Used Bookstores

To my long list of pipe dreams, I should add "own a used bookstore," an inkling that truly only strikes me when I walk into one or watch You've Got Mail. The Shop Around the Corner isn't a used bookstore; it's a small shop for new children's books, but they do seem to have a shelf of old copies of beloved books, and the store has all the quaintness I imagine used bookstores to have. Maybe Meg Ryan helps that.


I think this quaintness is the first thing that draws me into used bookstores. I find old things to be charming, I find small personal shops to be charming, and I think old, worn books tend to be sweet or strange or beautiful. I like that they tend to hide unfamiliar names, lists, and markings in the covers and margins. I like books that have been owned, maybe loved, by other people, and that have been, for whatever reason, left behind or given up or passed along, to be purchased by wanderers who know nothing of their history but will gladly give them a new home and new use.

I also like the idea that strange finds may exist in these stores. I like thinking that perhaps I will wander into some dusty corner of a dusty bookshop, pick up a dusty, misfiled, leather-bound volume with a title that is strange to me, pay five dollars to take it home and find that it is the answer to the Voynich manuscript or the door to Narnia. Or maybe it'll just be a really, really good book.