A Likely Story: The Day after Black Friday at the Used Bookstore

 At A Likely Story, a small used bookstore in a nearby town, four people were shopping.

My husband and I browsed silently in the literature section. 

The other two shoppers were a mother and daughter.  They were talking wistfully about a book or movie in which two people meet in a bookstore and fall in love.  (Notting Hill? You've Got Mail?)

Notting Hill

I should have asked, but I wasn't up to speed because I have a cold.  I didn't have my reporter's notebook with me, so I couldn't pretend to be a reporter. And I never admit to anyone I have a blog.  

So I was stumped.  No idea what romantic bookstore movie/book they were talking about.

Did I ever meet a paramour at a bookstore?  Sadly, no.  At far more predictable places than that.

Bookstores are not romantic, but they are my favorite places.  At A Likely Story (I've changed the name, because you won't be flying in to this tiny town anyway), you can have a chat with the owner.  He really knows books.
He'll also talk about the business, though you don't have to chat if you don't want to.

We bought $30 worth of books, and that seemed pretty thrilling to him.  I gushed about finding two books I'd never heard of, H. G. Wells's Christina Alberta's Father and Christopher Isherwood's Down There on a Visit. The internet has taken away something of the joy of serendipitous discovery.

The owner of A Likely Story said he is a member of a bookstore chat website, and that two small used bookstore owners told him they are going out of business this month.

"The smallest rent increase can do a bookstore in."

It seems the things most worth doing are not profitable.  I have known bookstore owners who live in their stores. 

There are no small used bookstores left in Our Otherwise Very Nice City. When B&N goes, we'll be stuck with a couple of lovely people's tax-write-off spaces that are smaller than my living room.

I have also felt a pang of nostalgia about Borders lately.  A former student, a vivacious bookseller at Borders for many years, died of cancer last spring, a year after Borders closed. If Borders were still open he might be alive (health insurance), and he would be in his element this time of year.  I have to imagine that in an alternate universe he is still working at Borders, quoting The Shadow of the Wind (Cemetery of Books # 1) to customers:

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”