And now, for today’s little jaunt to the delightful Dutch city of Haarlem!

My daughter turned twenty-one this month. And she was sadly lamenting to me the trials of a February birthday. There are just so few celebration opportunities. No laid-back picnic in Vondelpark, no sunny terrace, no renting a boat to cruise the Amsterdam canals. It’s too cold (and most likely rainy) for such summertime delights.

As a fellow February birthday, I know her pain. So I suggested she could have a party at our house. She laughed out loud and rolled her eyes.

And, fair. Hanging out in an 800-square-foot apartment with one’s parents underfoot could put a bit of a damper on any college party. When I went on to helpfully impart a few of my favourite vintage cocktail recipes, she said her friends weren’t sixty years old.

For the record, neither am I. But I obviously wasn’t needed here. So I suggested to the Bookish Husband that the two of us make everyone happy and head off for a night away, leaving the house in a much more appealing state for hosting a birthday party.

One of the best, closest weekend escapes from Amsterdam is Haarlem. In fact, at only fifteen minutes from Amsterdam by train, Haarlem makes a great day trip too. There’s nothing that makes me feel more like a young, hip European than spontaneously grabbing my backpack and hopping on a train. Even if I do have the libationary tastes of a sexagenarian.

The weather gods had a rare fit of benevolence, and blessed our weekend with the most gorgeous blue skies. It was very warm for February. If you stood in direct sunlight, you could maybe even unbutton your coat.

And Haarlem, I can tell you, is spectacular. Here’s the Gothic St. Bavo Cathedral at sunrise.

Conveniently located on the main street that goes from the lovely 19th-century train station to the walking-only historical centre is an English-language bookshop I’d been wanting to visit for awhile.

Catnap Books was founded around the time I decided to start my bookshop in Italy. Back then, I chatted a bit with the owner, Selby, in a Facebook group for aspiring booksellers, and started following her on Instagram. At the time, she was doing regular little popups as she built her inventory of books for the shop.

About a year and a half ago, Catnap Books opened as a permanent storefront. I was in Haarlem last summer, and really wanted to visit, but they happened to be closed, as many small European businesses do in August. So I was delighted this time when the Bookish Husband and I were able to pop in whilst walking from the train station to our hotel.

And what a darling shop! They were all decked out for Valentine’s Day, of course, with hearts and roses and gorgeous crown moulding, and furniture that could adorn the castle in Beauty and the Beast. And yes, that’s me, in the hat and retro leather backpack, delving deep in the secondhand stacks for the gem I just knew was waiting there for me.

And sure enough, I found it! From the book jacket:

At the end of December 1817, two years after Waterloo, Benjamin Robert Haydon, history painter of gigantic canvases, gave a dinner party to which he invited his young friend John Keats, budding poet, to meet his elder, the awe-inspiring William Wordsworth. Charles Lamb, the essayist, was also included among the guests. There was laughter, the declamation of poetry, high-minded discussions and ridiculous antics during a party of brilliance and wit that came to be known as the Immortal Dinner.

Absolute catnip for a nerdy bookish type like me. And yet another very good answer to the question of which historical personality you’d like to dine with if you had the chance. With the Immortal Dinner, you wouldn’t have to choose just one.

And the next best thing to an invitation to said dinner is this book, which I can’t wait to delve into. It’s definitely going to feature as a cameo in my next paid post, on Ian McEwan’s latest novel. Because he mentions The Immortal Dinner in his book!

Sadly, when we popped in on Saturday, Selby wasn’t in the shop. So on our way back to the train station the next day, we stopped by again, and found her there! We chatted a bit, and I admitted to stalking her bookshop on social media (or as the Bookish Husband put it rather less creepily, finding her an inspiration in my own bookshop quest).

She gave me some very useful advice about running an English-language bookshop in a foreign country. Such as to learn which books they read in English in the local school system, so you can supply them to children and teenagers in the area. And to stock popular titles about the country you’re in, and language-learning books, because foreigners like you will buy them.

She also encouraged me to stock some new books alongside the used ones, according to local demand. Which I was very happy to hear, since while I’m passionately devoted to secondhand books, I’d love to be the kind of bookseller who gets surprise packages of ARCs in the mail, and to have an excuse to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair every year.

And of course one doesn’t set foot in an independent bookshop without buying something. Since I’d already gotten a book (ok, and also a darling enamel pin that looks like a Penguin classic and says “support your local bookshop”) the day before, my eye was drawn to the small but well-curated selection of fountain pens at the counter. I’ve been eyeing a Kaweko ever since I first got into fountain pens.

And especially now that I try to carry a mini notebook around with me on the day to day, I really wanted needed a miniature fountain pen.

So, da-da-da-dum!!! Here’s my honey-coloured Kaweko with caramel brown ink. (I’m very into their culinary nomenclature.)

Selby divulged that it’s her own bookish husband who’s the pen enthusiast. She actually did not refer to him as bookish, but must not all husbands of booksellers be at least honorarily bookish? He at least has excellent taste in pens, which is certainly book-adjacent.

