From time to time I find myself alone in America, with an hour or two to spare. In such a situation, you might seek out a bar, like Auden on the brink of war, or go hunting through the crates in a record shop, or find a place where you can get ice cream. But I’m a bookworm, and if I can, I prefer to turn at times like this into one of America’s many independent bookstores.

I don’t know why I love doing this so much. I think maybe it’s a way to try to get under this weird country’s skin, and catch a glimpse of what it remembers. And not just through all the old books I’d never find in England, and the names and dates inscribed inside. Somehow the stores themselves help time slow down, and let me step back into the centre of the 20th century.

The Last Bookstore in Downtown Los Angeles, for instance, lurks on the corner of Fifth and Spring, in a hundred-year-old bank building. Walk in at night past the neon sign, and you enter a vast cavern. As I do in the undemolished, low-lit, human-scale streets outside, I feel more at home in there than in any other part of that weird, car-distorted city. But like the rest of Downtown, this place is also faintly sinister and forbidding. Outside, among the fire-escapes and the dead theatres, it’s like being lost in the noirish 1940s. Inside, among the vinyl and the esoterica, it’s like the darker corners of the 1960s.

Digging through dusty old paperbacks in other cities is like this, too, if less intense. In an old commercial building in Chicago near the lake, I came upon a ramshackle shop where I unearthed a little teal-and-chocolate-brown anthology of articles from the Saturday Review in 1953, by the likes of Elmer Davis and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It wasn’t clear how much that store had changed since the book came out. It would be a pity if it had. Then there are the basement and indoor balconies of Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, where I found a tiny 1961 Pocket Books copy of Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover – once the property of ‘Chaplain Dickinson, 1963’.

Or most of all, the magnificent Strand in Lower Manhattan. This was the first of these stores I ever entered. The sheer scale of the place – ‘18 Miles of Books’ stacked high above my head on four floors, all held up by tall white New York pillars – showed me a version of America I never knew was there. I’ve since discovered more books in the Strand than I can remember. Not least The Letters and Autobiographical Writings of C. Wright Mills, which would help me find the key for how to start the book that was beginning to take shape in my head. It’s the story of a 1960s hoax, conceived a couple of blocks northwest of the Strand, in the Fifth Avenue office of a little satire magazine. I needed a way to set up the vexed politics into which the hoax exploded – not by giving the reader a lecture, but by telling the story of a compelling character, and the details of Mills’ life revealed in that book, and his struggle against the ‘power elite’, were exactly what I needed.

The half-forgotten country opened up by those old volumes is not exactly the land of the free – Mills was spied on, for example, by Hoover’s FBI. Nonetheless, the stores themselves help me recapture for a moment that breathtaking optimism and possibility – however earnest – that America used to exude, even in the 1950s, and which was fading well before the new administration began to mimic Hoover and McCarthy. The fact that these places are still there at all is a triumph for what America was meant to be – a republic of small independent traders, and independent thinking.

When I first arrived one September afternoon in 2023, Hudson in upstate New York seemed unbelievably calm. But it became obvious pretty quickly that the simmering culture war had not left this place alone. All the way up Warren Street, the streetlights were adorned with American Legion placards honouring ‘Hometown Heroes’, some of them from long ago. Below, the storefronts offered nicely poised antiques. Someone had scrawled ‘TRUMP’ on a paving stone; on a white wall, someone else had stencilled ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’. So it was good to have a break from these silent stand-offs for a bit, in Spotty Dog Books and Ale, a normal, cheerful bookstore with an L-shaped bar, which didn’t seem particularly committed to either side. I was there partly to see if they had Fight Club, which they did.

It was even better, and more delightfully surprising, to visit East Aurora, at the other end of New York state, the year before – another place with Hometown Heroes parading down Main St – and to find, in this tiny town, a huge, family-run bookstore called The Bookworm, in what used to be a beer-bottling plant. I bought a copy of The Nine Lives of Otto Katz, about a communist chameleon spy who inspired the hero in Casablanca. I’ve kept the old-school orange price sticker on the spine.

But the independent bookstore I will always want to visit most is long since gone. I first travelled to Los Angeles in 2015, three quarters of a century too late to sidle into Stanley Rose’s Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, which once perched next to another 1930s movie writers’ haunt, Musso and Franks restaurant (which was, blessedly, still there). Rose was exactly the kind of wild man you might hope to find in the bad old Hollywood, even in a bookstore: a friendly, boozy smuggler and small-time crook. And skulking in his store’s back room you might have found not just books but actual authors: Horace McCoy and William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, all lost and pissed off in Tinseltown, drinking orange wine. Stanley Rose’s closing long ago – Los Angeles’ first last bookstore – makes me feel this is a way back to the past that’s at constant risk of slipping out of reach.

At least, right now, I have a new book out about America – about its struggles with its grand ideals and its own forbidding power. And it has a record of my journeys through these bookstores scattered through the endnotes – including that Mills collection I happened upon in the Strand. I was supposed to do some talks at one or two of these independent stores to promote it. In the end, I couldn’t go. But knowing I now have a work sitting on the shelves of some of these stores, waiting for other bookworms to unearth it, is something I will cherish, however long it lasts.