Bookstores
Feb. 17th, 2015 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressThere is a magic in used bookstores, one that is not as easily found anywhere else. It can be the tiniest little shithole with the worst selection of romance novels and computer manuals from the early 1990s, but it will still be a place I want to wander and sit and look at the titles and just breathe, quietly, between the stacks.
The components combine to make the whole more than the parts. You have books (actual physical books, because for all that the part that matters is the words inside, and those can be made in so many new ways) combined with things that have already been owned, (and touched, and maybe used and loved by someone else), combined with a claustrophillic winding room, with aisles too close together and too tall. Sometimes you get an older person working the counter, who knows where everything is without looking it up. Sometimes you get cartoons pinned to the bookshelves, or postcards, or lists. Once, I was in a used bookshop that offered discounts, ten percent off for every foot of books you purchased.
Sometimes there are cats.
The used bookstore I was in today was a combination English and Japanese shop, with almost no non-fiction. Opposite the sff shelves were rows of little Japanese paperbacks (just proving that I can feel magic-safe-right inside a bookstore even if I don't speak the language, and that was a valuable thing to know). Poking around, I found a tiny back closet, barely wide enough for me to walk into and maybe only three feet long. It was probably storage, full of extra manga and Harlequins, but it was tight and dark and cool and I could breathe out everything that is hard about the world.
There is magic in used bookstores and magic in used books. I am glad.
The components combine to make the whole more than the parts. You have books (actual physical books, because for all that the part that matters is the words inside, and those can be made in so many new ways) combined with things that have already been owned, (and touched, and maybe used and loved by someone else), combined with a claustrophillic winding room, with aisles too close together and too tall. Sometimes you get an older person working the counter, who knows where everything is without looking it up. Sometimes you get cartoons pinned to the bookshelves, or postcards, or lists. Once, I was in a used bookshop that offered discounts, ten percent off for every foot of books you purchased.
Sometimes there are cats.
The used bookstore I was in today was a combination English and Japanese shop, with almost no non-fiction. Opposite the sff shelves were rows of little Japanese paperbacks (just proving that I can feel magic-safe-right inside a bookstore even if I don't speak the language, and that was a valuable thing to know). Poking around, I found a tiny back closet, barely wide enough for me to walk into and maybe only three feet long. It was probably storage, full of extra manga and Harlequins, but it was tight and dark and cool and I could breathe out everything that is hard about the world.
There is magic in used bookstores and magic in used books. I am glad.
no subject
on 2015-02-18 02:17 am (UTC)