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Andrew O'Hagan muses on the perfect bookshop.

This story from The Guardian this past weekend:

Great bookshops are the heart of every literary culture, the chambers where life-giving material is exchanged and where writers and readers deposit and find their secrets.

I once sat among the stacks at the City Lights Book Store in San Franscisco with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (pic left), as so many people had done since 1953 when the shop opened. Above the traffic, you could almost hear the sound of human activism, of writing and reading giving out to hope and change, while Ferlinghetti showed me the feathers in his old cocked hat.

He told me of Jack Kerouac coming down to the store and reading up a storm before drinking like a loon in the Vesuvius bar next door and missing a meeting with Henry Miller. "We always had a world going on in here," he said. "Like nowhere else."

The greatest bookshops set up a trade in books and passions, in the interplay of inquiring minds and the search for values. And so, the best bookshops in the world become centres of a way of life - as Shakespeare & Company is on the Rue de la Bûcherie, or Garrison Keillor's new shop, Common Good Books, which he opened in St Paul, Minnesota this month, is sure to become - because there is so little else around now that is like them. Independence is their creed but also their character: they seek to know what they are selling and to sell it with feeling.

Read the rest of this great piece by Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan. You must read it.