When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right
-Bob Dylan, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”
Sean Stanford pulls on a vape from behind an Oak Tree Books countertop piled so high with books that he can’t see the door. He sports a salt-and-pepper David Cross beard and wears thick glasses, his eyes underneath sometimes darting around the store as if a book might, out of nowhere, slip off the shelves. As he scans from shelf to shelf, Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)” wheezes from the speakers, as vintage, quiet, contemplative, and analog as the bookstore itself.
From 1993 to 2017, Oak Tree served as Tulsa’s rare books paradise. While not totally averse to the run-of-the-mill bestseller, its book selection was more like a collection in a museum, with first editions and signed copies and old books kept in immaculate conditions. During those years, it was, above all things, a place to find an exquisite book.
Its closure in 2017 meant more than just the loss of a bookstore, says Jeff Martin, co-founder of Magic City Books and president of the Tulsa Literary Coalition. It meant the loss of discovery in Tulsa’s reading culture. “That was one of the great things about it,” he says. “You were going to find things that were out of print or things you just would never run across. … It felt like part of the ecosystem was gone.”