Browsing in Bookstores a Thing of the Past?

To The Editor:
In junior high school I loved walking to the newly opened discount store near my home and browsing through the large book department. I settled on the science fiction section and would, by reading cover blurbs and being struck by the cover illustration choose the novels I would then buy over the next few weeks. In high school a friend of mine and I discovered Miller’s Used Book Store in town. We spent hours in the heavy odor of dry paper and leather, paging through the volumes. We’d need to turn on the lights in each room of shelves. For new editions and best sellers there was a bookstore about a mile from home. Covers, titles and authors called to me from every neat, clean shelf. This store was illuminated overhead, no shadowed corners like in Miller’s.
Since then I’ve checked out the titles in used and new book stores in almost every town I’ve traveled to. College towns always have a good used store where used textbooks, old classics and Modern Library editions abound. Two favorites were in Charlottesville and Baltimore.
More recently Borders and Atlantic Books drew me in. Monthly excursions to Mays Landing and frequent treks through Cape May resulted seeking and finding many a new or overstocked and discounted title. I lifted the volume from its shelf, examine the blurbs on the dust jacket, made a note to myself to come back for a particular one next trip
I do not just buy a book. The book romances me. It calls out from the shelf. Later it whispers to my imagination. Once I make my purchase I always absorb the volume by sniffing its pages, and remove, if only for a moment, the dust jacket, in order to see its hidden cover and spine.
A Kindle doesn’t allow you to absorb the scent of paper and ink. Ordering online gives no feel of the weight and heft of the volume.
New technologies ultimately bring many new jobs add another aspect to our culture. I welcome this. But with the closing of bookstores we are also losing an important piece of our culture. Book collectors, whose history goes back to the Library of Alexandria, will eventually fade just like the colors on the dust covers or old books.
STEVEN ALFANO
North Cape May