping my boots on the doormat after a walk back from Unnameable Books,  I realized that I had chanced upon the exceedingly simple reason why I was frowning all the way to Grand Army Plaza and smiling all the way back to Berkeley Place.

An ever-so-small gradient to the roads leading to Prospect Park is invisible to the eye.

Hence the name Park Slope.