The best bookstore ...

As in the rest of America, the days of the independent bookstore in Montana appear to be numbered ... doomed to extinction by the likes of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. There are still a couple of fairly-good local places to buy books here in Bozeman, but that's not the case for most of Montana's cities and towns.

There's only one bookstore in all of Montana that I consider a destination in its own right, and its in a fairly unlikely spot: the little town of Alberton. There, the Montana Valley Bookstore has packed an old storefront with well over 100,000 used books, stuffing a maze of narrow, floor-to-ceiling shelves that extend even into the cellar. It's dim and musty and there's a resident cat -- a browser's dream, and one of the greatest ways to spend an hour or two that I can think of.