Selby also alerted me to the fact that there’s a yearly pen festival in Utrecht, and the Bookish Husband (my Bookish Husband, not to confuse things here) immediately and without any prompting said, “we should go!” Which melted my heart on the spot, and reconfirmed—not that we needed any extra confirmation—that he is indeed the man for me.

On the way out, I got another chance to peruse “The Museum of Things Found in Books,” which is an idea I’m absolutely going to steal borrow when I open The Wardrobe in Narni. (Not least because I’ve already found a ghost in a book donated last year!)

And did I do anything else in Haarlem other than repeatedly visiting this bookshop? Yes, a few things. The Bookish Husband and I did our version of bar crawling, i.e. having as many cappuccinos at as many cute European cafés as possible. I even snuck out early in the morning for a walk around Haarlem while the Bookish Husband slept in.

I wrote my morning pages accompanied by this excellent latte macchiato and a picture-perfect view of the canal at The Coffee Spot Spaarne, which I absolutely recommend. They even loaned me a phone charger because I’d completely drained my battery taking a million beautiful photos of Haarlem in the morning.

I think you’ll agree with me about Haarlem in the morning.

And though we didn’t visit it this time around, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the Teylers Museum, the oldest museum in the Netherlands, and absolutely unmissable if you go to Haarlem. As you can see if you zoom in on the photo above, the building looks like a giant curiosity cabinet.

Which is basically what it is. This place is magical. Here’s the atrium, where you can see the Rococco and Neoclassical detailing.

The museum is based on the collection of a merchant banker named Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, who collected books, fossils, medals, paintings, and other artefacts. When he died, he left 2 million florins (80 million euros in today’s currency) to the city of Haarlem, to promote the study of religion, art and science.

The city renovated and added on to his house, and created a wonderful public showcase of objects as diverse as miniature windmills, an impressive collection of taxidermy, and the tippity top of Mont Blanc, which was hacked off in 1787 by a guy named Horace de Saussure.

I love these old museums when they’re left more or less intact, because they tell so much not only about the objects, but also about historical ways of thinking about knowledge and art and nature, and how they were all so much more intimately entwined in people’s minds back then.

So if you are ever in Amsterdam, I highly recommend a trip to Haarlem, which in addition to the bookish delights listed above, is close to the Dutch coast, and full of cobblestone streets, cute little free libraries, cafés, and lovely shops.

Better yet, I’m always an advocate for spreading the love to smaller places and taking pressure off over-touristed cities. So go ahead: flip the script entirely and and stay in beautiful, calmer Haarlem, then take the train in for a day trip to Amsterdam.

Have you ever been to Haarlem? Or do you have a favourite small hidden gem near a famous tourist city somewhere in the world? (extra points if it includes a charming bookshop!)

And what are the holidays but an excuse to do more of all of the above?

And then there’s writing books. Have you noticed the hints I’ve been dropping lately? I wrote a novel!

I. Wrote. A. Novel.

At this point, I am hopeful and masochistic enough to dream that someone besides the Bookish Husband might think it’s good.

To wit: a literary agent.

It’s also true that the Bookish Husband didn’t get the first look. I wouldn’t subject him to that. First drafts are for my eyes only. Once things get a bit more coherent, I call in my writing buddies.

I’ve been workshopping this book with my critique group for most of the five years I’ve spent writing, rewriting, and editing. I’ve also sent the manuscript to several readers I trust to give me unvarnished feedback. And then finally I did share it with the Bookish Husband and my mom, because yes, I also need someone who’s going to tell me it’s perfect other than that one very fixable typo on page 47.

If five years sounds like an insanely long time, well, I agree. But I take comfort in the fact that this is the book that taught me how to write a novel. I learned how to plot, how to make characters come alive, how to tearfully cut 85% of my adverbs and adjectives. How to find my voice.

And I wanted this book to be as polished as I could make it before I started sending it off to literary agents. Which is kind of like double-checking your gear before heading up Mount Everest.

If you are lucky enough to be untroubled by the quixotic ambition of publishing a novel, it’s one of those things that falls in the category of mountains to leave alone unless nothing else in this world can make you happy. Writing a book (and then convincing people to publish it) is a rollercoaster: wild emotions, endless waiting, crushing rejection, and—yes—the occasional burst of euphoria.

In the first place, the emotional journey of writing a novel is the farthest thing from linear. It’s a bizarre oscillation between falling in love with the incandescence of your own sentences, and then a few hours later tumbling into a pit of despair because the entire thing is actually a pile of hot garbage, and why did you not see this before?

Repeat ad infinitum.

It’s you alone in your writing den, muttering stories to yourself.

On a good day, some of the stories you tell yourself are stories about your future illustrious writing career. Bestseller lists. Literary prizes. Someone loving your words so much they tattoo them on their body.

On a bad day, well. Best get out of the house, and take a long, long walk.

Writing is eternally captivating, and endlessly frustrating. I can’t live without it. And true, sometimes I can’t live with it either. But like I said, there are always my sanity walks, even if in Amsterdam they often involve Wellies and a raincoat, and weather so bad my dog refuses to come with.

It does make me wonder: if I’m so wrapped up in the writing process, why do I even feel the need to publish? Why not fill my notebooks and keep them to myself?

