You can be alone in a used book store but not feel lonely. These used car lots of literature have a welcoming smell of lignin that is like an old companion come to visit. With the winter sun streaming through the windows I feel cloistered and part of a brotherhood, because books themselves have a friendly feel about them. They don't judge you or nag you or give you HIV or sue you. I can't imagine the Afterlife as a place without books.
The Pioneer Book Store on Center Street in downtown Provo is a sturdy book bastion, generously endowed with comfortable leather chairs on both floors. If life is going to pass me by, it will happen in a used book store like this one. Where I can dip into as many volumes as I like and let the world go hang.
While never frivolous, a used book store is not wont to take itself too seriously either. The shelves tend to sag under the weight of old, well-bound books, and the different sections are indicated by hand-lettered signs on casual scraps of paper. It is a flea market for the mind, where you can find anything from a biography of Henry Ward Beecher to a straggling line of Louis L'Amour shoot-em-up western paperbacks.
A used book store is a place to sit down and start to wander. To nod off and then wake up in a dream. They are quiet and simple and clubby. The very motes that glide by in the silent sunlight are detached molecules from poems. How do you rate a magical place? How do you rate a used book store? It's either Open, or Closed.
