A recommendation for the next time you lose yourself in your local independent bookstore.

T here are few activities more dangerous for me than being set free in a bookstore with a gift card and unlimited time. Among my hobbies, flying might take first prize for peril, but given my bibliophile tendencies, it’s only slightly more expensive. Anyway, a birthday gift card was egging me on, and each Sunday (the day I was often downtown) I hoped would be the time to finally spend it.

First off, I really did need to spend it. I have a terrible habit of hoarding pretty and precious items rather than spending or enjoying them, waiting for some illusory “right moment” to come along. And second, I’m an easy sell when it comes to a good book. Three out-of-town weekends and two car issues lay between me and my goal, but I eventually managed to escape into the winding rooms of my local bookstore.

This independent bookseller is a staple in my city. With its rabbit-warren-esque interior, outside garden, and adjacent coffee shop, it’s a must-see for locals and travelers alike. Out-of-towners may end up being locals, though, since it’s easy to get lost (physically and metaphorically) in the store’s twists and turns. If someone took all the back hallways from 1950s homes, installed ’70s wood paneling, used florescent tube lights, borrowed movie posters from your nerdy cousin, and glued everything together without looking at the directions, the result would be this store.

While its books are organized (probably) by genre and author, finding the section you desire could take some time. And when you get there, you realize the author you seek could actually be in three different sections. The staff is helpful, but even if you had Ariadne’s thread and made it back to the main counter, chances are, you’ll have forgotten your question along the way. It’s easy to do, what with exciting titles and new nooks constantly popping out at you.

Do you want that coffee-table book on art (at close to $300, it was beyond my abilities that day)? What about the charmingly bound Wooster and Jeeves titles? Maybe a Shakespeare play? The options were almost endless, and a bit of decision paralysis started to creep in during my wanderings.

What I really wanted was a Rumer Godden book, preferably Thursday’s Children or An Episode of Sparrows, but those of us with eccentric taste have little luck at regular bookstores (or even antique stores: A copy of Godden’s Black Narcissus was $95 at one I visited recently). My second hope was for Marguerite Henry’s White Stallion of Lipizza, needed for a class I’m teaching, but even here I was frustrated.

Worried that I’d fail at my goal of finding a book worthy of my gift card and time, I took refuge where I knew I’d have success: A. A. Milne. Specifically, I needed a copy of some Pooh book — any Pooh book — as long as it had bees on the cover (to match the blanket I’d made for a friend’s new baby).

With The House at Pooh Corner tucked under my arm, I struck out with renewed confidence, carefully considering my options. Picture books were too expensive. No hardback books by Brian Jacques were on offer. I couldn’t buy a new copy of Howl’s Moving Castle until I’d looked harder for my missing one. Couldn’t find any Lewis. Already own Dorothy Sayers’s Whose Body?

I’d almost decided that Wodehouse — somewhere across three rooms, through a few hallways, and up at least two flights of stairs — was to be my homeward-bound companion, when a new shelf caught my eye. Tucked in a breezeway between two rooms and immediately making me an obstacle for three converging pathways when I stopped to browse, this shelf was an odd mix, half of which demanded my attention. Genre? Myths, legends, and fairy tales. It wasn’t, sadly, a robust section, but among dragon anthologies and an old edition of Oscar Wilde’s tales (worth buying, but I already had it), was tucked a fabulous treasure.

Surely, it couldn’t be mine, could it? How had no one else snatched up this incredible book? My prize? A stunning hardcover copy of the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.

Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire, a talented husband and wife team who emigrated to the U.S. in the ’20s, are known best for this book. Not only does it tell the ancient tales beautifully, its pages are awash in bold pictures full of color and detail. It is a very distinctive art style, even though this particular book wasn’t done with the D’Aulaires’ hallmark stone lithography technique. It’s one of the pair’s final works, however — their early American career was focused on capturing the stories of famous men and women in their new country. In a lovely tribute to the couple for Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow detailed the painstaking research process they undertook for each book in their series of historical biographies.

Any of the D’Aulaires’ books are worth your time and money, but, as Laskow recommends, check out the editions published by Beautiful Feet Books, which reprinted the illustrations based on the illustrators’ original works, rather than on the cheap, washed-out acetate versions encouraged by their publisher. I’d also recommend the Doubleday hardcover edition of the Greek myths, which is what I found. Growing up, we had a well-loved soft-bound version, which my mom re-taped with contact paper numerous times. This worked fine for some time, but eventually, we’d lost so many pages, she had to get a new one. Hopefully, this hardcover edition of mine will last, and as an extra perk, there’s a wonderful essay in the back giving readers details about the authors, their writing and illustration process, how this book came to be, and much more. I particularly loved the description of the lithography process and the pictures of preliminary sketches they’d done for the book.

So even if you don’t have a gift card to draw you in, go explore your local bookstore. You may end up in ancient Greece.