Maybe the same reason I’m addicted to hitting “publish” here on Substack. There’s something about sending my words out into the world that feels indispensable. Is it a plea for connection? A desperate wish to be understood? Or just vanity—the egomaniacal, crackpot idea that my weird little private thoughts might interest someone else?

Whatever it is, I’ve been feeling this way for quite awhile. There’s a scene in the 1994 version of Little Women where Jo finishes her manuscript, and then slides a little geranium sprig under the twine holding the pages together. That moment right there, when the novel is done, and ready to be sent out, was the one I instantly longed to inhabit.

By the time I got around to querying my novel, we were no longer writing by hand and tying up with twine. We weren’t even typing up and printing out. We weren’t mailing manuscripts by post, or even barely emailing anymore. The process of querying an agent is mostly automated now, thanks to a website called QueryTracker.

Which is good news and bad news. With its ready-made, self-populating forms, QueryTracker does streamline the process of querying, and I have no doubt it helps agents keep their inboxes organised. So hurrah for that. But the very fact that such a thing as QueryTracker exists points towards an inescapable fact about publishing these days: lots of people are writing books! Which I love, because storytelling is a core human thing, and I’m thrilled that so many of us take it as our own and want to share.

But it does mean that one of the biggest challenges with querying an agent right now is the sheer volume of queries hitting their inboxes. For most agents, we’re talking dozens—if not hundreds—of new query letters to sift through each day. Which no doubt is, on the whole, good for publishing. Yay for having choice. And from the number of great new books I read every year, this abundance is bearing fruit.

Still, it makes it hard for a writer to stand out in the so-called “slush pile.” You have only a short query letter to convince an agent that your book is amazing (and you won’t be a completely unhinged person to work with).

So once I finally finished my novel, I spent many hours perfecting my query letter. There’s more or less a formula for this. It starts with a distillation of housekeeping details (word count, genre, title, and “comps”—published books that are like your book, to give an idea of how yours might sell). Then there’s a pacy plot paragraph that reads like the jacket copy of your (as yet unrealised) book. And finally, a juicy little summary of your writing credentials, where of course I don’t miss the chance to show off Escape to the Bookshop, because I’m inordinately pleased with this cosy corner of the internet.

(Aren’t you? Go ahead: be a star and share it with a bookish friend!)

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After the query letter, I had to write a two-page synopsis of all the major plot points, which is WAY harder than it sounds, because you’re forced to figure out what the heck is actually going on inside your novel, and whether the plot even makes sense. (Yes, my first attempt at a synopsis revealed various plot holes that needed fixing, and the book is now stronger for it. But like all parts of this process, it was painful!)

Finally, most agents want to see some portion of the manuscript. Maybe it’s the first five pages, maybe ten. Or it could be 20, 25 or 50. Some want to see a certain number of chapters (most commonly 1, 1-2, or 1-3). Or maybe they ask for the first 10,000, 20,000, or 50,000 words. So yes, I have separate Word documents for each and every one of these specific manuscript sample sizes.

If the stars align (i.e. your book is actually maybe good AND the timing is just right), you start getting requests from agents to send you the full manuscript. I got my very first full request the morning after I sent out my first round of queries, which gave me wildly unrealistic expectations for how quickly agents are getting through their overstuffed inboxes.

Mostly, what you hear back is no. But do you know what I love about the publishing industry? Every single one of these agents does their best to let all these sensitive writers down as gently as they can. They encourage you to keep going. They remind you that tastes are subjective, and another agent might love your work. They wish you luck. Sometimes, they even take the time to give you some personalised feedback. They’ve obviously put time and thought and care into crafting these rejections, and I think that’s such a kind thing to do.

Still, no matter how kindly offered, rejection hurts. For me and pretty much every other author in the querying trenches, the rejections outweigh the full requests by a considerable margin. So that’s a lot of time spent in the depths of despair. Cue yet another walk along the canals of Amsterdam.

Every so often, you get that magical yes: a request for the full manuscript. Mostly, it’s a trickle. But this week, I got two full requests in the space of twenty-four hours. Which of course makes me start indulging in all sorts of magical thinking. I’m no longer even nominally at the wheel of this rollercoaster. Every time I get a full request, it sends me all the way up to the euphoric apogee. Life is amazing! I’m living my dream! I’m on track to become a published author!

Then another rejection rolls in, and down I plunge. Querying feels like a high-stakes cross between online dating and playing the lottery. Good thing writerly angst is a core component of my expertise.

Sending out a full manuscript triggers another round of waiting. This time, you’re waiting for them to read an entire book. I’ve only been querying for a couple of months, so all the agents who’ve requested my full manuscript are still reading. Will any of them invite me for “the call” to discuss representing me as an author? I fervently hope so. I’d love to find “the one.”

Finding an agent is a happy ending, but also a whole new beginning. The rollercoaster starts back up when your agent begins submitting your book to editors at publishing houses. Not to mention when your book gets published. Will anyone even buy it? And if they do, will they hate it, and write crushing reviews? So, yes, I expect to be in some variation of my current state for a good while yet. Ideally, the rest of my life.

