The Last Bookstore

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” – Neil Gaiman

I went to The Last Bookstore today. Not to worry, that’s just its name. If you are curious about the name, the owner opened his independent bookstore when physical bookstores were closing all over and thought, Well, maybe I’ll just open one more anyway. That was nearly twenty years ago, and the store has now grown to 22,000 square feet. Take that, Bezos.

So yeah, I drove thirty-eight miles, one way, through summer beach traffic and into swarming Downtown Los Angeles just to go to a bookstore. What, you might ask, would cause a person to drive thirty-eight miles, one way, through summer beach traffic and into swarming Downtown Los Angeles just to go to a bookstore? Well, it’s a cool bookstore. To wit: I arrived ten minutes before the doors opened at eleven, and there was a line. Some were there, I’m sure, for its Instagram popularity, ironically, but most appeared to be my people. Book people. Awkward, strange, beautiful book people.

You should know that me and my people, and this is hard to explain, think that a bookstore is a place where invisible magic happens. We really do. Good magic, mostly, so as you’d might expect, we’d rather be there than most any place around, except possibly our own special reading spots where we take the treasures we find in a bookstore. At the bookstore, we wander slowly through the stacks believing that magic is happening all around us. We’re searching for our own magic, so we do an odd little dance, sideways shuffling down the stacks, rarely making eye contact with our fellow citizens and wordlessly exchanging places with one another like a clumsy do-si-do, respecting the magic that we know is flirting with our fellow readers, too.

We believe and do all of this because our lives have been changed, magically, in a bookstore. We have been transported back in time, and I’m talking literally, and if you don’t know what I mean, then I can’t explain it to you. We have discovered new worlds that we had never imagined and now can’t live without. We have found ourselves in a bookstore, including soulmates that were dead before we arrived on this planet but who now live with us, magically. We have lived the lives of many others, too, vicariously. Maybe vicariously. Sometimes it is hard to tell.

I went to The Last Bookstore today and left with two new treasures: Box Socials by W.P. Kinsella, and Morgan’s Passing by Anne Tyler. At the checkout, with a line behind me, the staff member wanted to talk about Anne Tyler. We talked about our favorite Anne Tyler books, and for a few moments, we seemed to forget that this was actually a place of business. Probably because we knew it was much more.

So, I’ll be back, traffic be damned. Although I may take the subway next time since I noticed that The Last Bookstore is very close to the Pershing Square station. That way I can read a book.