2jakes
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 9,680
- Location
- Alamo Heights ☀️ Texas
The loss of the small bookstore ended one of my favorite pastimes. In NYC, twenty five years ago when I first moved here, there were so many of them - staffed by book lovers - that many of my reading choices came from the "staff's selections." It might be silly, but I loved the physical nature of those places - most where old, dusty, stuffed to the gills with shelves of books (books on piles on the floor, etc.), marginally organized and great places to browse and chat with fellow book lovers. Within almost any few blocks, you could walk into several very good ones.
What amazed me is that after grumbling, but finally "learning" how to shop at Borders and Barnes and Noble (I hung in with the old book stores as long as I could, but by the mid-to-late '90s, they kept closing to the point that I needed another source for books) - and never really liking it - they started going away too and, now, I buy and shop for almost all my books on-line. I've "learned" how to find interesting books, where to look to get ideas for new books to read etc. on-line, but it isn't the same at all. It truly tok away one of my favor hobbies.
I do still frequent used bookstores that don't really carry new books and only sell used books. They are fun in their own way, but they are not at all like what small bookstores were.
I also gave up reading the physical paper as more stores not only stopped carrying them, but more importantly for me, they stopped getting them in early. I read my papers at +/- 5am and, in NYC, I used to be able to get them that early - now that I can't, I've been forced on-line. That was a very, very hard transition, and I still miss both the physicalness of the print edition and the closed-content reality of a physical paper (on-line, you just keep reading as stories get published throughout the day and are linked to other related items, so there's is no beginning or end, just a constantly changing stream of information).
All of the above plus the old public library. I remember the encyclopedia books that Lizzie mentioned in the past.