Basement of The Regulator

Go in through the front door of The Regulator. Walk past the magazine room on the left, the register on the right, the fresh hardcover releases deliberately arranged in the center. Eventually, you’re going to take a left; you’ll know the turn because you’ll see a staircase going down. Descend.

The staircase takes you to the basement of The Regulator, the Carnegie Hall of Durham’s literary scene. It’s here that the word-inclined can see Wells Tower read “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”—a wit-soaked story about existential Vikings—and savor the warmth of Tower’s virtuosic, conversational sentences spoken aloud. It’s here that Triangle music enthusiasts can catch Merge Records founders (and Superchunk bandmates) Mac McCaughan and Laura Balance, fresh from publishing a history of their nationally renowned label called Our Noise, talking about some of America’s greatest rockers—many of whom are Durham and Chapel Hill natives. And when the duo produce an acoustic guitar and bass and play together, watching the crowd simmer in gratified reverence is its own simple pleasure.   

Even when the lower floor isn’t under the control of a North Carolinian art hero—though this is the ideal—it’s still the best part of the store. The Regulator’s stock of fiction resides in the basement, sporting a wider catalog than the Gothic Bookstore and a soul the giant book chains lack; local authors and widely translated giants are positioned side-by-side, the alphabet the only rule of law. Yes, the cooking section is nice, and when I’m a future gardener/homeowner I’m sure I’ll appreciate those colorful missives on domesticity. But downstairs, the shelves prize writers as they should be: the choice obscure novelists, today’s literary royalty, displayed alongside the canonical Roths and Updikes, no less than Pantheonic gods to those like me. The choice among stores, and even among The Regulator’s sections, is clear: I’m all about the basement.