The Russian American Book Store & Art Gallery

Oh, man. I have been wanting to write this one for months!
So a couple of years ago I decided to learn Russian. This hasn’t been easy as 1. I don’t know that many Russians, 2. I run my own business that takes up most of my time, and 3. I am already in the throes of three other languages.
Nevertheless, I plowed into it starting with the alphabet. I had some basic primers and knew a waitress at what was then one of the best cafés in town (Café Arianna on Wilson by Damen I miss you!) who walked me through the phonetics of the Cyrillic alphabet and got me sounding things out.
Now, things haven’t changed much — I am still sounding things out and sounding like a dimwitted child, but I keep trying.
The problem is that there aren’t a lot of materials available — college bookstores, small news-​stand pieces, and LOTS of religious literature.
Enter (trumpets, please) the Russian American Bookstore at 2746 W. Devon. I was having lunch with a friend on the strip last June — talking about Hindi lessons and the finer points of making sari blouses when **BAM** there it was.
We put off our Hindi conversation (about Hindi, not in Hindi [yet]) and went in.
Well, let me tell you what a treat this was!
The Russian American Bookstore stocks tons of titles in about every conceivable subject. Biographies, cookbooks, sewing and crafts, trashy fiction, classics, everything. Wow. Wow. Wow. Obama’s biography? Yup. How to sew, knit, crochet, or weave? Yup. Turgenev? Why yes, which edition? Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, reference works, history and historical fiction… In the back they have used books as well. All of them «real» books that normal folks read — not just textbooks and grammars.
So this may just be my key to actually learning something more than how to sound things out. I bought a book of poetry, some short stories, a double paged English-​Russian version of Turgenev, and a comprehensive sewing manual, among other things.
If you speak Russian or are looking for something outside the norm and perhaps a bit obscure, this place is a real find.