Over the weekend I went to a really nice little bookstore near me called Heirloom Books. It’s clearly a labor of love, which is really my favorite kind of book store to begin with. The staff are all volunteers and the store sells the books for whatever fair price they can find online. It feels like a space that loves the surrounding community, and I hope the community will love it back.
I really like to flip through the catalog of a used bookstore and find some old academic text on a niche an relatively unimportant topic. This time I walked away with a book on guerilla warfare in Missouri in the Civil War in 1862. I find the idea of so many repositories of knowledge to be strangely reassuring. That there’s so much out there to learn that I could quit my job and sit in a used bookstore all day and read whatever I came across and still only make a tiny dent.
Maybe one day I’ll have collected enough old books that probably nobody else even wants to open a used book store of my own. Then it will be my turn to sit and sort the shelves and peddle my old books for less than they’re worth in the hopes that someone will read through them one more time.