Best Used Bookstore

This is a bookstore torn from a book lover's imaginings and plopped down in the most unbookish of settings: amid a visual jumble of strip malls and shopping centers just south of the busy intersection of Oakland Park Boulevard and Federal Highway. The current vice president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association has plied his trade here since 1978 after growing out of a nearby store that he opened in 1974. It may not look like much from the outside, but open the door and it's a browser's treasure-trove -- more than 100,000 used and rare volumes are packed into a warren of narrow aisles and shelves that rise straight up to the second-story ceiling. Hittel brags he has books from 25 cents up to $14,500 (for a rare copy of Charles Dickens's serialized A Tale of Two Cities). On a recent Saturday, a financial planner stacked old books on the checkout counter, trying to get the right mix to give his office an intellectual veneer. He was puzzled by the rapt look of the other shoppers, lingering over Dog's Bark, a limpid collection of essays by Truman Capote ($20), or leafing through a wood-bound scrapbook of a family's 1941 Florida vacation ($75). For bookstore visitors, it's the outsides as well as the insides that confer the magic. And inside this place, it's easy to get lost. "I didn't know this was here," marveled a tall hipster with bobbed burgundy hair who had wandered into the store and then spent the better part of an hour hunched in the photography section.