Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Authors: Stephanie Butland
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
To a book lover, a bookshop is not a place in the world, but a world in itself.
You know.
You know what it is to open a door, and for the bell above it to chime, low
and summoning.
You know how the smell of pages is in the air like smoke; you know how
the sense of homecoming descends on you, whether you have ever truly had
a home or not.
You know that somewhere in this place is a book that can give you what
you are craving.
You know that books are safety and escape and wisdom and peace and the
things that get you through. Whether they are showing you the best way to
prepare mushroom soup, or breaking your heart with someone else’s loss so
you can better bear your own, or making you laugh when there is nothing
funny in your life, or making you afraid so that real life seems less fearful.
You understand.
And so you understand, too, or can imagine, the strangeness of an empty
bookshop. It’s been a sudden world, this one, where people can no longer
pass a book from hand to hand and say, I think this could be just the thing
you’re looking for. Where booksellers – even the ones who like books more
than people – cannot help but long for someone to come and interfere with
their perfectly alphabetised shelves.
And where even the most beloved of bookshops might begin to struggle.
Being filled with second-hand treasures of all kinds, books loved and
passed along, is useless when there is no one to open the door, and inhale,
and ask a question of the bookshop.
My mother wants to re-read something she remembers from school, but
she doesn’t know the title any more.
I’ve just finished my exams and I want to read a book that has nothing at
all to do with wars or history.
I can’t sleep. So I read. Where are the books that will make me feel
surrounded, befriended, rather than as though I am the only person awake in
the whole dark world?
It is easy to ask these questions, silently, when you’re in a bookshop; easy
to walk around the shelves, to touch spines and turn pages and think, are
you the book I need?
It’s sometimes straightforward to talk to a bookseller, to say, I want
something light, or, I’m looking for a recommendation; and the bookseller
will hear, beneath your words, I cannot bear how long the afternoons are,
or, I don’t know what my life is about any more.
But not if the bookshop door is closed.
Not if you are trying to explain, over the phone, what it is you need when
what you need is for the bookshop to invite you in and let you know it’s
okay to wander, to touch, to mull.
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