vga256<p>13 years ago, my wife at the time and i were going through a rough period. we decided to hit the reset button on our marriage by driving south with no particular plan or destination. just two weeks away from home to get our bearings, and spend some time with each other.</p><p>along that two week drive, we stopped at every used bookstore we stumbled upon along our route through montana, idaho, washington, and arizona.</p><p>we ended up getting as far as Nogales, Mexico before turning around at the border crossing and heading home.</p><p>the best of the bookstores was found on our very last stop before crossing the US-Can border, in Butte, Montana.</p><p>Second Edition Books didn't look like much from the outside - a long brick and stucco building, painted over with a vile shade of pepto bismol. a little crate of old books propping open the door promised a treasure trove inside.</p><p>a treasure trove it was. you always know a bookstore is going to be great when they've run out of books on the shelves, and start piling them on the floors in the aisles.</p><p>it was the end of the trip - my wife was sick of me, she was eager to get home, anticipating the divorce that would come two weeks later</p><p>i spent two hours walking every aisle and shelf in that store, looking for the perfect memento mori.</p><p>i found it crammed in a barely-visited corner of the room, devoted to the history of California: a 1929 edition of The Gold Hunters by J.D. Borthwick. </p><p>a recounting of his years trying to pan for gold in the 1849 california gold rush, borthwick's memoir is part solo adventure, part cultural ethnography of the SF bay area.</p><p>i was overjoyed to find this book today, double-stacked behind a dozen others in my shelf. i hadn't read it since i bought it 13 years ago to the day.</p><p>if you ever find yourself in Montana, make the drive to Butte's uptown core to visit Second Edition Books. it won't disappoint you.</p><p><a href="https://secondeditionbooksbutte.com" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">secondeditionbooksbutte.com</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p><a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>books</span></a> <a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/bookstodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>bookstodon</span></a></p>