F-o-x.

            In the ‘90s, f-o-x* spelled evil. It’s been over a decade since the reinvention of the concept of the bookstore’s arch nemesis. It was once the big, bad mega-bookstore. But that was in the era of the book. And it lasted for a while. For quite some many decades the book was the guest of honour in many homes; the attraction in the living room, the thrill hiding in the bedroom and the lure of the bathroom.  

            It’s now the time of the pad, pod and touch. Things that we can’t feel like the spine of a book; can’t smell like the eau-de-book-glue and most definitely cannot romance like a book in the light of a night lamp.

This brings me to the nub of this rant: the imminent closing down of my shrine. The one place that I learned that the best way to buy a book is with your eyes, then with the tips of your fingers and then finally your wallet. It is at Book World that I learned to anticipate the rush of adrenaline that comes with the first view of a wall of books—correction, walls of books—all around. The many coloured spines stacked up like snatches into different worlds. Fonts waltzed and authors jousted for attention. It’s my one place of true and complete abandon.

But the e-Book has taken us willing prisoner. And we’d rather read on the luminous screens before us than with the grain of a page against our skin. And then there is that part of the whole that does not read at all; save for the obligatory text book/summary of notes/question paper/text message/etc.

            So here I am: at the end of an epoch of belief; on the other side of a river of faith in the invincibility of the book store. But the going gets tough when the money gets going. And all I can do is shed a tear and hope that someday the age of the printed word returns. A book is my dream cased in a dust jacket, my tears wrapped in clean lines of text. A book is my happiness spun of coarse, thick paper and offered to me at the hands of that tall man of immense wisdom in the lore of books and happy memories.

*See You've Got Mail.