In the meantime, to keep sane, I keep writing. I’m three drafts into a second manuscript, and well into the first draft of a third. I like to have at least two writing projects going at all times. That way, I can cheat on one with the other whenever I feel stuck.

Which may or may not have been a partial motivation for starting Escape to the Bookshop. So, every time you open another of these missives, you can enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re helping me procrastinate on writing my next novel, or distracting me from refreshing my inbox yet again.

Thank you for assisting in this important work.

Curious what’s up with the bookshop in the meantime? Read this:

Are you an aspiring author too? I subscribe to several literary agents on Substack who generously share all kinds of interesting stuff about the publishing industry. Maybe you’ll find them helpful too:

Jenna Satterthwaite: Jenna’s Substack - Author + Agent + Human

Alia Hanna Habib: Delivery & Acceptance

Louise Buckley: Writing & Self-Editing Fundamentals

Richard Curtis: Inside Agenting

Danielle Bukowski: Just Reading All Day

Erin C. Niumata: Erin’s Third Act

Every time someone takes time to comment or send a message telling me that something I wrote expressed exactly what they feel, it gives me a little thrill. It’s like C.S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves:

“Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’”

I find it’s often my oddest, most private thoughts that make me feel impossibly alone. But when I finally gather my courage to share, they turn out to be the very ones that resonate with other people. This, in a nutshell, is why I write. And why I read. To feel seen and known, and to help others feel seen and known as well.

It’s a lonely world out there, and what do we have to cling to but each other?And sometimes, these sparks of fellow-feeling grow into fragile beams of light that connect us across oceans and continents. I never take a single one for granted.

Long-time readers will know that I think of C.S. Lewis as a kind of patron saint of the bookshop I’m starting in Italy. It was he who saw the medieval town of Narni on an old Latin atlas, and imagined it into a whole secret world.

That’s why I’m naming my bookshop The Wardrobe, in his honour. I’d like to think it will be a kind of portal to magical worlds, as all bookshops are.

Long-time readers will also know that The Wardrobe Bookshop does not quite yet exist. Except in our collective imagination.

A year ago, the Bookish Husband and I bought a little stone house with a medieval tower, right in the centre of Narni. Which means that every time I travel there, I get to walk up through the labyrinth of Narni’s many-arched narrow streets until I turn the most magical corner of all and find myself at my own front door.

I can’t believe I get to call such a wonderful place home, at least from time to time. And yes, it’s true that the road to Italy never did run smooth. But what’s a fairy tale without at least one or two unwinnable battles and hopeless quests?

Of course, the whole point of a hopeless quest is to show us that the world is more hopeful than it seems, that dreams come true, that it’s worth working for things we care about even when the outcome feels uncertain.

Which is exactly how I got it into my head that I could turn the unfinished cellar beneath my stone house in Italy into the bookshop of my dreams. And the more time I spend in Narni, the more it feels like anything could happen, and my dreams are only a few million miles of red tape from coming true.

Fairy tales are also full of wise old hermits and fairy godmothers. Last month I told you about the retired professor who donated part of her extensive and well-curated book collection to my future bookshop.

After I got the books home and unpacked them into the built-in bookshelf alcove in my living room in Italy, I was paging through a volume of Byron’s poetry (as one does). And what should I find but a stack of intriguing old photographs, tucked inside the dust jacket.

Upon finding these photos, I immediately contacted the professor who had donated the books, sure that they must be treasured family heirlooms.

It’s also true that in my mind, I was already driving back up to her house, located conveniently near the town of Montefalco, where on our way home from picking up the books, we stopped for lunch and a glass of the truly delicious Sagrantino wine the town is famous for.

However, the professor asked around amongst her family to see if anyone recognised the people in the photographs. No one did, so she wrote me back with the sage advice to “maybe put them back in the book and think of it as being haunted.”

And isn’t that just one of the very best things about browsing through books in a secondhand bookshop: you never know what unexpected treasures you might find.

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Obviously, I took her advice, and slipped the photographs back into the dust jacket of . . . a book. Possibly the Collected Poems of Lord Byron, possibly some other book. You won’t know till you’re in the bookshop some day in the future, and out of nowhere you come across that mysterious boy, gazing up at you.

He looks like a kindly ghost, though, don’t you think?

And he’ll probably feel right at home. Even I can admit that at the moment, the future bookshop does look a little haunted.

It’s hard to believe, but when I started Escape to the Bookshop a year ago, I had one single solitary reader: . We’d never met in person, since she lives in Malta, and I live in Amsterdam. But we were already friends.

We met years ago, when the author posted on Instagram how grateful she was for her writing group, and offered to match up newer writers who followed her so they could also have the wonderful gift that is a supportive writing group. (I don’t think Amy reads my Substack, but if you do happen to read this, Amy, thank you so much for introducing us.)

Maureen and I were delighted to find that we were in the same time zone, and started meeting every Monday morning to chat about our writing and support each other through the highs and lows of what can be a very solitary pursuit. We soon found out that we had lots in common, including our respective religious upbringings, love for dark academia, and a soft spot for archives. And of course, Italy.

So this summer, when it turned out we were going to be in Umbria at the same time, we knew we just had to meet up. She and her delightful family came to Narni for the day, and I showed them all the best hidden corners.

