Bookshops are a great place to breathe.
On a lazy afternoon, as you excuse yourself from the confines of your weekly abode, grab your car keys and escape to the highway thinking of how you can salvage the day, you may realize that it doesn’t take as much effort as you might think.
In my city, you need to either to be able to drive or Uber to get to any place worth spending time, if a walk in your compound isn’t quite cutting it to ease your cabin fever. There’s no need these days to leave your house to eat from your favourite restaurant or watch a movie, so you have to make believe an excuse to be able to get some fresh air.
Just go to the nearby galleria, find a bookshop and start browsing the sections. Within a few minutes, your breathing will ease and you’ll start to notice the beautiful art on the book covers. Go on, grab one. Turn it around if you must, you could always pretend to read inside the back cover until the smell of the fresh pages starts to flood your senses. Inhale them. The aisles are a great place to rest. Occasionally someone might brush past your elbow, or you might catch a whiff of a strong perfume—but if you pretend to be lost in the pages nothing more sinister could bother you.
You could then walk the aisles, hands in your pockets, just looking for nothing. You don’t have to necessarily walk the streets of Venice to be a wanderer, this is a much cheaper and more accessible way to do it. No need to take an extra weekend off, or go around looking for fresh air in the mountains or near rivers!
Once you’ve been around the shop a few times, and put some books back clumsily on the wrong aisles, you might be lucky to find one that really catches your attention. At this point, you may even start to look around for a place to sit, and that’s a signal that this book may belong to you.
But if you can’t be sure yet - your best bet is to order a medium hot chocolate, sit down at a table for two and read a couple more pages before you decide to buy. And if it takes even longer—an order of chocolate brownie with a dollop of vanilla can buy you some more time until you make up your mind.
Occasionally, a few people may join at your table. A customary nod can usually suffice, but sometimes a conversation about the book in your hands, or otherwise may emerge. This is a great chance to get to know some interesting people, perhaps share a hot drink with a stranger that might turn occasionally into friendship. Be careful though while offering to share dessert, these places don’t lend themselves too well to passing over the goofiness of spilling chocolate sauce on your lap. You don’t want to attract patronising sneers or scandalised stares from any of those cold brew sipping, half-rimmed aviator donning pseudo-intellectuals.
Bookshops are a great place to breathe, and for studying human behaviour.
The cute teenage couple holding hands in the corner sharing a hot fudge staring into each other's eyes.
A middle class family of four out for their evening stroll trying to escape the drudgery of cooking on a Sunday evening.
The quiet, seemingly affluent man in his early 50’s that likes to surreptitiously frequent the comics’ section.
People that come and go, and people that stick around for longer. Just like outside.
So if you’re tired of the template vacations stinking of exotic locations, food porn and empty smiles, bookshops may be a great place to take refuge from the mundaneness of your daily life.
And sometimes, your own mind.
I love the idea of bookshops as an escape. Books themselves are frequently said to create the safe haven, but you’re right--bookshops can be a world of their own as well. Lovely read!
Umm, I love this😬