They always move things around on me. I think it’s a ploy to keep me there longer, trying to find my way through the shelves twice my height. Actually, it might be that I don’t come in often enough. With every visit, I wonder why it’s been so long. No other place makes me feel as surrounded by brilliance. By history, by love, by faraway places, and by things I’ll never even know about because I won’t have a chance to go through it all.
One step into a bookstore and I’m like a kid in Toys “R” Us. I walk around in wonder, taking my time. I look for the perfect item to take home because this is a treat. It’s not every day I get to spend time in such a special place.
I usually peruse the New Fiction, Humor, and Literature Studies sections. I go through the rows carefully, running my fingers along the spine of each book as I read its title. I’ll even get on hands and knees to appropriately assess the bottom shelf. I’m so discriminating about the design I might miss out on a good book because the casing doesn’t draw me in. The coloring, the imagery, the type treatment – all of it should come together to create a style so captivating that I can’t help myself.
When I’ve found one worthy of a closer look, I tip the top corner toward me then pull it from between its neighbors that don’t seem to want to give it up (jealous, I’m sure). I look at the cover a second then flip to read the back. I hate when the back is crowded with nothing but reviews from every newspaper with the word Times in the title. Sure, it might be a charming anthology, or a terrific debut, or even a book for the ages, but I’d like to understand what these 342 pages entail before I’m willing to care how they were interpreted by someone else.
After the back, I dive in to a few chapters at random. Nothing else quite smells or feels the way a book does. The smell is like that of sawdust long settled on a workshop floor. The smooth, soft paperback cover like thick tissue paper. Flipping the pages, it’s as if the same paper variety and weight has been used for every book printed in the last hundred years. I’m not talking coffee table books or textbooks here – those are far less magical, what with their glossy pages and charts and pictures. A real book doesn’t need pictures. It needs to be unusual, enlightening, and full of heart. 
With most of them, I don’t get past the second paragraph of a chapter. This always reminds me of the importance of great openings to any piece of writing. If I haven’t been hooked, I gently spread apart the books that have fallen together in its absence and put it back.
With every return to the shelf, my disappointment grows along with my eagerness to find one worth keeping. As I search relentlessly for the next author I hope to stir my soul and make me think differently, I realize that everyone around me is doing the same. For the time these people are here, they’re removing themselves from the complexities of everyday life to appreciate the simple pleasure of literature.
The authors of these books have created something bigger than themselves. They’ve created whole worlds or new ways of looking at our world. And brought characters to life in so real a manner that we feel we know them better than our closest friends. The stories they’ve constructed have the potential to touch people for decades, or even centuries.
{photo credit: brewbooks flickr}
