Down in the Basement

‘Hush, this is a quiet place’ doesn’t really hold true of bookshops anymore. Books actually provide quite good acoustics; thousands of sentences absorb the echoes and soften the sound.

For a lover of language there is something erotic about a bookshop. It’s all the virgin editions with their uncreased spines and unhandled pages; all the books you can’t afford. All the books you don’t have time to read. And all the covers that are prettier than the ones you have at home.

The Book Lounge is one of the most perverted bookshops I’ve had the pleasure of frequenting, deviating often from its chosen trade. I always leave satisfied and often empty handed; I’ve only bought a book there once. You see the Book Lounge doesn’t just sell books: The Book Lounge moonlights as so much more than a book shop. Come downstairs with me…

Down in their basement a few Friday’s ago, with his back against the self-help and the poetry, I came across Lance Herman for the first time.

Herman was there for the third session of the Book Lounge's Down in the Basement, a once-a-month evening that has nothing to do with books, and Herman had brought his guitar to perform as Eliezer.

Eliezer’s music is clear and lyrical, and the evening had that unusually musical nakedness of just one man and his guitar. Amongst the wine and the books and the hypnosis of the guitar strings it was really a pleasurable evening. Just one thing Lance, don’t say 'fuck’ when there are kids in the front row.