If you build it, they will come

I drove to the new bookstore down the river today. This is the third time I've been there since it opened in November, but the earlier visits were for Christmas gifts, while this one was all about me. It's nice to have a real bookstore within a 30-minute drive; in the past I've had to content myself with brief visits to the local used bookstores (brief because used bookstores make me sneeze) or, a few times a year, making the two-hour drive to the state capital, where there are bookstores galore. Now there's a real bookstore reasonably close by and I love it even though (1) they somehow lost my order for David Citino's posthumous poetry collection; (2) the person who "helped" me had never even heard of Citino and couldn't manage to spell either his name or mine correctly; and (3) the coffee shop was out of chai latte.

Every time I go in there, I am amazed to see the number of people sitting around reading. I realize that this is a common sight at bookstores all over the country, but I've never seen it here and I wonder: where were all these reading people before the new bookstore opened? Did they plop down on the floor in the book section at Wal-Mart or hover over stacks of discount books at Sam's Club? Where did they come from? If the new bookstore fails, where will they go?

So far, the new bookstore appears to be doing quite well. Who says nobody reads in Appalachia?