This weekend I went to a talk on the history of bookselling in the United States, given by Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (a book on the topic), and it brought up so many thoughts. He led into the talk by telling about a particular bookstore that sounds pretty much like the Central Casting vision of a bookstore, all cozy and quaint, run by friendly people, with customers and staff who are like a community, the staff knowing the customers’ tastes and knowing books well enough to recommend just the right book to them. He talked about how there’s an emotional bond between customers and bookstores in a way that there isn’t with other retail, like hardware or grocery stores. After his book was published, he got a lot of letters from people telling him about their local bookstores (dismayed that he hadn’t mentioned them).

I realized while listening to his talk and seeing the pictures he showed of bookshops, that, as much as I love the idea of that kind of bookstore, I haven’t really had that kind of relationship with a bookstore. The closest may have been a used bookstore in the city near where we lived when I was in high school. That area was something of a book desert when I was a teenager, which was a huge culture shock to me (we moved there just before I started high school). The small town we lived just outside of didn’t have a library at that time. The school library was pretty much pointless. Of course, there was no bookstore. I don’t think we even got Scholastic book orders (we definitely didn’t have a book fair). We eventually found that we could buy a membership in a nearby town’s library, which was better than nothing. In the nearby city, there was a B. Dalton in the mall, where you could get current releases and bestsellers and a small selection of mass-market paperbacks. And there was a pretty big used bookstore.

Up until around the time I graduated from high school, it was located in an old strip mall. It occupied a couple of the storefronts, and they seem to have also moved into what would have been the back part of one of the shops. That meant there were multiple rooms, with little passageways and steps in between sections. It was the kind of bookstore where you could easily get lost, possibly even find yourself in a magical realm. The man who ran it looked like Santa Claus, but sometimes his wife (who would have made a good Mrs. Claus) was working. I don’t recall it being the kind of bookstore where the booksellers knew their customers’ tastes and hand-sold books or made recommendations. They did know their customers, but they let customers browse on their own and make their own discoveries. The shop was near the hospital district, so whenever I went to the doctor and found that I would have to stay home from school, we’d make a stop at the bookstore on the way home to stock up on reading material. I remember one time when I’d completely lost my voice due to a tracheal infection and was being sent home to rest after seeing the doctor, we stopped for books, and I found a book that was a sequel to one I’d read, but the only copy they had was a trade paperback, which was out of my price range. I was disappointed, but then Mrs. Claus declared that it had water damage and marked it down.

It probably did have some water damage, as the old strip mall was located just under a hill and tended to flood. Late in my senior year of high school, they got a new building in a different part of town. It was nicer, but it was less convenient and less atmospheric. I understand it closed a few years ago. The owner died, and the people who took it over said they weren’t getting in a lot of books. I guess the rise of e-books meant a decline in books being sold to used bookstores.

I know we’re supposed to hate the big chain stores, but I loved it when Barnes & Noble came to town. They felt like cozy bookstores, with their big, comfy chairs, but they were big enough to have a lot of stuff. And they had coffee shops! I don’t like coffee, but I really tried so I could properly hang out in a B&N cafe. I used to take my copyedits for the first few Enchanted, Inc. books to my neighborhood B&N to review. I could spread out on a cafe table, have a cup of tea, and it was near the reference section in case I needed to look something up. Alas, that store got closed down and later demolished so they could expand the nearby Kroger.

Now, I live in a town with one of those “right out of a movie” bookshops. It’s in an old downtown shop, complete with the display window in front and wood floors, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Mostly, I don’t have room for more books in my house. I mostly get my books from the library or as e-books. I only buy print books I’ve already read and know I want a “keeper” copy of. Books are too expensive for me to do my exploring in a shop rather than a library.

However, our library is also pretty atmospheric. It’s in an old (early 1900s) elementary (or possibly junior high) school building, with those front steps like in movie schools, tall windows, and the wooden floors on the main level. When you go up and down the stairs between levels, you can almost hear the ghost footsteps of kids running up and down the stairs.

I’ll have to read this book about bookstores when I finish my current stack of books. It sounds like good cozy fall or winter reading.