Found in a Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

To a book lover, a bookshop is not a place in the world, but a world in itself.

You know that somewhere in this place is a book that can give you what you are craving. You know that books are safety and escape and wisdom and peace and the things that get you through.

‘Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.’

We know the power of a book. Let’s not forget the power of a letter. It’s doing the same thing as our beloved books, only in a more specific way. It is taking feelings, knowledge, requests and hopes, and transferring them to paper. And then that paper conveys the feelings, knowledge, requests and hopes, and unfolds them in front of someone else. No wonder people who love books also love letters.

Reading will pack them full of words different to the ones in your head, and before you know it, it will be as though those time-yawns were never there, as forgotten as a glove on a wall by a bus stop.

Or perhaps, there is more to healing than medicine. There is the osmosis of love, one to another, through embrace if you are able, and smiles and looks if you are not. There is closing the door and disinfecting our hands and knowing we have made ourselves the safest we can be. There is the magic of shared experience: what relief, to know that there is something impersonal in this suffering, that there is hope of coming to the end of it! And there are books. Readers know that, when their heart hurts with loss or absence, then a book that they have read before can lessen the ache. Readers, faced with a new experience, find a book to help them navigate: a travel guide to a new city, say, but also a novel set there.

she has a kind of diligence to her that suggests she is always, always trying to hold on to her place in the world, convinced it will not be hers for ever.

Reading should be a pleasure and a joy, an education and a promise, a release and an escape. The books you choose for yourself should never, ever feel like a punishment or a chore.

They have many ways of doing it. Some create a story as though they are knitting a scarf. One stitch is made from the last. Quietly, slowly, through work and patience, a book – a scarf – grows. Some authors create their stories in a frenzy of activity, short and sharp and frantic, as though they and their idea are lovers reunited. Some treat their work with caution, and do not so much write as listen, sometimes for years, for whispers and words to set down. Some authors begin with a blueprint they have laboured over; others are chasing a thought or a feeling down on to the page; others yet write while hoping to excise the thing that squats in their belly and makes them separate to everyone else, however hard they try to fit in. There are authors who write for a ravenous, waiting public, and authors who put down word after word with no expectation that their work will ever be seen by someone else.

Sometimes a book will know you, inside out, and it’s as though the pages have some sort of magical quality and the words are appearing on them just a little bit quicker than you are reading, because they are so very connected to your own heart and your own story that that’s the most logical explanation for what’s happening.