A Stop Into a Bookstore

The "Mockinbird" cover I saw

 I'm traveling for work, in Albany, New York, staying just outside of the city in an oddly situated area that seems at once intensely rural and endlessly suburban and commercial. From my hotel, it is a ten minute drive (no sidewalks for walking) to the main road, past an airport, and cornfields, instantly pouring out onto a developed suburban commercial strip. Nothing is familiar here, and it's an odd feeling.

 Thank a higher power, I was able to lose myself in a Barnes and Noble I found in a mall. It called to me across the food court, and I decided to slip in for a moment. Always dangerous, always rewarding. Always a joy.

 Naysayers certainly abound nowadays regarding the future of the book industry. If the future generation isn't reading as much as it should, or the industry as we know it is doomed for a future consisting only of the electronic reader and e-book, I don't mind.

 Because I know those people could not be more wrong. And there's nothing like a trip into a book store--independent or chain-- to tell you how wrong they are.

 The first thing the stores offers you when you walk in now is the display of their e-reader device, the Nook.

I own a Sony Reader, and love it. I'm constantly adding new titles to my e-library and reading works off the device. But while the future of the print industry concerns the e-reader greatly, the printed page will never fall out of style.

 I decide to take a stroll through fiction, knowing I won't buy anything, can't. Don't need to. I visit some old friends, Michael Cunningham and Joyce Carol Oates for starters, marveling at new paperback covers of novels I own and love. I pick up a new paperback edition of Stephen King's "On Writing," and notice that, in the back, the King has included a new recommended reading list next to the one he included on his first writing. I stop a few minutes by the table displays of required reading and classics, thinking of how one of my favorite professors in college once remarked how he would love to teach a class on different editions' covers of novels. I almost buy a copy of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and yet another copy of "Dracula" because of their absolutely intriguing new covers. But I stop myself.

 I find Shirley Jackson on the shelf, completely by chance. I picked up an fascinatingly awesome edition of "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" and I come dangerously close to buying the book on the cover alone. Knowing full well I have a copy somewhere. I see novels I've never heard of -- "Empire," "Jesus Boy," "The Meaning of Night" and "The Monster of Florence" and immediately jot them down in my phone, meaning to add them to my to-read list after having been pulled in by their covers and printed description. And before I leave, making it out of there purchase-less, by the skin of my teeth, I consider buying a hardcover volume of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe (now that, I do need.)

 I leave feeling rejuvenated, eager to go and grab a corner with the novel I'm reading (John Irving's "Last Night in Twisted River") and read. There's no feeling like a bookstore gives you. While Internet e-book shops and the like give me something of a similar feeling searching the covers and descriptions, I know at once how perfectly the two worlds fit together, and will continue on into the future, hand-in-hand.