the bookshop that still exists

Khan Market has a bookshop. Two, actually, but one of them has been there since before I was born, and it has the specific quality of places that have been doing the same thing for a very long time: a settled authority, a slightly exasperated tolerance for people who don't know what they want. The man at the counter, whose name I've never asked, knows the stock the way some people know their own houses — not by having memorized it but by having lived in it long enough that the knowledge is ambient. You describe a book badly — "it has a red cover, it was shortlisted for something, it's about a family" — and he either has it or he doesn't, and if he doesn't he tells you where it might be. I go there when I want something I haven't heard of. There's a specific pleasure in handing someone else the curation. I say something about what I've liked and don't like and he goes and comes back with two or three things. He's been wrong twice in maybe thirty visits. Both times the wrongness was interesting enough to justify itself. Most things like this are gone now or going. The cafes, the small shops, the particular people who've been doing a particular thing for decades. This one is still there. I buy something every time I go. More than I intend to, usually. It seems like the right thing to do.