The Bookshop Of My Dreams
Dec. 11th, 2017 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI often dream about bookshops. They're always rambling old places- clearly modelled on Hall's Bookshop in Tunbridge Wells which I used to visit on Saturday mornings in my teens. The whole family would drive into town, my sister would be taken off to have clothes bought for her at one of the big department stores on the hill and I'd go downhill to Hall's and browse through the shelves for however long I had. Last time I checked the shop was still there, still looking as though it has changed nothing but its stock since Jane Austen's day. Hall's has two floors but the shops in my dreams have an indefinite number and if I haven't found what I want I just head for the next flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. Mind you, in dreams I never do find what I'm looking for and the thrill is entirely in the browsing not the purchase. In real life I bought lots of splendid things- some of which I still have.
The photograph was taken a few years back.
The photograph was taken a few years back.
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Date: 2017-12-11 10:42 am (UTC)My Saturday mornings were spent at the library, while my parents did the grocery shopping. (At a certain period, anyway, which I could date because I know which library it was, and therefore where we were living at the time!)
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Date: 2017-12-11 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-11 12:36 pm (UTC)“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
Terry Pratchett
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Date: 2017-12-11 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-11 06:22 pm (UTC)That does look lovely.
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Date: 2017-12-11 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-11 07:01 pm (UTC)Good!