Secondhand book stores -- just like libraries and first dates and festivals and weddings -- exist in a transdimensional manifold interlinking coextensive passageways of time and space —

Immerse yourself in a sprawling second hand book store - bury your nose in an unexpected book, shuffle from one shelf to the next without looking up from the page, turn around

Scuttle crabwards between hand-stacked towers, stacked trolleys, occasional quakes and collapses of overflowing volumes - scuttle down another cramped corridor - still without looking up from the missive in your hands

A noise - you lift your eyes from the page

Where are you now? The same shop? Perhaps - No it is another - you twist back through the stacks and blinking emerge in Morocco, in Marrakesh, in Bolivar, in Soho, in Prague - the 2B Space links point to point - from all these and more

A shop I know exists on the periphery and only offers travel through time - the musty warm dewy smell of aging paper carries you back twenty years in half a second - but the corridors fold in on themselves and lead you nowhere

Comic book shops spiral away in an adjacent roseaceous manifold but on this topic I must keep my vow.

See also

• The Old Library