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When I was growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, there were never any independent book or record stores that stocked new material. If you were a perpetually broke, artistically inclined individual living there during the late nineties or early aughts, you had to get creative to find anything the public library wouldn’t carry, or outside the mass-market paperback row of H-E-B.Luckily, when you first become an insatiable reader, the books you gravitate to tend to be classic paperbacks or anthologies that can be found for next to nothing—in Hidalgo County, you just needed to know where to look. My favorite spot was the tiny Friends of the Library Bookstore inside the downtown McAllen Public Library on Main Street. It held erratic hours, usually from…

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