Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World, edited by Henry Hitchings.
The bookshops of my formative years are gone, sadly. No semblance remains of the stores where I discovered Magister Ludi or the journals of Henry David Thoreau or the science fiction stories of Heinlein and Bradbury. The city of 60,000 I grew up in is now a metropolitan center four times as large, but only one book store remains where a half dozen opened their doors to my browsing.
This book edited by Henry Hitchings collects the bookstore memories of fifteen writers at a time when bookshops are dwindling in number, displaced by online bookselling and e-books. It calls attention to distinctions that make the brick-and-mortar shop preferable.
"When we shop online it's easy to find what we want, yet, when it comes to books, 'it's not enough to get what you already knew you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them,'" Hitchings points out, quoting from Mark Forsyth's essay, The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted.
And then there's the pleasure of actually taking possession of a book in a way that no library or e-book allows, holding it and carrying it around and maybe gifting it or reselling. The bookshop offers true ownership.
