EST. 2014 · PORTLAND, OREGON · 3617 SE HAWTHORNE BLVD
Events Sell Your Books The Hawthorne Letter Visit

Book of the Week — Fiction

A novel about trees that turns out to be a novel about how we mistake the foreground for the world.

By Catherine Lehrer  ·  The Front Window

The Overstory by Richard Powers — book cover
The Overstory, Richard Powers. W. W. Norton, 2018. 512 pp. Pulitzer Prize, fiction. Stocked three deep at the front table; signed first-printings, two left.

Powers writes the way a forest works — nine separate lives that you assume are the book, until forty pages in you understand they are the canopy, and the book is the root system underneath. The Overstory is, on its surface, a novel about trees and the people who notice them. Underneath it is a sustained argument that the human scale is not the only scale we are allowed to write at. Almost no contemporary novel earns that argument. This one does.

We have been recommending it for seven years now and have never quite stopped. New readers find it in a different decade than the one it was written in, which turns out to suit it; the book is patient about its readers in a way that mirrors its subject. The chestnut chapters at the front are worth the price of admission, but it is the long middle — the activists, the engineer, the slow turning of the property line into a moral question — that does the work.

Powers will be in conversation with Catherine in the front parlour on June 14 (see below; the queue is forming). Come read a few pages first. The book asks to be entered, not summarised.

Continue to staff picks →

An Object Lesson — Pages of The Overstory

Cover

The Overstory · Richard Powers

W. W. Norton · A Novel

From the opening

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

The Front Window · Catherine

The chestnut chapters at the front teach you how to read the rest of the book. Read slowly. Read it twice. Powers earns every inch.

Beside it on the table

  • Braiding Sweetgrass · Kimmerer
  • An Immense World · Yong
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek · Dillard

Save the date

An Evening with Richard Powers.

In conversation with Catherine Lehrer. Saturday, June 14, 7:30 PM, the front parlour.

Colophon

Linnaeus Booksellers · 3617 SE Hawthorne Blvd · Portland, Oregon.

Staff Picks — May

Six titles the booksellers have been pressing into hands this month. Reviewed, annotated, occasionally argued over, all in stock as of Friday morning.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — book cover

Catherine’s Pick · Natural History

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer · Milkweed, 2013

Kimmerer is a botanist and a Potawatomi citizen, and the book moves between those two ways of knowing without ever choosing. Read it slowly. Read it again in October.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald — book cover

Tommy’s Pick · Memoir

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald · Grove, 2014

A grief memoir, a goshawk training manual, and a quiet rebuke to T. H. White, all at once. Ten years on, customers still come in asking for it by the colour of its spine. We never quite have enough copies.

An Immense World by Ed Yong — book cover

Marisol’s Pick · Science Writing

An Immense World

Ed Yong · Random House, 2022

The animal sensorium in 400 generous pages. Yong writes like a person who has read everything and is still surprised by it. The chapter on electric fish is the chapter you will read aloud to whoever is in the kitchen.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson — book cover

Catherine’s Pick · Essay / Poetry

Bluets

Maggie Nelson · Wave, 2009

240 numbered fragments on the colour blue, on heartbreak, on the long afterlife of attention. Nelson writes the way a careful reader thinks. We have moved several copies this month to people who were buying it for themselves.

Devotions by Mary Oliver — book cover

Devon’s Pick · Poetry

Devotions

Mary Oliver · Penguin, 2017

The selected, arranged backwards from her last book to her first — watching a poet uncomplicate herself in reverse. The gift book we sell more of than any other. We are unembarrassed about this.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard — book cover

Tommy’s Pick · Natural History

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard · Harper, 1974

Fifty-one years on and still the strangest, most attentive book about a single creek in Virginia anyone has written. Dillard at twenty-seven watches the world without blinking. The Pulitzer was the small part of it.

By Department

Five rooms, roughly. The shop sprawls a little — the Victorian was not designed for shelving — but the hand-lettered signs are accurate to within one short flight of stairs.

