Hello everyone. It is I, Lieutenant Lefler, and I am the next officer to write in the Bookstore Beat column brought to you by the OTF Library. This is the second installment of this column and I hope it is helpful to all you book lovers out there. (U.S., Canada, Europe, Bajor Sector, etc.) If any OTFer out there has a favorite bookstore and wants to tell us about it, feel free to contact the Library and ask to write for the Bookstore Beat column.

My all time favorite bookstore is Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore. It is an independent bookstore which has been a Science Fiction fixture in Minneapolis for as long as I remember. It is located at 2864 Chicago Ave. S. in Minneapolis. One block North of Lake Street. Their hours are 10 AM to 8 PM Monday thru Friday. 10 AM to 6 PM Saturday and NOON to 5 PM Sunday.

This is the best store to get Sci-Fi that I know of in the Twin Cities area. Hugo's is not small. They literally have thousands of new and used books in the genres of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror. Hugo's orders new books as soon as they come out. Used books are half off the publisher's price, but they have a minimum price of $2.00 USC. If you don't feel like walking to Hugo's, you can order books through the mail from them. Their bimonthly newsletter gives you a list of all the new books that are coming in each month. Authors also come through on tours. Harry Turtledove was there this past week.

Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore is connected to Hugo's, and is just as big as Hugo's. If you can't make it to Minneapolis, I would like to forward Zekk's recommendation of Half Price Books. I have shopping there since I was 12. Go there if you're looking for books not in the SF genres.

Boekhandel Stevens

And from missMaul, this is going to be an article about my favorite bookstore. My favorite bookstore lies in Hoofddorp, Holland. It is called "Boekhandel Stevens" and has changed its location a couple of months ago. It's bigger now and better organized. In the old place everything was very close together and you needed to be very careful not to knock anything over. People did wonder whether they could afford a bigger place, but it's the only good bookstore we have here. There are almost always people inside looking around and it seems things are going fine.

Since they moved to the new place everything is very organized and you don't have to look very long to find what you want. There is a great diversity in books. You can find a lot of fiction. There are quite some science fiction and fantasy books. But also a lot of literature. And the section of English books is pretty big.

Next to the fiction, half the bookstore is filled with non fiction and magazines. There are a lot of travel books, art books, study books, cookbooks and computer books. There are all sorts of magazines, from fashion to cars.

When you walk into the store you walk straight to the table the top 10 of books. So you can immediately see what people like the best at the moment. And on the table behind that goes the same for children's books. Now why is this my favorite bookstore, beside from being the only good bookstore around? I like it because I can walk around it and always find something that interests me. I don't often buy something, but I just like to look around. And it doesn't seem to bother anyone that I just look around without buying, thus creating a very friendly atmosphere.

The people who work in the store are very nice and practically always can help you out. They know something about books. I also like it that, even though there are always some people around, the bookstore always seems pretty quiet. You can relax a little in there, there is no music and no one talks loudly, unlike in most other shops. There is a nice calm atmosphere makes it a very relaxing place to be.

Well, that's pretty much all I can tell about my favorite bookstore. It's not very big, but you can find there what you want. And it's just a nice place to visit every once in a while.