Denis McKeown
Tone
I was just seventeen and a train journey took me to the city. I walked up the tree lined street to the University district, the Georgian houses looking a little down at heel, the cracked pavements, the gardens beyond and it being early in the year just the hint, the promise of spring. I turned down a wide street to the University Bookshop. Walking through the doors - the portal to discovery - it was not just the air conditioning that raised my temperature. Stretching before me the lines of shelves rising to the ceiling. Books. Beautiful books, holding limitless treasures. I could just take one in my hands and open the pages. I could take this beautiful book home and bit by bit unearth it's secrets.
I was in my thirties when the rumour of the book's decline and replacement was circulating. I hadn't paid much attention. I had been on holiday up in Scotland on a road bike, with dear friends and a couple of tents. Or just thinking about getting a cheap flight to the USA. But some months passed and I happened to pass that bookshop near the Botanic Gardens. I wandered in. Something had changed. The shelves were gones. The books were all gone. There was an enormous television screen instead and it was surrounded by beautiful glittering "Kindle" devices.
The world it seemed had moved on from the paperback book.
I was in my thirties when the rumour of the book's decline and replacement was circulating. I hadn't paid much attention. I had been on holiday up in Scotland on a road bike, with dear friends and a couple of tents. Or just thinking about getting a cheap flight to the USA. But some months passed and I happened to pass that bookshop near the Botanic Gardens. I wandered in. Something had changed. The shelves were gones. The books were all gone. There was an enormous television screen instead and it was surrounded by beautiful glittering "Kindle" devices.
The world it seemed had moved on from the paperback book.