Fillipi’s Old Books and Records, Seattle’s oldest bookstore, is closing. There are wide gaps in the shelves and the posted store hours have diminished to ten a week.
This family owned shop opened in 1935 and moved to the building at Melrose Avenue and Olive Way in the ’50s. It expanded until it’s collection of books, records, sheet music, and vintage snapshots and movie stills filled the building’s three storefronts.
In the last ten years, I’ve spent a dozen afternoons browsing there. On my first visit, I bought a hundred year old anthology of short stories by Scottish writers for $3.50. It had the self-contradicting title, Stories by English Authors: Scotland. I went to a park and started reading it, which soon became difficult as the book still had some uncut pages. At the time that Stories by English Authors: Scotland was published, books were bound with some facing pages bundled together. Readers had to use a knife to seperate pages — to get from page to page. At the time, I assumed that it was a binding error.