Bookshops

I don’t mean your typical high street bookshop (in the UK, Waterstones is a good example), staffed by people who don’t even have to have ever read a book in their lives; no, I mean a bookshop run by people who know something about books. It’s more likely to be a second-hand bookshop, but after some thought I didn’t think I should narrow down the category to that. I have some personal treasures that I have unearthed over the years, in shops in Carnforth, Southport, Leeds and elsewhere; of course not everyone will agree with me, I realise, because reading books for pleasure is not a universal pastime, what with all the forms of “entertainment” available today: soap operas crammed with actors playing characters with “interesting” lives and less-than-usual life expectancy, computer games, motion pictures that have action but no intelligible plot, hundreds of digital TV channels where you can’t find anything worth switching on for… Ah, well, that’s enough whinging. For now, anyway.

I’ll just add one anecdote giving an example of what I consider to be a Bad Parent. I was in a bookshop (where else?) and I overheard a mother say to her child: “What do you want a book for? You’ve got one at home!”