I have been fortunate to have visited some stunning bookstores in cities and villages. I have seen the world through books and learnt about cultures from bookstores.
Independent bookstores are central to a thriving local community and are also one of the last truly-democratic institutions that are free for all. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.” Going by the dwindling number of bookstores, it appears we are thinking less.
Some of my favourite books are true stories of bookstores and two that top my list are on bookstores in Afghanistan and New Zealand. The Bookseller in Kabul (2011) by Norwegian author Åsne Seierstad was not just a bestseller but also deeply embedded in controversy. Seierstad entered Afghanistan two weeks after the September 11 attacks and followed the Northern Alliance into Kabul where she spent three months. Disguising herself by wearing a burka, she lived with a bookseller and his family in Kabul, which provided her with a unique opportunity to describe life as ordinary Afghan citizens saw it. The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw is a rich, immersive, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of the charming bookseller who runs two tiny bookshops in the remote village of Manapouri, New Zealand.
A longstanding item on my literary bucket list was the legendary bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Before I visited this bookstore in September 2022, I read the memoir Time Was Soft There: a Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Canadian reporter Jeremy Mercer. This is a fascinating book on how Mercer as a wandering reporter entered a little bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, bought a book, and after the staff invited him up for tea, changed his life forever. Time Was Soft There is the story of a journey down a literary rabbit hole in the shadow of Notre Dame, to a place where a hidden bohemia still thrives.
Writer/artist and Reader’s Digest cartoonist Bob Eckstein’s wonderful homage to bookstores that he calls “temples of thought”, Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores is full of funny and poignant stories. Two of my current favourites are In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch and The Last Bookseller by Gary Goodman.
The internet has changed the book business forever but preserving the printed word along with the physical space of a bookstore is of great significance. It is where dialogue and undivided attention are privileged and where imagination has space to meander. My dream is to own a bookstore and for now, I am just living my dream through these books.