Books

Recently I was at the Yonge-Eglinton mall, which houses a big, bright, shiny Indigo bookstore. I have done my fair share of shopping there. But the bookstore that I find hardest to resist is a scruffy little hole-in-the-wall that's located underground in the Eglinton subway station. I have a very hard time walking past it without going in, and once I'm in there's no way I'm leaving without two or three new books.

I justify it by the fact that it's a discount bookstore, offering 50% off the suggested retail price. The fluorescent red price stickers seduce my inner bibliophile.

You can tell how long a book has been there by how dirty it is. The air quality in the subway station is poor, thanks to the constant crowd of buses idling at any of a dozen or so bays just down the hall. All the black, sooty particulate that belches out of their tailpipes finds its way into the store and settles into the pages. After I've been browsing in there for a while, my hands look like I was just fingerprinted at the police station across the road.

It's actually really disgusting and I can't explain why I'm not more put off by the filth. I think at some level I'm convinced that the dirt is only a superficial mask for unknown treasures. Others may be put off, but I'm going in for the gold!

I bring my selections to the cash, where the owner types up the prices and tries to lure me into buying one more book for an additional discount. I usually decline because I've already got enough to carry all the way home. The owner then pulls out his ever-present tool of the bookstore trade: a vacuum cleaner. With the upholstery attachment, he carefully vacuums my books, sucking as much soot as possible from the cracks in the binding and between the pages.

Now that's customer service! Has any bookstore ever vacuumed your books for you? I didn't think so.