Last week I wrote about my favourite bookstore and the personal attention it gives to the customer. For me this bookshop is way more than a place where I buy books. I have taken a writing course there, attended book talks, brought my friends and family there, chatted with the owners and with the other readers. The books they have chosen have broadened my world and mind, allowing me to read authors and topics and styles that are not necessarily featured in TOP 10 lists of most read books (some of course have made the lists too).
After I watched a movie about a bookshop owner who had been on the same place for decades, I imagined going to my favourite bookshop when I was seventy and having the owners smiling to greet me. One of my secret dreams was to volunteer to work in this bookshop during a summer. This bookshop is a dose of happiness in my life.
This bookstore has been a rarity in the corporate bookshop world, where the large chains sometimes have more gifts and knick-knacks than books, most of the books are all the hyped mainstream best sellers, and human contact is disappearing because people are replaced with self-check machines.
This Sunday I read they will be closing their doors. The owners have to make tough decision if the bookstore doesn't bring them an income, the books won't vanish from my life, things like this happen - I say these things to myself and yet, I feel a deep sense of loss.
I do not appreciate impermanence right now.
Oh, I am so sorry to hear that yet another independent anchor-in-a-life-at-sea has closed. Your bookstore is so much more than that. This is the sadness of commerce and being small and local and a part of your daily joy—just having it there a comfort. (I feel this way about our small public library that has had to cut back its hours because funding is an uphill struggle. Even public services that provide stability are suffering…) I need to work on my Buddhist stance: all is impermanence.
ReplyDeleteWhat a shame. Yes, things like this happen, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. As you say, independent bookstores offer something chain stores don't, the personal interaction.
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