Reading inspo

Great finds at Lost City Books

June 2024

I read this at Lost City Books months ago and I still love it. It’s a handwritten book review that’s on a bit of paper wedged between a row of romantic comedies and a shelf:

‘Jac’s Staff Pick: “Funny Story” by Emily Henry

Without a doubt, Emily Henry has found her voice. It’s incredible the way her skill, characters and overall story-building continue to age like a fine fucking wine.

When her fiancé decides that he actually wants to be with his best friend Petra, our main character Daphne moves in with Petra’s ex-boyfriend, Miles Nowak.

Forced proximity, and they-were-roommates, and a love interest that is SO Nick Miller coded? Giving this 5 stars is as easy as breathing & NEVER did I think that another book would be fighting “Beach Read” for my fave.’

I can’t read that review without hearing an American accent. Jac, to me, is Iliza Shlesinger doing her ‘ugly bra’ bit.

Obviously I want to be Jac’s friend.

(Nick Miller, by the way, is the love interest in the TV show New Girl. Just thinking about the kiss scene of that show – there is only one kiss scene; if you know, you know – it still makes me swoon. I watched that scene many many times during COVID.)

So, Jac works at Lost City Books. I have yet to meet them. I’ve only seen them on Instagram. Actually, maybe I have met them, and I wasn’t aware.

I’ve been in Lost City Books several times. It’s one of my favourite independent bookshops in Washington DC.

Lost City Books is on 18^th Street in Adams Morgan. Eighteenth reminds me of Lower Main Road, Observatory. It’s gritty. There’s a whiff of joints being smoked and spicy food being cooked. During the day, there’s a smell of stale alcohol that doesn’t go well with sunshine, and one worries about rats around the restaurant bins.

Walking along 18^th Street for the first time you notice the day drinking and the hookah pipes for sale.  But like Lower Main Road – and Rockey Street, Yeoville, and Seventh Avenue, Mellville, at their peaks – if you know where to go, there’s gold.

Andy’s pizza doesn’t look like much but it serves the best New York style pizza in DC (It’s official: The Washingtonian voted Andy’s no 1 in this category last month).

There’s Sakuramen, the legendary ramen place in a basement on 18^th. Tryst coffee shop is always full, even though it’s huge.

The Indian food on 18^th is excellent: I’ve eaten Nepali food at Himalayan Heritage and I’m keen to try the South Indian dosas at Vegz. There’s a bar on 18^th called Madams Organ. It’s what I call Adams Morgan now.

There’s a 1990s or 2000s feel to 18^th Avenue that I find nostalgic. I’m never going to wear a tie-dye T-shirt again. I couldn’t care less that it’s legal for me to go into a shop on 18^th and buy a postcard with a ‘free gift’ joint sellotaped to it. But am I interested in your bookshop, 18^th Street? Yes, I am.

Lost City Books is a multi-level, new-and-second-hand mix bookshop with creaky stairs and an open-door dog policy. Also, staff who write kick-ass reviews. But you knew that already.

The selection of books here is superb. It’s a mix of new, used and rare books, chosen by owner Adam – and surely the staff too. Why do I say that? Every section looks like it’s been curated by an expert on the subject, and the owner can’t know everything.

You don’t need to know one jot about graphic novels to know that the seminal works are here, new or secondhand. Ditto international politics. Ditto romantic comedies.

One of the clues to how seriously Lost City Books takes its curation of the subject shelves is in the handwritten review cards. It was, of course, on one of these cards that I first saw Emily Henry referred to as “EmHen”.

Here, at Lost City Books, thanks to the review cards, I learnt that zombie sex novels are a thing – and which was a very sexy, very gorey one. Last year in October I found Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson here, fresh from the printers. And there are gifts I want to buy: edgy greeting cards; a Georgetown map poster and a Lost City Books book bag.

This place is iconic; it’s self-consciously an institution. That’s a good thing for a indie bookshop to be.

The toilet walls are lined with matchbooks from all over the world, dating back decades if not half-centuries.

Yes, Lost City Books gives off vibes of a time when readers smoked cigarettes inside, instead of vaping on the street.

It doesn’t matter.

Lost City Books celebrates curiousity and courage. It celebrates difference and that colourful, hippy-ish atmosphere of a youth culture built on sex and sticking it to the man.

One of these days I’m going to walk up to the counter and ask to speak to Jac, ‘the one who wrote that EmHen’s writing continues to age “like a fine fucking wine”.’

After that, I might ask Jac which other rom-coms they’d recommend. If I’m lucky, we’ll end up day-drinking in Madam’s Organ, swooning over Nick-in-New-Girl.

I could do that, like, maybe forever.