A Real Page Turner:
A Book Lover’s Tour of Buffalo

Start your tour of literary Buffalo with a cup of coffee at Caffe Aroma, 957 Elmwood Avenue at Bidwell Parkway, and spend some time next door browsing at Talking Leaves, Buffalo's oldest independent bookseller, with branches in the Elmwood Village and University Heights.

Next, visit the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum , with locations at 453 Porter Avenue and 220 North Street, part of the largest private document collection in the world. Buffalo is one of only eight U.S. cities to house a Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum. Special exhibits of rare documents complement a permanent collection of more than one million items.

Nearby, you'll find the 472 Delaware site of the home of Mark Twain where he lived with his wife Olivia and son Langdon from August 1869 to January 1871. Although the home itself - a wedding gift from Olivia's father - burned down in the 1960s, the two-story carriage house is still standing on the property. Heading west on North Street, you'll pass the former Lenox Apartments at 140 North Street. As a very young child, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here with his family for a brief time.

Make your way downtown with stops at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street, in the heart of Allentown. Here you'll find an eclectic array of everything from cookbooks to comic books. Your next stop should be Old Editions Book Shop, 74 E. Huron Street at the corner of Oak. Old Editions is home to a vast collection of rare, out-of-print and hard-to-find books.

From Old Editions it's a short walk up Oak Street to the Central branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library at Lafayette Square. Here you'll find the Mark Twain Room, home to the original handwritten manuscript of Huckleberry Finn. Across the hall, visit the Rare Book Room and its collection of magnificent illustrated books, including Audubon's Birds of America. Small group tours are available by appointment.

From downtown, make your way to suburban Amherst and the North Campus of the University at Buffalo's Poetry/Rare Books Collection, 420 Capen Hall. Devoted to 20th Century poetry in English and English translation, the Poetry Collection contains 90,000 volumes by every major and many minor poets writing in English. Recordings of poets reading from their own works, poets' notebooks, letters and manuscripts, and a wide variety of literary magazines are also included in the collection. The cornerstone of the Rare Books Collection is Thomas B. Lockwood's collection of first editions of the works of English language authors from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The collection is also internationally known for its significant holdings of the work of James Joyce.