And of course we invited them back to our house, even though it was in one or another state of messy home improvement projects. At this point, the professor’s books were still in grocery bags and stacks on the floor. But I’d told them all about my wonderful windfall, and how excited I was to have a tiny seed of inventory for the bookshop.

Maureen’s oldest daughter started looking through the books. And what do you know, she found a ponderous academic tome: Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, and asked if she could buy it.

My first impulse was to gift it to her on the spot. The Bookish Husband (whose day job when not making my home renovation dreams come true is corporate sales training) said, laughing, “this is why bookshops don’t make any money!” And, fair.

But Maureen’s daughter insisted on paying, at which point I further demonstrated by superior negotiating skills by suggesting a symbolic one euro payment. Her dad produced a two-euro coin, and the deal was struck. Then we all traipsed down to the spooky basement, where she and I formalised the transaction.

I know it’s the tiniest of beginnings, but I can’t begin to describe the joy in my heart that arose from putting a book into the hands of a young woman who really wanted it. Even though I have a long way to go yet to fulfil my dream, in that moment I felt like a real bookseller.

And the people I wanted most to tell about this little milestone are you, my readers, because I knew you’d understand. These are the small things that mean so much. So thanks for being with me on this quixotic little journey. I can’t wait to see where we end up!

In the meantime, would you like a peek at a magical bookshop in Italy that already does (and yet does not!) exist? Check out this post:

And then I laugh and laugh and laugh. But only inside my mind, since laughing out loud would be rude. And anyway, I’m laughing at myself. Having so very many books is what gave me the idea of opening a bookshop in the first place. I’ve been training for this for years. And by training, I mean haunting used bookshops and library book sales, and otherwise collecting books.

I’m not really into the whole idea of manifesting, but I have noticed that I think about books all the time, and books flow to me. And there’s got to be something to it besides just the fact that when someone asks if I want a book, I can’t keep myself from saying yes, and once a book comes into my home, it’s hard for me to let it go.

In principle, I like the idea of passing on a book I’ve loved, but in practice, I have to go to the bookstore and buy that same book, wrap it up immediately in pretty paper, and then gift it as soon as I possibly can, before I become attached. It’s safer if the bookshop in question offers gift wrapping.

I know this about myself, I recognise it’s a bit unhinged, and I’m getting help for it. If by “help,” you mean surrounding myself with people who agree that the more books, the better, and one can’t possibly collect too many.

I own such an abundance of books that for any other item I’d probably consider it excessive. Although, just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t each book unique? It’s not like I own a thousand different copies of Wuthering Heights. I’ve got two. Three, at most.

You see the problem. But with books, we don’t call it hoarding, right?

Hear me out. I have definite hoarding tendencies. (Who would have thought?) By focusing them on books, I avoid worse catastrophes. Trust me, this is true.

I once did get caught up in the whole madness of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This was a book I had vowed I would never read. As a teenager, at least 85% of the fights I had with my mother revolved around the state of my messy bedroom, and the stuff she wanted me to throw away.

Luckily, it’s never caused tension in my marriage.

Every time I moved to a different place at university, I would be up late in the night, battling with all my junk. During one of those moves I remember going out to the dumpster at midnight with my roommate to throw out six giant pickle jars (empty of pickles, but full of pickle juice, which in my nineteen-year-old wisdom I reused to pickle baby carrots in monumental quantities).

When the Bookish Husband and I got engaged and were contemplating moving our combined belongings across the Sierra Nevada to Utah, he came over to my house to go through all my “special boxes” in my parents’ garage. Together, we decided which items I should keep, and which ones to throw away. At the end, I looked at the pile of things to throw away, and cried.

I kept it all. Somewhere along the line, the Bookish Husband bought me a set of clear plastic containers and gave up trying to get me to throw any of it out.

Suffice it to say that I have always found it hard to let things go. When Marie Kondo’s book became popular, we were living in a four bedroom house in Florida. I had a big walk-in closet (which doubled as a tornado shelter), a giant garage, a pantry, and loads of other storage in various areas of the house. So I was in a prime position to take advantage of all the fabulous stuff people left out on the curb when they didn’t need it.

I didn’t need it either, but I was not about to let that stop me. A set of huge aquariums? A hydroponic gardening system? A chest of drawers I couldn’t fit in my house, but left in the garage to fill up with all the other stuff I was collecting? Why not?

I’ll admit, it was a bit out of control.

We downsized spectacularly when we packed up to move to Amsterdam, because we knew we would be moving into a two-bedroom flat. In a sort of rapid-fire reversal of the previous three years, we left pile after pile out on the curb. Most of it was gone within hours, if not minutes. (I still regret my wonderful roll-top desk!) Even so, once we unpacked at the diminutive flat with which you are by now intimately acquainted, we got rid of much, much more.

Having already accomplished this and other dramatic feats of decluttering, I thought I was finally ready to take a stab at life-changing magic. I had already mastered organising, and felt quite smug at how few extraneous possessions I’d kept. Still, maybe I could garner the odd tip.

I listened to the audiobook over the course of a dozen or so of the little errands I do by bicycle on any given week in Amsterdam. She went on and on about how much she’d loved organising ever since she was a child, and I tried to keep an open mind. After all, I spent my childhood up a tree with a book, so who am I to judge?

