bookstores

My earliest memory of a bookstore is that of Good Books in the town/lil city where I first established my identity as a lil brown girl with a serious face and earnest big black eyes who was boring enough to prefer to be curled up with a comic than play with her cousins or friends. I don't remember if the city even had another bookstore or if this was by choice everyone's 'go-to' place. I remember how books were a luxury those days, and we went there only to buy school textbooks and stationary. the entry aisle of Good Books was full of colorful stationary, those colorful pencils that had lil white black bits that you used and pushed to the back to discard. all those strange shapes and sizes of erasers and sharpeners, and pencil boxes, ... As expected, a trip to the place would often end in tantrums from me or my lil sis and a sharp rebuke or a giving in by my father. Most often over stationary, stuff that wasn't really needed, but desired, because so-and-so in class had something similar, or even better if no one had seen anything like it before.

Like I said we didn't really buy books then, outside of textbooks. And so it was pointless making a fuss over wanting books from the store because I knew there would be no giving in to that. This was also probably because my father doesn't believe in buying books at all. His cliched answer to a request or a desire to buy, is, "Go to a library". A book purchase to him is a wastage because the thing will lie on a shelf at home long after it has provided its one-read use. There were of course other cliches that went along with it, as the demand for a book was almost always that for some fiction, and according to him reading too much fiction made a person starry-eyed and removed from reality. It was therefore not my choice to accept that we did not buy unnecessary books, because that was what I was born into.

My mother however had come from a different setup at her home, and encouraged my enthusiasm for the written word. She would get me comics now and then. Whatever she could get her hands on at nearby multi-goods mom-and-pop shops because Good Books was far to get to without papa. And of course there were gifts of books from aunts and relatives, and prizes from schools in the form of books. all in all I had quite enough in the first seven years of my life in the city that housed Good Books. but yes, the awe of the bookstore is still real for me. All those colorful picture books in the aisles, those Enid Blytons (I think I was just starting out on those), and gloss and color and hardcovers where ever your eye went.

When we left that city when I was 7-8 yrs old, I followed papa's advice and devoured what I could from the library shelves of the schools I flitted between. And yes, I won many more prizes in the forms of books. Looking back now, the good thing then with limited access to books was that I did not own a single book I hadn't read from cover to cover. Unlike now, when I donate unread books to libraries when its time for me to move from a city, and feel sorry for myself and yet elated that it will be available to others like me in those libraries.

To cut the meanderings short, once I owned some money and could buy what I wanted, I started loving exploring bookstores. I'd spend a lot of time in bookstores, weaving through aisle after aisle, exploring unknown titles and names, reading the back covers, getting egged on if I found authors I knew and had read. In fact I re-explored my love of reading in these years because high school and college and the years of explorations of other kinds had taken me away from books. To be fair though, my college yrs brought it back to me, with a lag of some years, because one third of my bachelors degree was English Literature. The age of physical bookstores was exciting because it allowed one to unwind and spend time with multiple covers without the desire or need to buy one. Although till date, I feel guilty if I spend time in a bookstore and then leave without buying a single book. More often than not, I would go to bookstores simply to spend time and read and browse through books, with no clear plan of buying anything. But I'd end up buying one book, because my guilt would overcome my repeated self-instruction not to buy till I had read everything I already owned. A visit to a bookstore was to me almost like going for a walk in a park, to take in all the beauty and smells around me, of rows and rows of books and the smell of fresh new pages. But without intending to, I couldn't come away without paying my tribute of thanks and buying something. so I bought quite a few books then, read many of them, collected more and gave away some. it was all worth it, but yes, like papa would say I wasted a bit, not only in those that I bought and read once, but in those that I never read.

Some years ago I started buying ebooks. This changed my buying and browsing habits completely. I visit bookstores very rarely now, made worse by the fact that many have closed down. I do my browsing on the internet now, and its not active browsing when I want to buy a book. Like before I rarely really want to buy books. But now I follow major sources of book reviews and releases, look out for titles and names if people mention them to me, archive all I would want to buy in my Amazon wishlist, and buy on whim when I hear or read about some book and suddenly want to read it. Auto-delivered wirelessly, instantly available to read, when the whim arises, this kind of buying is new but very attractive. What I do miss is strolling through and kneeling by shelves and rows of books, even virtually. Because I hardly ever even look back into my wishlist shelves; the fact that a title is in my wishlist implies that the whim or urge to buy it was not strong enough. Or else I would be reading it already.

Given this personal cultural shift in the pursuit of books, a visit today to Politics & Prose took me back to the good-old-days. Unlike some other surviving bookstores I have peeped into lately, this is as if the world hadn't changed. As if the discovery of ebooks had been reversed. As if a pity for physical bookstores was a thing for the future, science fiction. Its not just a huge store, it is alive in a way that the bookstores of my childhood and youth used to be. Agreed most of the crowd had come like me to listen to a Nobel laureate promote his book. But even before and after the talk, even with people far away from the crowd surrounding him, there was something that I thought was lost. Those engrossed faces, that seemed to not notice the pain in their arms under the weight of hardcovers precariously balanced, and that strange combination of conversation and silence. And all this at 8:30 in the evening when the neighborhood around had already retired for the day and the streets were quiet, while the cafe in the basement was ringing alive with the sound of live singing and guitars. I wanted to spend hours in a bookstore yet again. I did however come away because home was far and I needed to get home before too late. Of course I bought something, but today I had gone with the plan of buying. I had wanted a blank sketchbook, but I bought two. One lil one to get to know how to hold my pencil again, and the more revered hard bound one as a reward for when in the future I will feel like I deserve it.