Day 190 - The mystery of the Owl's Nest

The Owl's Nest on Queen Street in downtown Fredericton is one of the biggest used book stores I've ever seen. Spread over two floors of a large building, it offers a veritable maze of rooms packed floor to ceiling with books of all sizes, shapes and colours.

It also offers some of the cleverest signs (all of them handwritten) you'll ever find in a place of business. You get the feeling in the Owl's Nest like they must have the book you're looking for; it's just a matter of finding it.

We spent an hour or so today browsing this literary disneyland, looking for three specific books. Unfortunately, we found none of them. But we found thousands of other volumes to interest us. And then one little girl captured the feeling of the place for me: "It's like a bookstore from Harry Potter," she told her mother as she gazed wide-eyed at the children's lit sections.

I wanted to create a photograph that would convey the Owl's Nest to you, from the crowded shelves to the dim lights to the worn wood shelves and dust-filled air. So I put the Olympus down on one of those shelves in the furthest back room of the second floor, pointed it through a rolling ladder used to reach the upper collections, set it for maximum depth of field and a shutter speed (4 seconds) that would result in a shot that was just slightly underexposed. And let her rip.

The result is a crowded shot, filled with wood and books, slightly yellowed to match the colour of the aging pages of the volumes on the shelves, with one large faceless book hiding under the ladder right in front of you. It represents that book you're looking for, that you feel must be there, but that you know you'll never find.