Up under this guy’s arm, squeeze by that woman’s butt, then negotiate a skinny aisle like two trains on the same un-switched track — back away and let the other person pass.

It’s never been an easy thing, browsing among the higgledy-piggledy stacks of inventory piled nine feet high to the ceiling at Open Air Books & Maps. Even more of a mosh-pit now that faithful customers have learned the Toronto book bijoux is shuttering forever within a few weeks, bringing a crush of buyers and browsers to the cramped cellar at the corner of Adelaide and Toronto Sts.

Yet another victim of anonymous, greedy numbered-company property ownership.

Jeff Axler, proprietor, got the notice just before Christmas. There was no opportunity to even haggle over a rent increase to the current $2,400-a-month plus one-shot increments. “Thrown out by the landlord,” he sighs. Be gone by April 1 and thanks for your patronage. What will become of the space is unknown, but the owners have title to a chunk of real estate on the block. One more ugly-as-spit condo development? As if the neighborhood isn’t already glutted with them.

Thirty years, Open Air Books & Maps has occupied this location, and a decade previously in another building nearby. Those of us with wanderlust, itchy feet, are addicted to the joint as the go-to choice for a vast selection of books on travel and natural history, from the popular to the obscure and out-of-print; for maps of off-the-beaten-path places; for gadgets.

Fifty-thousand books on the premises, a treasure trove of reading and perusing, from paperback to coffee-table glossies. Over the years I’ve bought hundreds, with titles such as The Island of the Colorblind, Baghdad Sketches, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt – Women Travellers and Their World. Entering through the heavy black wooden door, the basement hidey-hole looks chaotic, but Axler can put his fingers on whatever is sought. “There is a method to the madness.”

“Herodotus,” I asked Friday, looking for a work by the Greek writer widely regarded as “The Father of History.” “Sold my last copy last week,” Axler informs regretfully.

An adventurer himself, Axler has visited nearly 70 countries, once swapping a carton of cigarettes for lodgings in Myanmar. He counts India, Vietnam, Liberia and Papua New Guinea as among his most intriguing sojourns. The store was an undertaking born of his own interest and a gap in the marketplace.

“Back then, the industry wasn’t so dominated by big book chains. I saw that the best way to go was more specialized. The Golden Era for bookstores would have been in the late ’80s, early ’90s.’’ Pre-Amazon days, as online shopping has obliterated the independent bookstore field. Though Open Air Books & Maps, as a niche emporium, was somewhat protected from the big-footers.

The obvious travel guides are accounted for, but Open Air Books & Maps specializes in the esoteric, the niche, the literature of travel writing, memoirs. When headed for far-away places, I still come here first, schlepping a heavy sack of books around the planet rather than rely on Kindle or the like. I want a thing I can leaf through, settle on my chest in a train sleeper, dog-eared and stuffed with notes. And real maps that unfold, however clumsily, rather than apps on a smartphone.

My idea of bliss is a mid-week day off — an hour or two browsing the stacks, sushi lunch next door at Nami Restaurant, and an afternoon movie down the street.

I inch my way around the constricted quarters, dipping into a William Dalrymple here, a Paul Theroux there, inhaling the aroma of pressed pages, sneezing at the disturbed dust. In a corner, I crouch over Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers over the centuries, and feel kinship with adventuresses long dead, free-thinkers and eccentrics who broke all the rules of female etiquette: British explorer Freya Stark; Gertrude Bell, archeologist (and spy) who helped establish the modern state of Iraq; Annie Londonderry, first woman to bicycle around the world (in the late 19th century); irrepressible crusading reporter Nellie Bly.

Books have been flying off the shelves here in recent weeks as long-time patrons come by to say farewell and stock up on the deeply discounted fare. Axler is unsure what he’ll do with the left-over inventory.

“Libraries don’t seem that interested; I’ve asked around. I’m thinking about donating to prisons — though obviously their readers aren’t going to be travelling any time soon.’’

Books can take anyone beyond four walls.

Axler might put what isn’t purchased into long-term shortage and sell via an online site. He can’t take any more books home because the wife won’t allow it.

“I feel like a tunneler in a prisoner-of-war camp, in reverse, sneaking books in.’’

Staff hug and cry with long-standing customers. “I didn’t tell people at first that we were closing,” says Axler. “I didn’t want it to be a three-month funeral. But it’s emotional — a lot of wear and tear on my soul.”

I bring an armful of books to the cash register: Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn, The Rise & Fall of the British Empire, Lonely Planet’s Guide to Rio de Janeiro, My Life in France by Julia Child, and Eric Newby’s What The Traveller Saw.

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That ought to keep me for a few weeks. And then what? I am forlorn.

Bon voyage, my dear old friend.