Perhaps it’s the sweet, musty scent of ink and paper, or the promise of wisdom between the covers. The hefty weight of a hardcover between my fingers, the crispy-crackly pages that have been thumbed through by countless others, or the soft yield of the spine bending back to release its knowledge into the sun-soaked air.
Whatever it is, something about local bookstores’ mysteriousness and quirkiness has endeared them to me, so that I often find myself passing entire afternoons fingering through the yellowed, threadbare tomes in the their basements, searching for …