I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me […]
Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the […]
Went into my favourite bookshop today, which has owls carved of different woods stashed in all its corners. For the first time I noticed the sign on the back of the door: Antiquarian shops are places of inner peace. There followed a series of red circles crossed by red lines, like no-through-road signs for traffic: […]