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I’m fairly certain I remember the first time I went to a bookstore. It was a Waldenbooks with my grandmother, and she bought me a few of the Calvin And Hobbes treasuries. By the time I was old enough to do my own book shopping though, I always went to Borders on El Camino in San Mateo. There was one right across the street from the closest mall to my hometown, Hillsdale, and it was where I went if I knew I needed a book, or even just to hope I would discover something new.

There were other places I browsed for books. The two I frequented most were a Books, Inc. in Burlingame, where I used to spend a lot of time in middle school and high school before I could drive. I would bike into downtown Burlingame, get lunch, rent movies at Blockbuster – this was when they had the unlimited monthly pass that Netflix based its business model on – and browse through the shelves at Books, Inc.

I went to high school further south along the peninsula, and the most convenient bookstore around there was Kepler’s in Menlo Park. My friends and I went to Kepler’s because it was next to the café we always went to, even now when a group of us is home for the holidays we meet right next to the store and I find myself browsing for a few minutes if I arrive early. Kepler’s is a beloved independent institution that was on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times during my high school years. It always managed to stay afloat mainly due to community insistence that the store’s continued existence was mandatory. It had been there so long, it just needed to stay.

For whatever reason, I just preferred Borders. It had more books than anywhere else, and they were cheaper. Kepler’s had the right attitude, but was far too expensive because it couldn’t compete with lower prices from big chains. Books, Inc. was passable and in a good location, but it was right next to a library, and I always would rather pay nothing for a book than something.

The Borders on El Camino also holds a special place in my heart in relation to the Harry Potter series. It was where my mom and I went for the midnight release of the fourth book when I was nine. There wasn’t a party celebrating the release, only a silent line of very tired mothers and their children eager for the book that would signal the series shift from childhood fantasy into darker territory. I was there for the release of the fifth and sixth books as well, reading in the car on the way home, but enjoying the layout of the store, browsing through magazines, DVDs, CDs.

One of the young adult series I devoured as a kid was Animorphs, and as I got older I would still check to see if they had any left in the children’s book section, to see if anyone was reading what I grew up on. I graduated to browsing CDs, when I wasn’t going to Tower Records, DVDs when I didn’t go to Best Buy, but the real shift was when I started browsing through the miniscule poetry offering and perusing “Literature.”

A bookstore like Borders can be daunting, and also frustrating when they offer little new material in a desired genre, and I can’t really say that I feel bad about Borders closing for good. It ran a lot of small, passionate booksellers out of business, and Barnes & Noble doesn’t seem like the kind of company to live up to the last part of its name. Amazon is as cold and unfeeling as every online emporium, but I will always feel a warmth when I think about my buying experiences at that particular Borders. It was a ritual. When I drove by it over spring break this past March, it was the first time I saw the place closed up, and though I have no feeling either way about the fate of the corporation, the fact that a place where I had good experiences is disappearing makes me nostalgic in a way I never used to understand.

I walked through the Borders in Evanston when it was going through its last sale before shutting down and felt nothing, but I do feel a slight pang of regret that I didn’t get one last chance to browse through the aisles looking at bargain books in a mausoleum to a long-past due business model. Publishing is going to hell, and so is book selling, and the saddest part about it is the passion and wonderful experiences people associate with those institutions. My feelings on the “digital revolution” in publishing don’t belong here now, but I think I just wanted to remember what it felt like to walk through those easy-swinging wooden doors, walk through a store layout I had memorized, and know that there were enough books for me to find something that piqued my interest.

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