With the hassle of holiday shopping behind me, I had some time to cruise over to my favorite store, John K. King, to dig up some paperbacked holiday fun. The man himself, Mr. King, is most certainly my hero. Aside from operating his three retail stores (two in Detroit, one in Ferndale) Mr. King does what I would love to do with my time, and that’s collect books.

The stores themselves hold over 1,000,000 books, and they go way beyond the mysteries with curled up covers you could expect to find at a used book store. Fiction, non-fiction, some of the rarest books that you could ever look for, are all under his roof. They’ve even got a great selection of books about Detroit history, and in the beauty of a used book store, the titles are actually published when the history was taking place. Maybe it’s the geek in me, but if I read a book about 1967 that was written in 1967, then I feel like I’m getting it right from the source and not a watered down version in a memoirs book.

Check out the various topics, titles, newspapers, postcards, and other just really cool stuff on their website, or just run over and wander the aisles. If you love the place like I do, don’t be surprised if you lose yourself for a few hours.