Importance of bookstores

So for me, at least, this was the way a bookstore first cast its spell.

To be a walker on Burlingame Avenue is to grow accustomed to a shuttered storefront. Each closing has its own story, of course, but because we live in one of the most expensive places in the United States, enormous rents have always played their hard-hearted part. And a bookstore, with the relentless popularity of buying in the digitized world, often finds itself in a less than congenial compatibility with our ever-evolving capitalism.

Many years from now I’m sure people will recall their local bookstore with a kind of fond, but rather vague, wistfulness. But there’s economy and there’s community, and the indispensable part, I believe, a local bookstore plays in the social fabric of a town. For a good bookstore’s role is irreplaceable — it’s not only in the community, it’s of the community.

They’re a reflection of the place in which they reside, and if one believes that bookstores — and the books within — are about free thought, the unrestricted flow of information and the pluralism of the imagination, then isn’t this the sort of place in which we would like to think of ourselves as living? Books — and the stores that house them — alert and teach us to be unsubmissive, to question the world and the conditions in which we find ourselves. And certainly the times in which we live cry out for this sort of critical examination.

I read recently that bookstores are a crucial repository of a nation’s ideas, narratives and lives. Of course, I would add the public library to that undeniable truth. It’s not by chance that the Burlingame Library and our bookstore on Burlingame Avenue work together on various readings and fundraisers that enhance the community’s access to knowledge. They’re like community centers of literacy, each with a unique role to play in the dispensing of information. Information dispensed that we may agree with or not, but that gets at the very heart of a resilient democracy.

And now one of them will be gone.

Of course, I know the bookstore is also pursuing these activities to try to make ends meet. That’s part of the reason why this soon-to-be-gone business hosts special book sales and shopping nights to raise funds for neighborhood schools and charities. But how many other retailers whose establishments you frequent make ends meet in ways such as this? And all the while also spreading the visions and imaginations and experiences of authors from around the world.

And the bookstore, too, supports the creativity of folks who might live just around the corner from you.

My wife is one such local writer. Awhile back, the store hosted a reading for one of her books. The chairs were filled with friends and strangers, some of whom had just wandered in from the street because something interesting appeared to be going on.

After the reading, as my wife signed copies of her book, I drifted through the store, just as I first did those many years before with the old man in the fedora, and soon found myself in the children’s section. The novelist Ann Patchett has remarked that “we have to raise up readers” and I thought about this as I watched a father reading a new picture book to his daughter. When he was done, the girl jumped up, ran to a shelf, and excitedly pulled down another book, so that the two could begin again.

Thus the bookstore had captured another reader under its spell.

I believe there is something altogether unique about this, walking into a place of business whose business it is to create this sort of joy as one human being reads out loud to another human being.

A local bookstore is there waiting for us for precisely these kinds of moments. Its doors are open. Until they’re closed.

Mike Nagler is a trustee on the Burlingame Library Board.