There's a new bookshop in town

So many bookstores have closed down in the past 20 years, and now there are entire suburbs without any kind of bookshop, either new or used, and that breaks my fucking heart. The ease and convenience of the internet sucked all the goddamn money out of the business and some of the best bookstores I have ever known have closed up shop long ago.

This is most obvious in my old home town, where I was born and spent a significant part of childhood. I still have deeply emotional attachments to them all - the one on the crest of the Bay Hill which was the only place to get Fantastic Four and Star Trek comics, or the one in the Stafford Mall which had the 1986 2000ad annuals and Silvestri X-Men comics, or the one at the front of the Plaza that had an exceptional amount of titless in the mid-1980s (I was only interested in the Indiana Jones comic, which I still have to this day.)

But they're all gone now, all faded away over the years. The last halfway decent bookstore closed a few years ago, leaving just the one chain book outlet, and the second hand place near the Majestic, and that's it.

(The Readers Book Exchange - that second hand place - is still my absolute favourite bookshop of all time, and more responsible for my painfully undying obsession with comics. It's still there, as far as I know, and I always try to stop by. They don't have a lot of comics these days, but I usually buy one of the many, many pulp sci-fi paperbacks they have out back, always finding a Phillip Jose Farmer I've been looking for)

So it's just really nice to see one come back, opposite Ballentynes, at the top of the town.  Bringing one back against the deluge of closures. I've always ultimately judged bookstores by the amount of comics they can give me, but I don't even care if this new one has got comics or no. Any kind of bookstore is always welcome, and always worth a look. 

I haven't been able to get back home for more than a year now, and have been painfully homesick, and I genuinely look forward to seeing the best of friends and dearest of family when I finally get back down south.

But I'm also totally sneaking off to check out the new bookshop in town.