You might respond that bookstores don’t matter. If you want a book, you can order it online. You can download it to your Kindle. What difference does it make if physical stores are in trouble? Aren’t they an endangered species anyway?
Maybe so — but they’re the kind of endangered species we should be eager to preserve. Brick-and-mortar bookstores matter because browsing is important. Browsing is important not only because it is a pleasure, but also because it underscores the forgotten role of the physical book.
A few years ago, a pretty young woman approached me in the lunchroom of the building where I began work on my novel, The Weekend.
“You’re writing about ageing, aren’t you?” she asked. I was, I said, smiling.
She considered my 50 year-old face for a few long seconds before shuddering, “I’m terrified of ageing.”
I burst out laughing.
But she’s not alone. Looking down the tunnel to old age, it seems we’re all afraid. But of what, exactly? How should we think about growing old?
For the last few weeks, I’ve eaten a big breakfast every morning. Rashers of bacon! Buttery French omelets! Massive breakfast burritos! The heart wants what the heart wants. And sometimes what it wants is a kimchi grilled cheese at 10 a.m.
Freed from the work schedule, a more feral logic has taken hold in my apartment: Sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry, and make it salty and fatty if at all possible. My anxiety is not lessened, exactly, but it’s been transformed from daily workplace neurosis to existential background thrum. Spending an hour to make a tray of crispy potatoes for a big fry-up plate would have been inconceivable in the past, even on the weekend. In my current state, it seems like not enough time to spend making breakfast, really.
Within a knot of streets about a mile square lived some of the 20th century’s most influential minds: the artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson; the art critic Herbert Read and the curator Jim Ede; Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. In Circles and Squares, the art historian Caroline Maclean brings this charged decade, in which a slice of London bohemia debated endlessly how best to live and love, and shook British art from its stupor in the process, to glowing life. Bar a handful of moments in which the narrative loses focus, she recreates beautifully the strange mix of buoyancy and instability that characterised the decade.
One day you look up
and all that’s left of leaves
is a twisted trunk, thick at the base,
When coffee first arrived in Europe,
It was referred to as “Arabian wine.”
In turn-of-the-century San Francisco,
The Bank of America began as the Bank of Italy.