04/30/2006

Dog Ears has cozy corners, rare finds

Shop caters to book hounds

by elizabeth kane buzzelli

Special to the Record-Eagle

NORTHPORT — Used bookstores are the cozy corners of the literary world — the places where famous and not-so-famous writers mingle democratically, in angled piles on table tops, along worn shelves, in stacks leaning against walls already lined with books.

They are the places of dusty, pulpy smells and creaking floors and little sales counters tucked between books, as if in these places the object isn't really money, but thoughts and words.

Take Dog Ears in Northport, where proprietress Pamela Grath holds a doctorate in philosophy.

The ambience at Dog Ears is a cross between country store and university coffee house. A bell tinkles. Northporters drop by to say hello, to chew over ideas, buy or sell a book, or simply to bring Nikki, the greeter dog, a treat.

If you are a book person, it is impossible to walk through the shop quickly. Book after book stops you. If they are not shiny, they are very old — and those are well-respected here.

Barely inside the doorway and there is a find: "I Kid You Not" by talk show host Jack Paar. Where else would I run across such a book for my husband? Paar shares shelf space with "The Judges" by Elie Wiesel, a true odd couple.

For $1.50, there is Madeleine L'Engle's "Circle of Quiet," a biography in which she tells of days when she feels like Emily Bronte or Jane Austen or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. On those days, she signs her checks with their names, and never once has the bank returned one as fraudulent.

Mind after mind. Worlds within worlds. Unexpectedly, sitting among the others as she never did in life, there is Emily Dickinson, the disputed photo on the cover — it might or might not be her — and between the covers Alfred Habegger's version of her life.

Grath has been in the used book business for 13 years.

"One day my husband noticed an empty store in Northport and asked me if I'd like to go into business. It sounded like a good idea. I couldn't sell anything but books, so it became a used book store. We did no market research. I had no business background. I was just surprised and grateful when people came in and bought books."

Another surprise was the number of people who came to buy poetry, since she'd imagined poetry was no longer read. And there were those customers who visited only to mourn,

"People just don't read anymore." She is there to tell them, yes, people read books, buy books and love books as much as ever.

Among them is Grath. With her natural inclination toward all things philosophical, Grath is happy to come across a wonderful philosophy book she hasn't seen in a while.

"When I pick up a philosophy book, I always check the index to see if there is anything by Henri Bergson," she said.

From this favored philosopher, her tastes run to Jane Austen, Stephen Jay Gould, and 19th-century travel books. She loves anything by Jean Henri Fabre, an entomologist who was called the "Homer of the Insects" for his wonderful stories of bugs

While going through Grath's catalog of used and rare books, I came across a book I've been wanting for years. It's called "Corona and Coronet" by Mable Loomis Todd, who was a neighbor of Emily Dickinson's and paramour of Emily's married brother.

So odd was it to find this hard-to-come-by book in Northport.

As one regular customer said, "I am an old book hound ... this is my respite from the stuff going on in the world.