Patrick Anderson

panderson@argusleader.com

It’s true I never loved you in life.

I’m sorry.

I never opened your front door, nosed through your paperbacks and hardbacks, opened pages and smelled that musty scent of old glue and yellowed paper — what creates that wonderful aroma! — never flitted through first sentences of classics I might want to read, never hunted for the names of favorite authors, never sat on your floor with six books splayed to different pages, taking in the beauty of language and history and art and emotion that you offered any passerby.

Out of ignorance, I never gave you that loving interaction, so unique between book store and customer.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry about the conversation I just had with your owner.

“Do you do that?” he said.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Write about closings?”

I do. We do. We write about everything, friend. We write about infant deaths. We write about domestic assault and war. We write about rapists and murders, about politicians and protesters. We write about the very worst things in life.

Readers deserve to know the darkness of our world. So, yes, we write about closings and now it’s your turn.

And worse, I'm part of the problem. You see, the wife and I simplified. The bookshelf at home is smaller, and we do most of our reading on screens. I can find any book I want to read with few taps of my finger, from the comfort of my chair or bed at home.

Different from how I found books just a few years ago. In New York, I rode the L and A subways all the way from Brooklyn to uptown Manhattan to check out Labyrinth Books, another store that closed and is now called Book Culture. Behind the Strand in the East Village I dug out a tattered copy of "Don Quixote" from a dumpster because I heard owners were liquidating the store’s collection and that made me sad. One of my favorite dates with my wife, before we were married, was a quiet walk to Housing Works Bookstore Café, where I paged through a Thomas Hardy before trying quiche for the first time.

Books have always been a haven. More than a mere source of information, books gave me a chance to peer in to the bigger world from a coffee shop chair or library nook.

I’m sitting at this desk because of stores like you. I failed at college and was delivering burritos in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I brought home a used copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentlemen.” It was Thompson’s pursuit of a journalistic career, cataloged in hundreds of his personal letters to friends, that inspired me to start volunteering stories at the local neighborhood paper.

Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” sealed my fate, teaching me there was nothing wrong with valuing my work, or with seeking perfection.

Stores like you put me here. It’s because of you these words will beam out from computer screens and cell phones, reaching the eyes of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Maybe they’ll wind up in ink, filling blank reams of paper, smudging the thumbs of readers.

I wanted to use them wisely, in a way that would do you justice.

And so I wanted to say I’m sorry.

(The Book Shop & Gifty Things Vintage, 1708 S. Western Ave., is for sale, according to the business’ website. For more information contact Josh Grode Wolters at 605-275-6464.)