Browse: The World in Bookshops ed. by Henry Hitchings (review)

This appealing small anthology was put together by Henry Hitchings (mainly known for writings on language), who asked fifteen authors (primarily celebrated novelists) from thirteen countries (in five continents) to write brief essays on the role of bookshops in their lives. Most of the pieces focus on single shops; some deal with new-book stores, and others with shops selling used books; some are charming, some touching; and some are more probing than others into social, political, and emotional contexts. But all are well written, and together they form a fairly comprehensive picture of how bookshops contribute to cultural life. The declining number of shops and their replacement by book sites on the internet are subjects that inevitably come up from time to time; and, whether explicitly or implicitly, the essays repeatedly depict the educational function of browsing in shops, where discoveries are made that would not have occurred in internet searches.

Although the anthology does not touch on institutional libraries, the same point could be extended to them. Yet the opportunities for productive browsing in open-stack libraries are decreasing, and for the same two reasons that book-shops are vanishing: real estate costs and the existence of the internet. Universities and municipalities with open-stack libraries have been reducing the size of their central stacks in the mistaken belief that retrieval from off-site storage and from digital collections (whether those online or in databases) is a satisfactory substitute for roaming the stacks, noticing previously unheard-of books, and randomly reading in them. Eliminating such possibilities undercuts the educational mission of these institutions and restricts their ability to foster advances in understanding that come from making new connections. A book like Browse could be written on this topic; and it, too, would be not only nostalgic but also elegiac. Given the present state of the book world, any account of browsing among physical books is an elegy.