Corktown Shops

When Erin Gavle quit her advertising job in L.A., she purchased a van named Betsy and drove to Detroit. Along her journey, she stopped at garage sales, craft fairs, and thrift stores to amass a collection of clothing, home goods, and jewelry that soon became stock at this beautifully curated new vintage shop. The store’s offerings range from cowboy boots to suede jackets to a truly impressive crystal collection.

Housed in a former glove factory since the early 1980's—which explains the oversized hand painted sign across the building's exterior—John K. King Used & Rare Books shop is truly next level. Wandering the enormous, overflowing rows of shelves that wind from the first floor to the fourth is a dream-like experience for any book lover. And what's really crazy is that the mind-boggling number of books here (Mr. King, who began trading in 1965, has about a million books in stock, and this is by far his largest home for them) are entirely uncomputerized collections—meaning they are organized wholly by hand making it a wild treasure hunt. Trying to find a Sylvia Plath? The team knows just where to go in the poetry section, and what edition of which book was recently taken off the shelf by a reader who came before. The fiction section on the third floor alone merits days of exploration and many returned visits—the store's collection is ever shifting. The rarest of the titles are kept separately—those are actually searchable online, so you can have any special requests for books to be pulled ready in…