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Are Bookshops Disappearing?
It looks like there’s hope, but enjoy them while you can.
This is a Very Important Subject.
Have you, in your lifetime, fully appreciated a physical book shop? They’ve been around since ancient Athens, and they may or may not be dying out.
“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us,” Virginia Woolf once wrote.
“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”
Bookshops have changed since Woolf’s day, of course. They’ve evolved in many ways since the libraries of ancient Athens. Today there are three main kinds of physical bookshop, and all three groups have lost sales due to online books and stores.
So let’s look at the kinds of bookshops still blessing civilisation today.
The Big Chain Bookshop
Yes, second-hand snobs (myself included), this kind of bookshop makes the list. Think Barnes &…
