I like a good used bookshop like I like a good pub: affordable, accessible, and diverse. Strangely enough, like pubs, there’s a sense in which a used bookshop is a microcosm of the whole community. Reading attracts all types of people, after all, and you can tell a lot about someone by their taste in books.

Walking into my local used bookstore, I immediately see nooks meant for each and every clique: whether your niche is in business, romance, horror, sci fi, philosophy, religion, history, art, music, film, or whatever, there is a place for you to go. I find I tend to hang out mostly along the one wall, where the religion, philosophy, and psychology sections are conveniently joined next to each another. That’s my bookish “watering hole” where I get my kicks.

And like in any good “watering hole”, you’ll meet people. Maybe someone makes a comment when they see what you’re looking at, or maybe you take a fascination in a book you’d once read that someone else has picked up. It doesn’t matter. While ultimately people aren’t there to socialise, it still happens: the community in a bookshop is purely coincidental, rooted in the diverse interests that bring us to read, rather than being strictly intentional.

Of course, as a patron, you might see someone once and then never again; but when you speak to the bookseller, you may hear about all sorts of “regulars” and their tastes. My local not only sells books but buys them as well (how else would they get their stock?), and on occasion I have sold some of my own books, later learning about who ended up picking it up from the shop. It’s fascinating to hear about these characters and to imagine the dialogue you could share. On one occasion I even had the opportunity to meet one of these people and we talked for a while about the spiritual journeys that had led us to the same authors and ideas. From disparate worlds, we met at our local bookshop.

This is some of what I love about my local used bookshop, to say nothing of the gems I have found there! I admit, it might sound strange to speak of community emerging from a bookshop, but alas I believe it’s true, and is something peculiar to bookshops as opposed to shops of other kinds. They are a place whose target market is simply the interested literate, and so it attracts a range of interesting people. That is, a mini-society in which the language and value of learning is shared.

That’s why I love bookshops: where else might we find these values and spaces so lovingly integrated in our communities?