WEST CHESTER — Once upon a time, books fell into certain categories. Now there are genres and subgenres.
Yet even the so-called nontraditional books - the ones that feature anachronistic characters such as cowpokes and Texas wranglers - have a home in Chester County.
They're found, along with about everything else from Sherwood Anderson to Emile Zola, at the Chester County Book Co., the region's largest independent bookstore.
Located in the West Goshen Shopping Center, the store carries a mind-boggling 250,000 titles.
Until recently, visitors only had to walk down a single aisle to realize just how many books that was: enough to spill out onto the carpet and be stacked against teeming bookshelves.
Like a scene in a wartime bookstore, or perhaps a children's story where books have magical powers, the towering piles have always been part of the place's charm.
Amid the overflowing inventory and general hubbub, customers explain book plots to clerks poised at terminals as the resident cockatoos squawk away. The whole business, bird, human and computer, is seemingly transported with each relocation.
There have been five moves within a small radius since the store was opened by Kathy and Bob Simoneaux in 1982. The last expansion was in 1992.
This year, they have quietly undergone the most major one of all, growing to a megastore of 47,000 square feet.
The expansion was made in part to accommodate the growing inventory of perennial sellers: children's books and books about gardening, cooking, antiques and art.
Those books, along with a new children's department that includes a sunken ``reading well'' and room for hundreds of titles and publishers' displays, is now housed in what was once a bowling alley behind the store.
Another expansion occurred when the managers of Rainbow Records, a music chain next door approached the Simoneauxes with the idea of using part of their space.
Instead of merely moving into the space, they bought the music store about a year and a half ago. They removed a wall so that they could expand the bookstore's restaurant, the Magnolia Grill, as well as the music store's book inventory.
``One thing led to another, and we ended up buying this one store. Business is very good,'' Kathy Simoneaux said recently, amid the handwritten signs and empty shelves marking the transition.
Books in the former children's area have been replaced by books that tell the story of publishing trends and the new, consuming interest in computers and personal investing.
