Bookshop Memories — Yellowed Pages, Lincoln, Nebraska

Yellowed Pages — Lincoln, NE

‘Mug, Book, Smoking Materials and Crackers’ by John Frederick Peto, Dayton Art Institute (public domain)

When my family first moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1986, we lived at the edge of a section of town known as University Place. UniPlace is a small district nestled between Nebraska Wesleyan University and the East campus of the University of Nebraska. Besides the mixed residential neighborhoods of droopy old houses converted into apartment buildings, there’s an old commercial district a few blocks long with two and three-story brick buildings from the turn of the 20th Century. To my young eyes, the architecture was old and interesting. However, there were not many places on that commercial strip on 48th Street a young family would go. There was an old-time barbershop on a corner where my Mom or Dad would take me for a fresh buzz cut every couple of months, but other than that, it was bars and pawn shops. Except for Yellowed Pages.

Yellowed Pages felt yellowed and crumbly inside. The owner smoked, so everything in the store smelled of tobacco smoke. And that was long before the building next door, an HVAC and plumbing supply shop, burned to the ground around 2002. As a young man, I lived in the neighborhood again, just a couple of blocks away from the bookshop, and my apartment had soot coming out of the ductwork. The bookshop closed later, around 2014.