Dos Amigos Books - Terlingua, Texas

This bookstore was a surprise. For one thing, it is in a tiny town in the mountains of West Texas where I didn't expect to find a bookshop. For another, it is housed inside another store, Terlingua Trading Company, which is probably the more accurate title for the spot, but there's a sign over the doorway and an angry-looking longhorn skull, so I'm listening to the sign.

This bookstore is very small, one large room lined with brightly colored shelves and a wooden wagon turned book table. If you find yourself in Terlingua, a town on the edge of the country, just outside Big Bend National Park, and most famous for its abandoned ghost town, you might be curious about the history of little place—I was. This bookshop is the place to go satisfy your curiosity. Three quarters of this space is populated with books on different facets of local history, coffee-table books of desert vistas, and poetry by Southwest Texas storytellers. Sometimes local history sections don't interest even me, a nerd for history of all shapes and sizes. But there were so many books, like a series of back porch stories and a history of pioneer women of Southwest Texas, that drew my eye. There was also a current fiction section and a children's section. Small though it was, it was a spot I could have wiled away several hours in.

Alas, I spent only a handful of minutes, because I had to go have dinner.