Friday, December 14, 2012

Where Are All The Bookstores?

I love bookstores.  I love going through the doors of them and being pulled in by the atmosphere of each individual place as shelves and shelves of books are shown - spines out with titles, authors and publishing mark showing - are all sitting there awaiting my perusal.  I love the smell of bookstores; the sound of the floors, the feeling you get when you walk around the old second-hand bookstores that you've come home to an old friend.  It feels as though I could almost sit down and happily have a conversation with some of the ghosts that meander around the shelves in the older bookstores; but I can't.
I also love the feeling of being in a new bookstore too where everything is brand new.  The spines are uncracked, nothing is faded, no corners have been turned and returned and there's no food or coffee stains on the pages.  The aroma of coffee usually pulls you inward and makes you stay until you find a book to buy; other times it's the music and the beeping and ka-ching of the cash registers.

However, recently, I've been looking around Logan City to find a couple of bookstores to review for you guys.  There's QBD... and that's it.  Sure there's the Book Warehouse, but it's not a major chain store or a second-hand bookstore I can find on a bus route.  A lot of the stores I've Googled can be found on the maps, but when I phone them up, they've closed up or gone online.  This is such a pity as I love to walk into a bookstore off the street and actually handle the books, talk to the people who own the shop and enjoy my time at the store while finding more and more books to take home to read.... don't you?  

I'm not sure about how I'm going to review bookstores this year; as last year, I reviewed a lot of them around Brisbane City; and they were the ones I could get to around West End and the inner city.  So, if I find a good one around Brisbane, I'll let you guys know about it.  If not, I'm sorry.  But I will keep you all up-to-date with bookstores that I find which are newly opened - that is if I find any that decide to open around Logan.  Until my next post, happy reading! 

2 comments:

  1. Hi, I'm seeing the same thing here in the eastern US! I work in the town that has the largest mall on the east coast, and guess what? Since Borders closed last year it has NO BOOKSTORES. Shopping mecca? I think not.

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    1. The exact same thing has happened here since Borders closed up shop. A lot of the smaller stores were put out of business because of Borders and now, it's harder than ever to open a bookstore anywhere because renting a space for it is almost impossible.

      I'm not putting people down who have e-readers or Kindles, but it's people who love the feeling of reading the real, traditional books who suffer and problems of not having bookstores around.

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