By my informal count, North Clark Street has about one bookstore per 100 taquerias. But that’s beside the point. It’s relieving to find any oasis of interest and knowledge along this particular stretch of the North Side of Chicago.

Bookworks, 3444 N. Clark St., is a clean and spacious store for used books, LPs, CDs, and other random items of interest, such as postcards featuring antique black-and-white photographs. The store’s owners make a point of keeping the store well-stocked with works by American Beat writers, and if you look around you can find a postcard with a nude photograph of Allen Ginsberg on it.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves are well-stocked, and the books are meticulously alphabetized, altogether making Bookworks pretty dependable as used bookstores go.

One of the enjoyable novelties that surfaced here was a German version of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Mexican Notebooks 1934-1964.”

Cartier-Bresson, who died this August, was revered for his black-and-white 35mm photographs of Paris street life. And “Mexican Notebooks” shows he was just as adroit at finding the immaculate in even the most ordinary scenes of life in Mexico’s villages and cities.

In Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, objects and people of otherwise no interest come together in a visually fascinating way — due in part to chance and in part owing to the photographer’s gift for composition.

Almost all of the more than 50 photographs featured were shot spontaneously, without any apparent posing. Often the subjects seem unaware or unwilling.

But each photograph has a distinct and remarkable arrangement of its own — whether it results from the downward slope of a village street, the smirk of a hooker with excessive maquillage, the broad curve of a tangle of garbage and dried tree branches or just the way a shadow happens to fall upon a certain space. The positioning of objects and people in the photographs direct the eye as subtly and masterfully as that of a painstakingly composed painting.

These photos mostly are concerned with the condition of Mexico’s impoverished, but Cartier-Bresson finds more among them than destitution and dirty children. This collection avoids being just a sociological photo essay — the photographs extract the unlikely beauty of their subject and then go futher, revealing idiosyncracies, ambiguous moods and other things people divulge when they don’t know they’re being photographed.

— Scott Gordon