16.5.00

My Secret Temple

Bookstores are more sacred to me than any church. Be they big and bustling, small and quiet, ultra modern or dusty and filled with mystery, there is something about row upon row of textured, printed paper that puts right everything that might be feeling wrong in my little world. Sitting on the floor next to a stacked bookshelf full of priced-to-own volumes and flicking through them, reading aloud choice sentences and paragraphs, mentally drooling over dHTML how-to's and Photoshop guides and writers' manuals and losing myself in the universe of fiction - the joy never ends in that place.

Sure, Amazon.com is handy, and they're always going to have even the most obscure title, but ordering books online deprives you of the experience. You can't stand at a wall of hardcovers and pluck one from the midst, thumbing through it and feeling the warmth, the very soul of that paper, getting a taste of the words inside and learning the author's flavour before taking the book home to enjoy it in some quiet moment.

The product is not delivered to you - you take it home. You hand over your hard-earned money and adopt that book into your life. Maybe later, you'll let it go to another home, lend it to a friend to never see it again, donate it to an opportunity shop, help a school stock its library. But you choose that book first, you see it on the shelf, pick it up, leaf through its pages, smell that glorious papery smell and bond with it. It might sound ridiculous, but you do - in that moment, when you decide you will take that book with you when you leave - you bond with it.

In the three hours I spent wandering rapturously around the bookstore this evening, I didn't bond with any books - I saw many that I coveted, but none that I could afford to take. Perhaps next time...