Portland’s Book Paradise Everything From Aardvarks To Zyzzyvas

Let’s play word association. Or destination association.

Even while luring travelers with widely diverse enticements, most U.S. cities are best-known for a single landmark or tradition. In San Francisco, it’s a bridge; in Philadelphia, a bell; in New York, a statue in the harbor; in Seattle, a coffee pot.

And Portland has its bookstore.

Well, a clarification.

As writer Peter Fish suggested in Sunset magazine, “To call Powell’s City of Books a bookstore is rather like calling Mount Hood a nice hill.”

Standing outside this inauspicious, dull-yellow building at 1005 W. Burnside St., a short hike from the heart of downtown, it’s hard to imagine Powell’s as a popular tourist attraction. Or a popular anything.

But you get an inkling you’ve arrived at an unusual place when, just inside the front door, someone hands you a map. And don’t stuff it in your pocket, because this 43,000-square-foot former carrepair shop is crammed with more than 1 million new and used books organized into 122 subject areas with 4,000 subsections.

Looking for the latest publications about beekeeping? Try Shelf 614 in the Rose Room. Dungeons and dragons? Shelf 308 in the Gold Room. Utopian studies? Shelf 756 in the Purple Room. Body piercing and tattooing? Shelf 520 in the Orange Room? Powell’s motto: “From aardvarks to zyzzyvas.”

“We don’t have every book,” concedes section head Elizabeth Law. “But I think that eventually every book makes its way through here.”

Among its several hundred employees, 80 work as new-book buyers, and 30 others are used-book buyers. Each buyer trains for at least three years.

Powell’s purchases more than 3,000 books every day just over the counter. And part of its charm is that all volumes - glitzy new coffee-table picture books, well-worn hand-me-downs and paperbacks - are grouped by subject, with 65 percent of the stock and 40 percent of sales in used books.

This is believed to be the largest combination new/used bookstore in the nation, in terms of space and inventory. About 3 million books are sold annually. At any given time, half a million volumes are stored in warehouses awaiting shelf life. Six thousand people visit on an average day, half to browse or to sip an espresso in the Alice Hughes Coffee Room.

It’s no surprise that familiar subject areas - religion, cooking, gardening, sports, romance, history, art, travel - are covered exhaustively. Or that visitors tend to linger longest in the children’s and science-fiction sections.

But we also discover shelves devoted to appliance repair and Arthurian legends, comics and cognitive science, etiquette and ethnobotany, paper dolls and power tools, voodoo and vaudeville.

Enlightening, too, is the ever-changing “weird books window display” near the main entrance. Among titles here at one time or another: “Know Your Toes,” “A Boy and His Battery,” “The South Sea Cult of the Abdomen,” “Margarine Modelling” and “The Pantyhose Craft Book.”

No, Marv Albert didn’t author that last treatise.

A Rare Book Room, usually open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays (appointments are advisable), includes more than 3,500 collectibles. The inventory during a recent visit ranged from an autographed limited edition of “The Complete Works of Mark Twain” to “Les Champignons de Jean-Henri Fabre,” a book on mushrooms in which all illustrations are hand-painted.

Most major authors find their way here to autograph and read new books or to speak. Or to shop. Indeed, so respected is this “city” that the Nation magazine quipped earlier this year, “If there’s a new edition of the Bible, people expect God to be at Powell’s to sign books.”

Separate locations in or near downtown focus on technical sciences and computing (at Northwest Park and Couch streets), cooking and gardening (3747 S.E. Hawthorne St.) and travel books (Pioneer Courthouse Square).

Virtual travelers can preview the entire operation - and even order rare books - via the Internet by accessing http://www.powells.com.

But only a real visit allows full appreciation both of Powell’s, which is open 365 days a year, and of numerous other attractions in Portland, the City of Roses.

MEMO: Call 800-878-7323 for more information about Powell’s. Call 800-345-3214 for general tourism information about Portland.