On the last Saturday of August, I began my morning with The New York Times, which carried yet another story about the decline of reading across the country.
Over the past two decades, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40%, as The Times reported. It’s a sobering trend with a lot of potential implications for the future. Reading has many social benefits, and our connections with each other can grow weaker when fewer of us find the common ground that books often provide.
But civic engagement wasn’t the first thing I thought about after reading The Times’ story.
Tall windows and high ceilings create a pleasant browsing experience in Beckham’s Bookshop, a longtime New Orleans destination for those in search of vintage volumes. Steve and Katrina Lacy bought the shop in 2024.
Photo by Catherine Heitman.
Instead, while mulling over the prospect of those legions of nonreaders out there, I worried about all the fun they’re missing. Fun was top of mind that day because my wife and I were planning a weekend drive to the French Quarter, where our first stop was Beckham’s Bookshop, a longtime Decatur Street destination for those in search of vintage volumes.
I’d first visited Beckham’s in 1990, picking up an 1858 edition of “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Steve and Katrina Lacy bought Beckham’s from Carey Beckham and Alton Cook last year. Steve has operated nearby Dauphine Street Books, which sells old and new titles, since 1994.
“I had often thought how wonderful it would be to buy Beckham’s,” Steve told me. “We find that we’re doing pretty well so far.”
Joni, the Beckham’s Bookshop cat, naps near a shelf of history books. “We say she’s the real owner,” said Steve Lacy, the shop’s proprietor.
Photo by Danny Heitman.
On an upper floor of Beckham’s, Katrina has been developing Madame Lacy’s Retreat as a community gathering place. It recently hosted a yoga program, and other plans are in the works. But books have been the star of Beckham’s since it opened many years ago, and that tradition is continuing with the Lacys.
The shop’s tall windows and high ceilings create an open feel that brightens the browsing experience, though visitors might have to walk around Joni, the shop feline. I found her napping by a history shelf, decorating the space like a throw rug.
“We say she’s the real owner,” Steve mentioned.
While hunting for another volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I found instead “The Journey Not the Arrival Matters,” a memoir by Woolf’s husband, Leonard, about their life together. My odyssey to find some medical essays by Oliver Sacks brought another happy accident when I spotted “The Patient Has the Floor,” a collection of speeches by one of my favorite writers, Alistair Cooke. Spying a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” made me feel even luckier.
Danny Heitman, who visited Beckham’s Bookshop in New Orleans recently, was looking for some titles while he browsed, but he was just as pleased by the great finds that weren’t on his wish list.
Photo by Catherine Heitman.
I’d loved “A Time to Keep Silence,” his account of visits to European monasteries, and I knew this other Old World travelogue would be just as good. I also nabbed “At Home and Abroad,” a collection of travel pieces by V.S. Pritchett, an English author I’ve cherished for years.
I’m sorry that fewer people are reading these days. They really don’t know what they’re missing.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.