(I’d written most of this column when I sent an idle tweet out, asking people to name their favourite bookshops. The response went on for the next two days: below the column, some favourite tweets. Thank you all for crowdsourcing this! )

Published in the Business Standard, May 20, 2013

Bookshops that aren’t really bookshops have an unmistakeable feel about them, like faux Italian cafes that serve butter chicken a la Tuscany.

The books will take second place to a variety of other tchotchkes: handbags, pretty stationery, cellphone covers, aromatherapy candles and incense sticks, tatty jewellery and assorted bling. The high-end bookstores will display these tastefully, the middle-range bookstore will lay these out in the manner of a Janpath pavement sale, but the effect is the same—to warn the bibliophile to step carefully. There is nothing innocuous about this merchandise; like a virus, it will slowly infect an even otherwise good store, until it has vanquished the books completely.

This is the kind of bookshop most commonly found in the places where new readers come in, lured by the idea of buying books. Often, these readers have had far more exposure to the cinema or to music than they have to reading. You cannot reasonably expect readers to thrive in an environment where most homes have magazines and TV, but no one buys a book in months, where there are few local libraries or good school libraries.

When a seasoned reader steps into the kind of bookstore you find in malls and large markets—the small, independent bookstores cannot afford the rates a Swarovski crystal showroom would pay—they know what to expect. But when a new reader comes in to one of these stores, they will leave with either the junk food of familiarity—popcorn bestsellers, bhelpuri consume-and-throw novels—or a faint sense of having been cheated, even if they can’t name what they’re missing.

Jason Epstein wrote, “A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.”

But he was speaking of the kind of bookstore that draws readers back time and time again, such as Ram Advani Booksellers in Lucknow, which furnished generations of historians with an unparalleled education. Ram Guha wrote of this in The Hindu, some years ago: “For the slightly older, ‘going Ganjing’ meant a triple pilgrimage to the Coffee House, the British Library, and Ram Advani.”

In a completely unscientific survey of friends on Twitter, I asked what made a bookshop special. Marryam Reshii spoke of a “book city” like Singapore, with several excellent bookstores, and singled out Kinokuniya’s delights. Harini Calamur brought back memories when she mentioned Lotus in Bandra, situated over a petrol pump.

Half of an entire bookshelf in my house is furnished with recommendations from Virat, Lotus’s manager. When Lotus shut down, our budget for books shrank until we moved disastrously close to The Bookshop in Jorbagh, where KD Singh helped me discover author after author I’d have never encountered otherwise. Many mentioned both of the legendary Shanbaghs—the late TN, whose Strand bookstore in Bombay built readers’ collections and their book memories, and TS, who runs Premier in Bangalore.

As the recommendations and stories came in, I understood why people love certain bookstores, like Giggles in Chennai and can’t accept the ersatz ones we’re offered these days, however many varieties of coffee and pastries they serve. The right owner or manager becomes part of your reading life; Nandita Saikia remembered how Crossword would allow customers to stay on and read, becoming a surrogate library.

The second function of a great bookstore cannot be replicated by a search engine. The books I buy on the Kindle or in other e-book formats reflect my tastes, and how sad it is to be a prisoner of one’s own tastes, however eclectic.

The writer Annie Proulx explains our need for secondhand books, and for bookstores that allow you to explore. “On the jumbly shelves in my house I can find directions for replacing a broken pipe stem, a history of corncribs, a booklet of Spam recipes, a 1925 copy of “Animal Heroes of the Great War” (mostly dogs but some camels); dictionaries of slang, dialect and regional English,” she writes in a New York Times essay.

“This digging involves more than books. I need to know which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats, to note that a magpie in flight briefly resembles a wooden spoon, to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds.”

The bookstores my friends named—Blossoms in Bangalore, Giggles in Chennai, Literati in Goa, Bhartiya Pustakalaya in Jammu, Grantha Mandir in Berhampur—were, to us, places of magic. In our hearts, we readers are secret Amundsens and Norgays, and the reading obsession is nothing less than a desire to experience all of the world, or as much of it as can be contained between the two covers of a book.

The right kind of bookstore tempts you to linger forever–and some do. As Sumant Srivathsan tweeted, “My family would regularly call Landmark in Madras and ask the staff to send me home.”