The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life.
Note please I write “bookshops,” not “bookstores.” A store you enter knowing what it is you want—groceries, hardware, pharmaceuticals—you purchase it, and depart. In a shop you browse, you engage in conversation with the owner or salespeople, you make discoveries you hadn’t previously known existed, you meet people with interests similar to your own, you hang out. In “The Bookshop in America,” an essay of 1963, Edward Shils wrote: “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”
The problem just now is that…
