An Ode to Bookstores

I miss bookstores. Do you miss bookstores?

Now, look, there are plenty of other admittedly more important problems arising from this quarantine; and plenty of other more visibly devastated mediums. One of the best things about a book after all, is that it can provide you with the same joy and escape and thought no matter where you bought it or where you’re reading it. A movie is objectively different when seen in a theater compared to your TV. Live music is how music is meant to be experienced. The loss of movie theaters and concerts right now is a tragedy and I desperately hope both of those industries can recover on the other side of all this. And lets not even talk about the unprecedented economic depression that we currently seem to be barreling toward. Let’s not talk about any of that.

Because right now, I’m running out of new books to read and I’m feeling nostalgic so this post is an Ode to Bookstores.

This post is an ode to bookstores of all shapes and sizes. From El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, a giant repurposed Art Deco theater from the 1920s; to Morioka Shoten in Tokyo, essentially a room where they sell fifty copies of the same book every week. From the boxy yet cozy book warehouses of Barnes and Noble or 2nd and Charles to that little place in a strip mall you used to pass on your way to work where the lights in one of the letters of the sign don’t work so it reads ‘BO KS’ instead of ‘BOOKS’.

This post is an ode to the sense of space you can only find in a bookstore. The long rows of bookcases stretching out in front of you in neat lines and corners, each shelf containing dozens of different worlds for you to potentially lose yourself. The stacks of new hardcovers piled up in appealing displays on scratched wooden tables to catch your eye when you walk in. The way you amble through the aisles just waiting for a cover to jump out at you. The covers themselves so colorful, each one containing at least one thought you never would have had otherwise.

This is for the quiet in bookstores, never fully silent, but something that allows you to hear excited whispering from two kids discovering the same story at the same time, the rasp of pages being turned and studied, the soft padding of sneakers on old carpet. The secret spots hidden away in rarely used corners where you can set up on a thoroughly graffitied table that rocks due to its uneven and bent legs and actually get your work done. A place where you can think for the sake of thinking without the need to force yourself into isolation.

This post is an ode to the romance of bookstores. The way you can walk into one looking for a study guide to the ACT’s and walk out carrying the book that changes the way you see the world. To the way chance and chaos shape your choices, what was on the shelf that day, what mood you’re in, if someone accidentally mis-shelved that perfect book for you in a way that places it just so in your path. How far that book had to physically travel to get to you in that moment, the supply chain of actual brick-and-mortar retail, the increasingly slim chances of this one volume reaching you right when you most needed it that only makes it more meaningful. An online order has a limitless selection while limiting your imagination to just what you think you want. A bookstore can be fateful. The best Amazon can hope for is convenient.

This post is an ode to the people that populate bookstores. This is for all the wannabes pecking away at their laptops on thirty-year-old Formica tables in attached coffee-shops all across the world. I miss you guys and hope we’ll be deluding ourselves in public again soon. This is for the high school girls with multicolored hair that cluster around the Young Adult section, chattering and giggling and allowing me to imagine a future where teenagers continue to read. This is for the granddads and uncles that congregate in Histories and Biographies, serious men with serious thoughts and serious books, most of which concern World War 2 or Thomas Jefferson.

This is for the older couples that make a beeline to the Travel section even when they have no trips planned. Holding those brightly colored Lonely Planet’s or Fodor’s or Rick Steve’s guides and imagining trips too perfect to be real. This is for those who linger near the Politics and Current Events section, over-informed about the entirety of a single side of a single issue and spoiling for a fight. You are much more interesting in person than you are over Facebook. This is for the pasty and the awkward and the acne’d and the overweight and the unremarkable and the everyone else who wander in an out of these spaces. Who went to General Fiction looking for something they couldn’t explain and wind up in Science Fiction and Fantasy with a 2000 page portal to another world they can no longer imagine living without.

This post is for one of the best dates I’ve ever been on. Going to a bookstore with a girl I’d been seeing for a couple months, holding hands and strolling the aisles together. It’s awful, right? How nauseatingly sweet that moment was to us. Picking up copies of our favorite books or favorite writers and going on long-winded, self-deprecating rants about how much these fictional characters meant to us. We each picked a book that we had been planning to read for years and simply hadn’t gotten around to, and then we switched with each other. I read her book and she read mine. And then we switched back. This post is for the fact that I don’t know if I ever felt quite as close to someone as I did to her in that moment. And for the many other trips to other bookstores we took throughout that relationship.

This post is for the moment, over fifteen years ago now, when I was standing in the Kids section of a Barnes and Noble in Texas and holding a Pendragon book and I thought to myself for the first time that I could try to write one of these books myself. This post is because, without all the time I’ve spent in bookstores, I would be a completely different, shallower, and (in my opinion) less interesting person.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way about what is, in reality, just another kind of store. I will admit that as I wrote this, the fact that I’m essentially lauding a particular type of consumer capitalism did start to bother me. But bookshopping is literally the only kind of shopping I’ve done in my life that actually felt rewarding, that didn’t feel like a chore. Sometimes a space can transcend it’s original economic purpose. For me, bookstores are just such a space. I hope they are for you too.

And if you want to buy a book online, please use bookshop.org instead of Amazon. It has essentially the same selection but you support independent bookstores when you buy instead of Jeff Bezos’ head polish addiction.

Maybe I’ll see you at a bookstore when they open back up. I hope I do.