Dear Bookstores,

I love you and I want you to flourish.

Whenever I pass you, I stop in if I have time to wander around. Hanging out with you is one of my favorite pastimes. I love finding new stores to check out and root through the many book stacks and shelves.

Your shelves more often than not carry something for everyone. They can hold books from thousands of years ago and books that were released just weeks ago. This shows the permanence of books throughout history.

Although I could go to the library and rent the books for free, there’s something about having a copy all to myself and cracking it open for the first time. There’s also something special about used books. I always imagine that the owner before me loved the book but ultimately had to get rid of it to make room for more of their favorite books.

There’s a sense of serendipity in bookstores. Like you were meant to find this book and read it. Like the author wrote this book for you to read at this particular moment in time. In one word, the feeling of being in a bookstore is magic.

It's terrible that you are an endangered form of housing for circulating literature. I hope there’s never a time when your existence is looked upon as a legend for children. I hope parents never say, “Back in the day, we would go into stores that sold books. The stories you read online now used to be printed out and you would flip through hundreds of page instead of scrolling through on your laptop.” I believe your existence is timeless. I think (and hope) there will always be people who desire to walk into a physical building and walk up and down aisles, and even up staircases, to various wonderlands, unsure of what treasures they’ll find. I find that for myself, I never leave with just what I came for. There’s always something else that catches my eye.

I’m sure you agree when I say that there’s a romantic aspect to reading physical books. That’s probably why you’re so set on staying open.

The need people feel to have physical books is met sometimes by coffee shops, including Oxford’s own — Kofenya — where there is a shelf that welcomes customers to take a book from its stack and leave one in its place. People are familiar with this innate desire to seek knowledge and sometimes to find a place to escape to in the plotline of books.

Thank you for staying open despite the risks. You enrich people’s lives every day.

Love Always,

Katie K. and Fellow Readers