Bob Eckstein, Martinus Bookstore in Bratislava, and Dream Driving

Back in — 2014? 2015? — two dear friends of mine put me in touch with a dear friend of their’s, New Yorker cartoonist and snowman expert Bob Eckstein, who was putting together footnotes from the world's greatgreatest bookstores, which he would title “Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores.”

I had been living and working abroad for quite some time by then, so Eckstein asked me to contribute some of my favorite bookstores, and tell a little story behind each.

I think I gave him two vignettes, one about a Croatian bookstore, and the other about a bookstore in Slovakia. He chose the one about the Slovak bookstore called Martinus. You can click on the photo to see what I wrote. I still remember that dream, and I still carry Gyula Krudy close to my literary heart.

It’s really nice to have this as a snapshot, quite literally, of what I was going through at the time.