EVEN THE HUMBLEST BOOKSHOP IS A WONDER OF DISCOVERY THE INTERNET CAN’T TOUCH. FIVE OF THE WORLD’S MOST RENOWNED ONES ARE LOVELY CITADELS OF LITERACY, WOWS OF BROWSE
If you stopped going to bookstores, you’d save some time—and you could still read. Click away on screen, have books delivered or e-books sent to your device, and rely on computers’ all-knowing artificial intelligence to tell you what you’ll want to read next. Ah, but maybe there’s a tiny spark in you that Big Data hasn’t figured out yet. Fact is, a great “brick-andmortar” bookstore does more than show and sell. It’s a stethoscope to the beating cultural heart of the city it calls home. The sheer profusion of what it displays— the lush, multi-colored, endlessly various array of it, and the knowledge that you’ll never have time to read it all—can be daunting and inspiring and nourishing in a way that tech, for all its wonders, hasn’t a clue about. Any book, fiction or nonfiction, is a prolonged, intimate encounter with its author, and with a tale or topic that engages that author’s passion. Behold all the possibilities! The passions! Even you don’t know what you really want, or what you’ll find. Explore a city without visiting its bookstores? Why, you’d miss a special experience, whatever the continent. The chance to inhale the aroma of aged rectos
and versos, sweep your fingers across the spines in a packed stack, thumb the creamy-white pages of a freshly published novel whose publication was the author’s dream. In a bookstore it may take you just minutes to find what you need (or for it to find you). If you’re lucky, it can take an hour or two. Yes, some independent bookstores have closed in the face of the competitive pressures of our digital age. Others have innovated, staging literary events and selling coffee and chocolate to go with your good read. But the world’s truly great bookstores remain revealing cultural destinations in themselves, where making purchases is only part of the appeal. In Bookstores: A Celebration of Independent Booksellers (Prestel), photographer Horst A. Friedrichs and author Stuart Husband conduct a visual tour of some of these treasure troves of knowledge and imagination. They’re housed in both historic landmarks and modern architectural marvels, some with stacks that extend for miles and others with collections so rare that many consider their existence a myth. They beckon. You could stop going to bookstores, but in a word, don’t. And don’t miss these five legendary ones.
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By Rita Guarna
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