The Bicycle Bookstore

the means on which the books were sold on, a bike like this, with a box attached…photo from online…

Sightseeing, translated…

At the dusk, draped over by fog, I’d gotten to the apex of the Treasure Mountains, I saw a smaller than small book store/artist workshop.  There may have been, no more than forty, fifty volumes of books on the shelves!

I can’t believe, that as I’d left this small bookshop, I’d walked to the other lot outside the hallways, and, saw another even smaller bookshop—“the Bicycle Bookshop”.

With just one bicycle, with a small wooden box on the backseat, with about ten books, two magazines in it.  The Led light flashed on inside the box, maybe, after the sky turned dark, it can still, attract the visitors who’d come here for a night view!

The owner of the shop was an artistic young man.  He’d said, that loving books, he’d wished to have a secondhand book store in the future, but for now, he lacked the funding, and there was no storefront, so, he’d used Saturday and Sundays, his days off from work, to start a mobile bookstore, with the bicycle as the means of the storefront, like, testing out the waters for his future dream.  There was, two other wooden cases, that can be pulled out, to be used, as seats for reading, and, pulling open the small wooden door in front, it can be used, as a sort of a bookcase, he’d made all these items himself.

So, I’d bought two books from him with my wife.  I’d asked him how many books he managed to sell for the day?

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm………five, but, it’d rained yesterday, I’d stood here all day long, and only managed to sell five!”

Five books a day, for some of my friends who owned a secondhand bookshop, it’s, considered a good day.  Not bad, this probably had saved him from being pressured by the rents, with some amount of creativity added by him, along with the spirits of the younger generations’ willing to try to find work on the weekends, and his attempts, to communicate with the rest of the outside world too.

So, this, commendable from this young man, he’d set up shop, in this high-tech world, selling paperbacks, because it’s, his dream, to sell hard copies of books, because he realized the importance of reading hard copies of books, and, it’s because of people like him, that made books still a viable form of reading material, as people are more than likely, to just read things online these days.