Room 01

Natural History

Field guides, bird monographs, a respectable shelf of mycology, a long run of Annie Dillard. The Sibley wall is comprehensive. We buy good condition field guides for cash.

+ 84 acquisitions this month

Room 02

Poetry

The largest section by floor area, by deliberate decision. Heavy on the living, generous to the dead, with a small case for chapbooks from the Pacific Northwest. Read here; we keep two chairs.

+ 41 acquisitions this month

Room 03

Science Writing

Long-form science, history of science, a strong shelf of cosmology, a slightly grumpy shelf of philosophy of mind. Mostly trade paperback, occasionally a beautiful Princeton hardcover.

+ 56 acquisitions this month

Room 04

Fiction

Small. Curated. We do not stock everything. We stock the books we trust to recommend in person to a customer we have just met. If the shelf disappoints you, blame Catherine; she does the buying.

+ 27 acquisitions this month

Room 05

Used & Rare

Upstairs, behind the curtain. Mid-century poetry, signed regional authors, first-edition natural history, occasional ephemera. Cash or trade for clean copies; appraisals by appointment, no charge.

+ 113 acquisitions this month

Room 06

Children’s & Young Readers

Picture books arranged by colour at the request of every child who has ever visited the shop. Storytime Saturdays at 10:30. Free apple juice; small chairs; no apologies for the noise.

+ 38 acquisitions this month

Upcoming Events — Hawthorne Reading Room

All events held in the front parlour unless otherwise noted. Doors thirty minutes before. Books from the visiting author at the front table; signing after. Wine and seltzer poured by whichever bookseller is least busy.

  1. Thu 22 May

    Poetry Reading

    Jane Hirshfield reads from The Asking.

    7:00 PM · Front parlour · Free, RSVP encouraged

    New and selected, with a few unpublished. Q&A with Catherine Lehrer after the reading; the shop has signed first-printings to follow.

  2. Tue 03 Jun

    In Conversation

    Robert Macfarlane on Is a River Alive?

    7:30 PM · Front parlour · $5 entry, full credit toward a book

    Macfarlane joins us for an evening on rivers, personhood, and what language does to landscape. In conversation with Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Reservations strongly recommended.

  3. Sat 14 Jun

    In Conversation · Fiction

    Richard Powers on The Overstory.

    7:30 PM · Front parlour · Free, RSVP required

    Powers joins Catherine Lehrer for an evening on trees, time, and the long middle of the novel. Capacity sixty, no exceptions; the queue forms politely on the porch.

  4. Wed 25 Jun

    Monthly Reading · Poetry

    The Hawthorne Poetry Hour, twelfth installment.

    7:00 PM · Front parlour · Free, open mic to follow

    Featured this month: Cedar Sigo and Carl Adamshick. Twelve open-mic slots after the readings; sign the list at the counter the day of, or quietly, in person, the week before.

  5. Thu 10 Jul

    Launch Event · Science Writing

    Ed Yong launches the paperback of An Immense World.

    7:30 PM · Front parlour · Ticketed; includes a copy

    We co-host with Powell’s. Tickets $32 and include the new edition of the book; capacity ninety; the queue forms politely on the porch and occasionally onto Hawthorne.

The Front Window — A Column by Catherine Lehrer

Essay · May 2026

On the books we keep recommending, and why the list is shorter than you’d expect.

By Catherine Lehrer, owner

A bookseller’s reading life is not, on balance, more disciplined than anyone else’s. We are professionally permitted to be distractible. The advance copies arrive in flats; the rep emails come in waves; the customer at the counter holds out an unfamiliar spine and says, kindly, have you read this? Often we have not. We say so, and we say so quickly, because in this work the worst thing you can do is pretend.

“A bookshop is not a library and not a curator’s wall. It is a small civic argument about which sentences deserve a reader this afternoon.”

