The Bookstore
The shelves are filled with old and dusty expanses of used books. The Corner Stone Bookshop in downtown Plattsburgh, NY, is an exciting place to find both new books and books that have been possessed by others. Those that are donated and sold at a cheap price make you wonder why someone would return such a thing filled with all sorts of knowledge and tales.
I feel sort of like I’m in a fairy tale when I’m in a bookstore. It’s an astonishingly exquisite feeling to be like one of those characters in a book that inspires others to read. Getting lost in pages is a helpful escape from reality, and a way to learn more about our current reality. There are many who believe that reading doesn’t give any value to life besides the “boring” textbooks. I’m one of the many who enjoy getting lost in reading whether it be a biography or fantasy book made by an author who values allowing readers to see different viewpoints and aspects of life.
It is important to have bookstores and keep them running with actual paper books rather than making everything digital. I like to feel the pages of a book rather than a small device that holds everything. When a book is digital, you don’t feel the paper between your fingers as you flip the pages, and you miss the smell of an old dusty book on a shelf. A physical book feels like it holds all this life inside it: to entertain, to live in a world besides the one surrounding you.
In Plattsburgh, we used to have a really cute Borders at our mall. Once that left it felt like a big gaping hole in a space that has never been replaced with a comparable store. The store had big windows on the outside, and when you walked by, you could see dozens of beautiful bookshelves, filled with new books. When Borders closed, it felt like there was no purpose to being down that one side of the mall. It felt like as soon as the Kindle was produced, the store was basically gone. Now it’s nothing but a memory.
We need actual bookstores. Inside them, you never know what you may find aside from a book—maybe even a polite conversation, or a friend. I want people to be wowed by the different covers and many shelves of books like I was back when Borders was still open. The Corner Stone Bookshop offers the same wow factor, and I like knowing that others have actually held a book before me. You take the book home, read it, then come back to the store again for another good adventure.