Eventually she got into the nitty gritties about clothes, and it kind of started getting good. I even thought I could give it a whirl. Maybe I wouldn’t go through my whole closet; I’d hold just a few articles of clothing in my hands and see if they sparked joy.

They didn’t. So I tried a few more. No dice. More clothes, and joy was seriously not sparking, and the pile of throwaways was getting bigger, and I was about to end up standing there in my underwear, except I’m not sure even my underwear sparks joy.

There was one single item that sparked joy: the strapless red dress I was planning to wear for our vow renewal in Iceland later that year. It totally gave me the thrill she described.

But it’s not like I could wear that red dress every day. In the end, I had to dial down the throwing out. Because I don’t live in a nudist colony, so needs must with the clothes. But I did get rid of quite a pile, and the rest I folded according to her instructions, finding the resulting extra space quite magical indeed.

It’s not that I don’t like my clothes; I’m not a huge fashionista, but they’re fine. Maybe my standards for sparks of joy are weirdly high. Or maybe clothes just aren’t my thing. Still, to this day, I fold my socks the Marie Kondo way. We’ll give her credit for that, even though her advice on books is bonkers.

Speaking of which, in the end, did I Marie Kondo my books? Well, we remodeled our house during the pandemic to create home offices. As part of the remodel, I gave the Bookish Husband one of my beloved rosewood bookshelves that I’ve carted all across the world. And I even went the extra mile of curating him a Zoom background out of several shelves of my favourite hardback classics.

Which he promptly replaced with his board game collection.

I wasn’t mad, just disappointed. And after I gave myself some time, I stopped being disappointed. Instead, I remembered we’re different people with different obsessions and desires. He’s my hugest fan, and the most loyal supporter of the bookshop. And he lets me call him the Bookish Husband, even though that’s more my thing than his. Actually, it’s pretty much all my thing. But he cares about my things. He loves me.

If I’m sounding all sappy and sentimental, it could conceivably have something to do with the fact that the Bookish Husband is currently on an airplane after a two-week business trip in California. I might be just a little excited to see him.

Anyway, when I gave him my bookshelf and he started using it for his board games, I had to pack away a few hundred of my books. Which gave me a chance to hold those books in my hands one by one, as Marie Kondo instructed. And I can confirm that each and every one of them did spark joy, whether I had read it, intended to read it someday, or had collected it for some random other reason.

I could have taken that as a representative sample, but I went the extra mile and ran my fingers lightly over the spines of all the books on all my other bookshelves. And the joy was just sparking off like crazy, like static electricity. So I’m keeping them all.

I have a loose moratorium on getting any more. Unless I really need them. Or I get them for free. Or somebody I trust recommends them. But I’m not, like, purposely going to library book sales with several empty bags, fully plotting to come home with dozens of books anymore. (Those were the days!) Marie Kondo would be proud.

I’m also not officially accepting donations for the bookshop yet. I’ve already got a storage unit in Amsterdam that’s mostly full of books, and a damp cellar in Italy awaiting renovation. Someday it will be The Wardrobe Bookshop, but for now it’s no place for books.

Still, I’m only human. Several months ago, when I still thought it would be hard to get people to donate English-language books to a little indie bookshop in Italy, someone posted in a Facebook group for expats in Umbria that she needed to find new homes for twenty bookshelves worth of books.

Twenty bookshelves worth of books! How could I resist? I messaged her, and she said she and her husband were older, and thinking of relocating back to London in the next few years. So she was trying to find a good home for the books now. Because we all know the terrible things that can happen to books if they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time with nobody there to save them.

So of course I said I needed wanted them. Then I had a lively little negotiation with the Bookish Husband about how many of them we could fit in our house in Italy. I reminded him of the cupboard in our living room that’s built right into the meter-thick stone wall. Someone told me these places are where they used to store food before refrigerators. Kind of like a root cellar in your living room.

We drove up to her house, and she let me loose on her bookshelves, and told me to take whatever I wanted. Kid in a candy store does not even cover it. Both she and her husband were once professors, and have excellent literary taste. So here’s what I got:

Not pictured is the fact that I’m double-shelving here (that cupboard is deep!), or several obscure Margaret Atwood novels and short story collections I’ve put away in my secretary desk in Italy to read myself.

This is sadly the last bookshop donation I will be able to accept until the bookshop is fully renovated (although I’ve had enough offers to thoroughly warm my heart). But these books are already working their magic. Next time around, I’ll tell you about my very first bookshop sale. Even though we’re not open yet.

In the meantime, here are a few other reasons I’m starting a bookshop:

And something about words in the wild at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and all the poetry painted on the walls in Leiden:

In fact, high on my list of best things about Italy is the people you find here, both Italians and others who choose Italy as home. Anastasia seems to know everyone and pretty much everything about our little corner of Umbria. And she’s one of those people who somehow manages to organise a million things while simultaneously making you feel like she has all the time in the world to spend with you.