What I have noticed, after twelve years on Hawthorne, is that the books we recommend aggressively — the ones we put a hand on a customer’s shoulder for, the ones we carry to the register so they cannot be talked out of it — are a smaller list than people imagine. Maybe twenty titles in a season. Maybe twelve. It is not because the rest are bad. It is because recommending a book is a small civic act, and you cannot perform it twice an hour without losing the thing that makes the act worth performing.

A book gets onto the short list when it does the thing we cannot do for the customer ourselves. A field guide that teaches a person to look at sparrows rather than past them. A novel that talks the way a friend talks when the friend is finally telling the truth. A poem so plain you can hand it to someone in the middle of a sentence. The list is short because the candidates are rare, not because the booksellers are stingy.

The other thing I have noticed is that the short list barely moves in either direction in any given year. Three or four titles arrive that earn a place; three or four leave because we have, finally, recommended them enough. The stability is the point. A bookshop is not a library and not a curator’s wall. It is a small civic argument about which sentences deserve a reader this afternoon. The argument is more interesting if it’s the same argument, mostly, year after year — because that’s how you find out which sentences actually keep being worth it.

So when you come in and ask — and please do come in and ask — we will give you a short answer. Not because we are not reading. Because we are. And because, after some years of this, we have come to trust the short answer more than the long one.

— CL, written from the front counter, 7 May 2026.

Used & Rare — The Upstairs Room

How we buy

Selling books to the shop.

We buy used and rare books Tuesday through Friday, 11 AM to 4 PM, no appointment needed for boxes of fewer than thirty books. For larger collections, libraries, or estates, write to Catherine (catherine@linnaeus.shop) and we’ll arrange an in-home appraisal at no charge.

Cash or store credit, your choice. Store credit pays at one hundred twenty-five percent of the cash offer. We work in writing and will return anything we don’t buy in the same condition we received it.

What we’re buying now

May conditions.

  • YES · Natural history, all eras, especially Pacific Northwest.
  • YES · Mid-century American poetry — the obvious names and the not-so.
  • YES · Field guides in clean condition (Peterson, Sibley, NWF, Audubon).
  • YES · Modern Library, NYRB Classics, Library of America — pristine only.
  • YES · Signed regional fiction (OR, WA, BC, AK).
  • SOFT · Cookbooks; we have shelves of them already.
  • NO · Reader’s Digest condensed, textbook editions, ex-library with markings.

In the case this week

A short list, currently behind glass.

  • Silent Spring by Rachel Carson — cover
    Silent Spring Rachel Carson · first edition club, 1962 · jacket VG · $1,650
  • A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold — cover
    A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold · OUP, 1968 printing · clean · $245
  • The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen — cover
    The Snow Leopard Peter Matthiessen · early Penguin · spine sound · $85
  • Annals of the Former World by John McPhee — cover
    Annals of the Former World John McPhee · FSG, first hardcover · jacket NF · $180
  • The Peregrine by J. A. Baker — cover
    The Peregrine J. A. Baker · NYRB reissue · near-fine · $32
Visit the Shop

Address

3617 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, Oregon 97214

503 · 555 · 0148

hello@linnaeus.shop

Hours

MonClosed — we read, and so should you
Tue11·00 — 19·00
Wed11·00 — 19·00
Thu11·00 — 21·00 · late, for events
Fri11·00 — 21·00 · late, for events
Sat10·00 — 19·00 · storytime 10:30
Sun11·00 — 17·00

Getting there

The shop is on the south side of Hawthorne, between SE 36th and SE 37th. The 14 bus stops at our door; the streetcar does not come this far. Bicycle parking is in the alley off SE 37th, weather-protected. Street parking is free after 7 PM and on Sundays; please leave the spaces in front of the neighbours’ homes.

Accessibility

The ground floor is fully accessible from the alley entrance with a single-step ramp; please ring the bell and we will come and unlatch it. The upstairs Used & Rare room is reachable by a narrow staircase only; we are happy to bring any title down to the front parlour for you.

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