Intuition | Days of browsing over, a bookshop is closing

Much of my long-evaporated youth was spent in Washington, D.C.'s Savile Book Shop, situated in three adjacent Georgetown rowhouses set back from the brick sidewalk. Perhaps I should have spent more time tending to the business of adolesence, defying parental authority, hanging out with inappropriate swains, but those afternoons remain among the most idyllic and indelible of my life.

The Savile Book Shop was possibly my favorite store ever. It defied logic and commerce, arranging paperbacks by publisher, forcing customers to wade through the mammoth Books in Print to locate the imprint prior to the book. This transformed finding a title into a treasure hunt - which, in a sense, it is - and made the buying experience akin to winning a prize, which could be argued as well.

Naturally, the store went out of business years ago.

After 26 years, Princeton's Micawber Books, an equally archaic emporium, is set to close in March. Owner Logan Fox is displeased with Americans' preference for pop culture over books. Ultimately, though, he blames something greater for his store's demise.

"The driving force of all of this is the acceleration of our culture," he told the New York Times recently.

"The old days of browsing, the old days of a person coming in for three or four hours on a Saturday and slowly meandering, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems they wanted, are pretty much over," he said. "Society wants satisfaction and fulfillment now."

Browsing on Amazon is not the same as getting lost in a bookstore. Sure, the online goliath offers speed and discount, but at the expense of so much pleasure.

Such as getting lost, a treat in independent book and music stores, also achieving obsolescence. Stumbling upon the unexpected, the absurd or the sublime is disappearing from our culture with the advent of GPS, MapQuest and other powerful search engines.

We don't search much anymore, in stores, even within individual works. Once, finding a certain song - or a bridge within a song - meant jumping the needle all over a record. Locating the passage was a hard-won joy, a miner striking aural gold.

The same held true for hunting through a reference book, acquiring other information along the way. Searching was a quest. Now, we simply plug in a word, a phrase, and are impatient if the network traffic slows to seconds.

My husband loves mysteries. I have no patience for them. Our solution is for David to read the book - inhale is more precise - then tell me the story. For Christmas, I spent the better part of an hour trolling the mystery section of a bookstore. It was a branch of a large chain, where the selection is huge, though this violated my resolution to support small independent businesses. I did this even though most of the staff care neither about books nor the customers' proclivities, help is a rarity, and the titles, for lack of creativity, are arranged alphabetically by author.

Still, I had big fun bouncing between the aisles, checking writers' blurbs against each other, figuring out which volume or series seemed the strongest, even though I don't read the genre. I loved just holding the books in my hand, feeling them, returning some to the shelves, only to grab some more.

That's the pleasure of browsing, of slowly meandering, as Logan Fox notes, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems. It's a way of trying to stop, or at least slow for a moment, the overwhelming acceleration of our culture.

David plowed through the books in record time, liking every one. Turns out when it comes to browsing and slowly meandering, even for books I'll never read, I'm an idiot savant.

Micawber Books, located at 110-114 Nassau St. in Princeton, its motto "Where good books turn up," is offering 20 percent off all inventory, increasing to 30 percent later this month, and 40 percent in February. The shop will close at the end of March, or earlier if the books are gone before then.