A passion for bookstores

The way most people browse, it's as if they've stepped into a temple or church. This is not riffling through the hangers on the clearance rack or tossing canned corn into the cart. No, this is browsing. It even sounds drowsy: to browse. Heart rates slow. Time disappears. Serious people turn into dreamers again.

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

A passion for bookstores may not be universal in the sense of everyone, but perhaps it is in the sense of everywhere. That is the idea one gets from reading Browse: The World in Bookshops, edited by Henry Hitchings (2016).

Hitchings asked writers from around the world to reflect on their experiences in bookstores, and the results, most of them anyway, are fascinating, often inspiring.

British novelist Ian Sansom recalls working at Foyle's Bookshop in London as a young man and spending most of his working hours hiding from customers, and presumably his bosses, and reading.

"Literature was my homeland," writes Juan Gabriel Vasquez, whose other homeland is Colombia.

Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor recalls visiting a Nairobi bookshop as a child. "We were in paradise," she writes, "because there was no (offending) school textbook in sight to destroy our illusions!"

"I would argue that under most circumstances the conversation of used book dealers or obsessive collectors is the best conversation in the world," says Michael Dirda, who writes about books for the Washington Post. In his essay he tells about using the hours before a predicted blizzard, while his wife is out of town, to search for treasures in a used bookstore.

Danish author Dorthe Nors tells of the thrill of seeing one's own book in a bookshop, although in her case the store manager, unimpressed, gets angry because Nors has moved her book to a more prominent position.

And so it goes, from Turkey to China to Ukraine to Italy and beyond. Some people may go to amusement parks for thrills. Others of us head for a bookshop.