My whole life, I’ve hated airports. Frankly, I have many bad memories in and around them – panicked rushes to make boarding, teary goodbyes with loved ones, irritable TSA agents snapping at me, exhausted red eye flights and also that one time I spilled coffee on my pants and yelped like a little girl in a packed terminal.
So you might be surprised to learn that I visit Milwaukee’s airport all the time – and not because I have to fly. Yes, I voluntarily drive down to the airport when I have no travel plans whatsoever, and I do so for one simple reason:
The airport has one of the best bookstores I’ve ever seen.
That’s Renaissance Books. If you’ve been, I hope you know what I’m talking about. If not, trust me. Yes, this bookstore is lodged in the main terminal of the airport, just around the corner from the parking garage entrance, next to the shoe shine spot. And yes, despite the unexpected location, it is amazing.
Allow me to explain.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
First off, when you shop at Renaissance, there’s no pretending you’re not in an airport. The shops open ceiling looks up to the bright white interlacing supports of the terminal rooftop. Occasionally, birds fly around up there. Every few minutes, County Executive David Crowley comes over the intercom to welcome travelers to Milwaukee. Your fellow browsers are often wearing pajamas, hauling oversized suitcases and neck pillows. A peaceful little boutique tucked away on some charming street, this is not.
And yet Renaissance overcomes that. And it overcomes it remarkably. How? Fundamentally, I think it’s because Renaissance is the pinnacle of what a used book store should be – in aesthetic, philosophy, experience, etc.
Walk into the slightly cramped store and you’re immediately enveloped in books. The shelves are overflowing, tomes packed tight against each other, stacked on top of shelves, hidden behind each other. If you have any love for literature, your eye will quickly alight on something – a novel by an author you like, an old mass market paperback of one of your favorites, a hardback collection for a better price than you’d ever get on Amazon. It’s a paradise for a pretentious little literary weirdo such as myself, but the selection is also so vast and varied that it offers plenty for the more well-adjusted and socially adept among us.
History nerds? There’s a shelf for you. Horror aficionados? Multiple shelves (including a much-appreciated special display for H.P. Lovecraft). Mysteries and thrillers? Of course.
But what makes Renaissance such a great bookstore isn’t just the selection of fiction and non-fiction titles – it’s the physical books themselves. These books are used. Sure, there are plenty of new ones near the front for those of you that want a sleek, unblemished copy of A Few Large Beautiful Doohickeys or whatever the latest trending novel is right now. But deep in the shelves, you’ll find yellowed, creased volumes with cracked spines and that unmistakable smell of a book that has survived the decades. You’ll discover weirdly illustrated covers, wacky old sci-fi on crumbly pulp, regal hardbacks with ribbon bookmarks. These are books with character and a history, the kind of volumes that exemplify why I choose the tactile reading experience over scrolling through books on my screens.
SEE MORE OF ARCHER’S FAVORITE BOOKS HERE
Another slightly less lofty bonus of those old, used books—they’re cheap! What a feeling, to run your finger along spines both creased and clean and find a copy of Travels With Charley for just four bucks. That’s less than I paid for coffee this morning. (Which seems ridiculous for black coffee. I mean, inflation I know, but come on. Anyway, I digress.)
Every time I visit Renaissance, I don’t just find one or two books that excite me. I’m usually bringing home at least five or six. Frankly, on a journalist’s salary, I have to restrain myself on most visits.
In short, Renaissance is my Platonic ideal of a bookstore. On every visit it reminds me why I bother driving to the airport, crossing the skywalk from the parking garage, and searching through the bookshelves instead of just trusting my shopping to the antiseptic guarantees of the Amazon algorithm. It’s the delight of the experience, the joy of browsing, the tactile thrill of a good haul – and then, of course, the satisfaction of reading some great books when I get home.
Oh, and they validate parking! Just make a purchase of $10 or more, and you get two hours of free parking in the garage.
Now at the end here, I’d like to introduce a section of this article entitled Archer Doesn’t Have Many Friends To Share Things With But He Wants To Share These Things And So He’s Going To Share Them In An Article Right Here For You. ADHMFTSTWBHWTSTTASHGTSTIAARHFY, for short.
Here’s everything I bought at Renaissance over my last three visits:
