Daedalus Bookstore is a lesson in stream of consciousness.
Sitting cattycorner on East Fourth Street by the Downtown Mall, Daedalus is a narrow three-storied row house. The structure itself is like an aging James Joyce - the brick is a little uneven, and the white paint on the window sills is curling from age. But the store inside, thick with the smell of old pages, is an encyclopedia of words.
A Joycean History
Before opening Daedalus, Sandy McAdams, 58, sold his first book out of a barn.
Growing up in the New York City area, McAdams was influenced by a Greenwich Village bookseller named Joe. McAdams always knew he wanted his life to revolve around books.
Several years later, he moved to Long Island and converted the barn next to his house into a bookshop.
But then a friend showed him a picture of a row house for sale in Charlottesville. Though McAdams wasn't impressed with the Virginia town in previous visits, the structure seemed the perfect setting for a bookshop.
So McAdams packed up his barn into a freight car and rental van and moved to the present-day location.
"We've been here 26 years, and it's still wonderful," said McAdams, who also co-founded the C&O restaurant on the Downtown Mall.
But in the beginning, McAdams concentrated almost exclusively on the bookstore.
"It was pretty filthy when we moved in," he said. "I had to clean it and I brought in the wood to build miles and miles of shelves in there," he said.
The books McAdams transported from Long Island filled the main floor and part of the top floor, where he originally lived. The basement was not refinished until several years later.
McAdams said he named the bookstore after Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist in Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."
"When I was 22 and 23, he was my favorite person in the world," he said. "He just appealed to me so much as this noble guy."
Joyce is one of his favorite authors, and McAdams enjoys discussing him and other notables with customers in the shop.
"The people really make it worthwhile," McAdams said. "People just come in and say stuff and you think, 'God, I never thought of that before.'"
Though he has favorites, McAdams is careful not to rank his passion for one book over someone else's feelings for another.
"For me, there's no difference from someone who likes Danielle Steele and someone who likes "Ulysses." If they love the book, that's what matters. Besides, there are a lot of books out there - we don't just have to have Faulkner lining our shelves," McAdams said, later rattling off a list of obscure authors stocked in his store.
For McAdams, his own eccentricities match those of the shop and the 90,000-odd books that line its shelves.
"The really fun part is just this really weird shop," McAdams said.
The Grand Tour
Howard Huggins decides the best way to begin is at the bottom.
Walking through a labyrinth of shelves and stacked books, he leads the way through the hardcover fiction section - McAdams' favorite part of the store.
"He likes the hardbacks so much he won't let me put them away," Huggins said.
Huggins, who has been working at Daedalus on the weekends and some Mondays for about eight years now, busily reshelves a few titles with his yellow-calloused hands.
Huggins used to be a typesetter but started working at Daedalus because he needed a part-time job.
"I do find it good therapy to work here - for a bookaholic I mean," he said, chuckling over his half-moon spectacles. "Here, you have to learn to let go of the books."
As Huggins pushes deeper into the first floor labyrinth, he describes how books are shelved in the store. Popular sections, such as fiction, are alphabetized, but less popular ones, like anthologies, are randomly stacked on the shelves.
He often has trouble getting all the books to fit, he said.
"It's kind of like a Rubick's cube in here, trying to fit the books on all the shelves," he said.
Huggins climbs the stairs to the main floor and passes lines of shelved paperbacks and boxes of newly arrived titles.
McAdams "occasionally buys books, but most of the ones you see here are what people bring in," he said.
Huggins climbs another flight of stairs to the top floor, where McAdams originally lived. More books and rooms abound. He then unlocks a door labeled "Private - Employees Only."
Inside, the high-ceilinged room is musty and the dust swirls across the books in the afternoon light.
"This area is mostly storage," Huggins said as he motioned to one wall devoted entirely to various editions of old Playboys.
"We have lots of literary journals too," he added quickly.
Back at the desk near the entrance to Daedalus, Huggins muses on the types of customers who walk through the shop door.
"People usually come in periodically, and usually, I recognize them," he said. "I'm good at faces but no good at names."
True to his statement, Huggins recalls a few out-of-towners who never forego a return visit to the shop.
"There is this one guy who comes in every couple of years - he teaches in the Far East but he's from here - and loads up on a few hundred dollars worth of books each time he comes in," he said.
In addition, Huggins says the bookshop offers some weird experiences for some patrons.
"One time an American family came in here - they were living in Japan at the time. They came in here looking for Japanese art books, and they found one with a receipt in it for a hotel in Kyoto," he said. "On the way back to Japan, they ended up staying at that same hotel. It's funny how books travel - I suppose they've got great stories but can't tell them."
Most people who frequent the bookshop do so to explore this mystical element they can't find at other stores.
"A lot of people who just want to browse come in here," he said. "But I think there's enough variety that there's a serious chance you'll find what you're looking for."
As he's talking, a large man in dark jeans and a faded work shirt approaches the desk. He lays a few books about Swedish immigrants on the table.
As Huggins tallies up the total on his calculator, the man reaches into his pockets and pulls out a fistful of coin dollars.
"I hate them paper dollars," he proclaims with a grunt and counts out $24 worth.
Daedalus doesn't use any electronic devices - they don't even have a cash register. As Huggins makes change for the man, he motions that his own pants pocket and the top drawer of the desk serve quite well as a substitute.
But for Huggins, the old-fashioned, timeless atmosphere of the store combine to keep him content.
"Everything just kind of meanders in here," he said. "I like that about it.
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