There are few better ways to get to know a city than to visit its independent bookshops. And nowhere is this more true than in Washington DC. Enter any of them right now and the big pile at the counter will be Bob Woodwards Fear. It’s not unusual to find Tmothy Snyders On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century next to it, or Cass Sunsteins Impeachment: A Citicen’s Guide. The section on politics will be bigger than the one for general fiction, and there will be at least ten different ways to categorize books on politics.

I need hardly add that the political scientist and booknerd within me was increadibly pleased with the bookshops of DC. I visited three on my very first day, and we began with Solid State Books, where I quickly bought On Tyranny and Cherry. Cherry is strictly speaking categorized as fiction, but only because it describes so many illegal acts that the author had to pretend that he made it all up. He’s also in prison.

Our next stop was Politics and Prose, and that name probably says all you need to know about bookshops in DC. T-shirts with quotes about books (Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read) mingled with feminist activist party-kit (including, of course, a corkscrew). Knowledgeable booksellers answered customers questions over the phone or carried piles of Woodward’s Fear to be picked up by customers later, and next door is Comet Pizza, where crazy Republicans believed that Hilary Clinton ran a pedophile ring in the bazement.

I do not want to suggest that it’s tiring to visit bookshops, but at this point we’d also seen Congress and the Supreme Court, so I felt very much in need of a beer. Fortunately Kramers Books were next on our list, and they do have a café/bar with the wonderful name Afterword Café. If I ever write another bookshop-book I’m stealing that name. Carina and Simona strenghten themselves with food, I strenghten myself with a beer, and then we were ready for another bookshop.

Total number of books bought: eight. But in my defense I did give two of them away.