She’s the one who told me about the cinema in Narni that every Friday night shows films in the original language (most often English). As opposed to the norm in Italy, which is dubbing everything into Italian. If you are in Narni on a Friday, the theatre makes a perfect evening out, perhaps paired with an aperitivo nearby in the piazza. (Give me a shout if you’ll be in the area, and I can hook you up with the email list where they announce the movies each week.)

Last Friday was extra special, because the filmmaker was coming from Ireland to present his film and do a Q&A session afterwards. The film (North Circular Road) was absolutely gorgeous: a black and white love letter to the filmmaker’s Dublin neighbourhood. I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Along with the film, Anastasia and several friends cooked up a delicious feast of all kinds of Irish food, which we enjoyed along with honest-to-goodness Guinness and live music. There’s a considerable amount of traditional Irish singing in the film, so it was extra special when Anastasia (who just happens to be Irish herself) performed a couple of soulful Irish ballads.

Really, it was a night to remember. And that theatre is worth visiting even if just for the lovely views.

Later that week, it was Anastasia again who told me she’d heard about a bookshop in a nearby town. Stifone is a jewel of a village, perched on the banks of the Nera River. It takes about an hour to walk down there from Narni, or ten minutes by car, through the woodsy terrain that characterises the Nera River Valley.

Near Stifone are the ancient Roman shipyards, possibly in use during the Punic wars. It’s also a popular local swimming site, although the water comes up from a spring, and it’s bracingly chilly.

I’m not hugely into cold water swimming, but from the safety of shore, the water has a kind of unearthly beauty. It’s crystal clear, and the most brilliant deep turquoise colour.

The town of Stifone has only a few dozen inhabitants. But it’s charming to wander through the streets listening to the twitter of birds and the flow of the nearby river. Close to the swimming spot, there’s also a nice little outdoor café that I’d guess is only open in the summer.

And then, of course, the thing you’ve been waiting for: the bookshop! Anastasia had been in Stifone the previous week, and noticed there was a bookshop in town, but found it closed the day she visited. We went back on a Saturday afternoon, which seemed like a good chance of catching this elusive bookshop open.

And sure enough, we were in luck!

Whatever you were imagining when I mentioned a quaint bookshop in a beautiful Italian village, I promise, this place was even better.

First of all, the setting! Not for nothing is Umbria called the Green Heart of Italy. The beautiful stone building (undoubtedly centuries old) is nestled on a quiet street with views of the hillside and neighbouring gardens.

Yes, that is a gorgeous old Underwood typewriter with a little explanation that this is called The Bookshop (that Does Not Exist), because it has no fixed opening hours and no bookseller. Nevertheless, it sells beloved books to be read with pleasure, interest, and curiosity.

An auspicious beginning, to be sure.

Inside, the place is a cornucopia of wonderful details everywhere you look, from the lovely light fixtures to those gorgeous terracotta floors and quaint brick arches. And that’s just the architecture. The books are displayed on every different sort of shelf, cabinet, chair, and table.

Look closer, and you’ll see, for instance, this tiny mirrored wall cabinet holding miniature opera scores. A local maker of paper marionettes has left a wide selection on consignment, and in case you’re in the market for something other than Italian books, the shop also includes the work of several other artists.

For instance, I bought one of these beautiful botanical prints, since the walls in my house in Italy are crying out for something to be hung on them. I also love the innovation of displaying books peeking out of a half-opened drawer on a carved console table like this.

Due to my ambition of opening a bookshop in Narni, I am, of course, always taking notes on the most aesthetic ways of displaying books in antique Italian furniture.

I will admit that when I stepped over the threshold of this unforgettable bookshop, one of my first feelings (after rapture and delight) was dismay. How in the world, I wondered, could I ever compete with this?

But then I remembered that we independent bookshops aren’t really ever competing with each other. For people who love bookshops, one is simply not enough. It’s like books. One can never have too many.

Am I right, dear readers? Would you come to Umbria and visit my bookshop and also The Bookshop (that Does Not Exist)?

I suppose there is also the tiny matter of language. My bookshop, the Wardrobe, will focus on English-language books. Naturally, like nearly all bookshops in Italy, The Bookshop (that Does Not Exist) is filled to the brim with Italian books. Most are classics, some originally written in Italian, but also many of my favourite English-language authors in translation.

The walls are adorned in quotes by famous authors, sometimes with accompanying black and white photographs. Every single corner holds something to delight. I mean, look at all these marionettes hanging from that wonderful wood-beamed ceiling!

Although the sign outside denies the existence of any bookseller, a lovely woman was there running the shop, though she says she’s only occasionally in town.

Every month or so, the bookshop also organises casual book club events, most recently one focusing on Shirley Jackson. I so wish I were going to be in town for the next one! Sometime in the future, no doubt I’ll manage it. In the meantime, here’s the Instagram handle for the bookshop. I’ll definitely be popping by again next time I’m in Narni!

I’ll leave you with this dreamy view out the bookshop window, and the wise quote above the typewriter.

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

— Gustave Flaubert

In the mood for more window shopping? Italy has the most amazing secondhand shops! Here’s a tour of one of my favourites, and what I found there:

That email went out to exactly two recipients, one of whom was myself. Shoutout to the other: —my lovely writer friend in Malta, who not only opened that first post, but said she liked it and I should keep writing.

