The Bookshop

The Bookshop:   By Pamela Hill

I stumbled upon a place forgotten.  Clay-colored cement floors were dusty and drab, and walls lined with unsymmetrical, rutted wooden shelves displayed books that stood as castles in rows or books that lay piled in stacks because they had been read and handled so often they were too humble to stand.  The scent of their musty perfume made my head spin.

I stood in awe, almost hypnotized.

In the most dingy corner of the vast room of bookcases aligned in no particular pattern there appeared before me a genie, a magician, and flying all around me were enchanted carpets and flying horses.  I laughed at my musings.  My hand slowly rose to a shelf to caress the red leather volume of Arabian Nights, and as I pulled it from the shelf, dust alit around me and settled in my hair and on my face.  I held the treasure to my chest. 

Slowly I maneuvered around the menagerie of shelves when to my mind came the words:  A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us, and of course there I found a volume of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  

I continued on my journey through the dust where the sun does not shine, and where I did encounter a mind that startled me.  

"All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king" – J. R.R. Tolkien

I had no choice but to climb the bookcase ladder to reach the dark green leather volume where the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, imparted wisdom from Lord of the Rings.  

The Bookshop did not glitter from glass glinting sprinkled sun, nor did the scent of roses drift to please the senses. For the dark, dusty bookshop had no windows, and the swinging light from wire hanging bulbs did cast its shadows, but it was the most beautiful place I had ever been, although the beauty that it held came deeply from within.