Just one year later, there are more than sixteen hundred of us, escaping to the bookshop in our heads. And I’d venture to say that together, sometimes we’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.1

Such as: that dreams come true. That books and reading are still relevant, even in a world like this. That living abroad will change your life (but really just reveal you to yourself).

Speaking of revealing yourself to yourself, there is nothing quite so revealing as overhearing someone else describe you. A couple of weeks ago, I got put on a random list of Substack writers who live abroad, and here’s what they said:

And I thought, do I live in a cosy mystery where the murder just hasn’t happened yet?

Let’s hope not, for the sake of everyone. But I can admit, the description is on point. And we must all be into that vibe a bit, since here we are. Whether this is your first or 35th post, I can’t tell you how happy I am to hang out together in this quixotic corner of the internet.

In honour of a whole year of Escape to the Bookshop, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite pieces you just might have missed. Think of it as a highlight reel of where we’ve been and (hopefully) where we’re going.

Happy reading, and may we all meet someday on a sun-drenched street in Italy.

In which I decide that the end of the world is the time to be your most idealistic self:

In which I introduce you to the little stone house I bought in a Medieval town in Italy, with a secret cellar beneath the stairs destined to be the most magical bookshop in the world:

In which I suddenly get all grown-up and practical, whilst making the case that sometimes following your dreams makes all the sense in the world:

In which I show you around Narni, Italy, the town that inspired C.S. Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia, and me to open a bookshop in his honour:

In which I talk about why I moved abroad, why I’m never going back, and why in spite of all that, being foreign is . . . complicated.

In which I explain the big, terrible thing that happened in October, why I’m still in Amsterdam, and what in the world is happening with the bookshop:

Thanks again for being here. If you’re hankering after more to read, you can find the full archive here. In the meantime, what’s your story? What resonates with you here? And where would you go, and what would you do if you could do anything?

Which made me think, maybe it’s time to give you a little update on my whereabouts and whyabouts. And even a little introduction too? Because when I last did that, I think Escape to the Bookshop had a total of maybe twenty readers.

So, hello again! I’m Sarah, and I grew up in California, in a family with five kids and a big backyard. We were all homeschooled, and my mom had a pretty relaxed definition of what that meant, so I spent most of my time reading, writing poetry, and directing backyard plays with my siblings and our (also homeschooled) neighbours.

University was the first time I ever set foot in a classroom. And I loved that too. What’s not to love? More books, bigger library. I started out majoring in philosophy. At the beginning of my sophomore year I wanted a challenge, so I decided to take Russian 101. Russian was full, so instead I ended up taking Arabic. I kept on taking Arabic every semester after that, which led to me majoring in Near Eastern Studies.

I spent my final semester on an intensive Arabic study abroad in Damascus, Syria. Which meant I turned 21 in by far the most foreign place I’d ever been. After that semester, we spent another two months on the road, visiting Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and the remnants of Muslim Spain.

I consider that study abroad during the first six months of 2001 the formative experience of my life. After immersing myself in another language and culture and way of living, there was no way to go back to seeing anything from a single point of view. My worldview had become irrevocably multiple.

Also, I’d fallen in love with being Elsewhere. Home never really felt like home again.

The next thing I did was a year-and-a-half-long mission in Santiago, Chile. (I grew up Mormon, a religion I’ve since left.) The week I returned home, I met my future husband. His aunt set us up, and when he called me to ask me out, I kept forgetting English words, because I’d spoken only Spanish for so long. I was mortified, but fortunately, he ended up liking me anyway.

We’d been married a year and had a six-week-old baby when we set off on our first big adventure together: a field study trip in the Philippines. We were there four months, and it was everything we’d imagined, and more. Which I guess is how we became the kind of people who gallivant around the world with babies and toddlers in tow.

Two years later, I was pregnant with our second child when I discovered that my husband might be eligible for an Italian passport. My head filled immediately with dreams of escape to Europe. I must have had vague ideas before, but this was the first time I realised that moving abroad—not just traveling—might actually be possible.

There was the small matter of needing birth, death and marriage certificates for all his ancestors back to his great-great grandfather in the early nineteenth century. But this was a mere detail.

(I jest. Genealogical research and document collecting became my full-time job for the next year.)

After a lot of red tape and making strategic connections in Italy, in 2008 my husband became Italian, and my life turned into this:

Which . . . may or may not look like something a normal person would want to do. For me, it was a dream come true.

We spent the next several years really trying to make that dream work, with not a whole lot in the way of financial resources. Which ended up meaning (among other things) thirteen different homes in four countries in four years. Including moving to Italy three separate times, and never managing to stay.

Someday I’ll tell you more about all that. Suffice it to say that we were living as “digital nomads” before the term existed. Constantly trying to make ends meet while parenting two toddlers and trying to convince ourselves that our life was amazing.

Which it was, don’t get me wrong. We loved each other desperately, and we managed to pack more adventures into those years than a lot of people have in a lifetime. Every time we had to move back to the United States to get back on our feet, pretty soon we were moving abroad again.

Still, despite the excitement, our life eventually became exhausting.

In 2015 we finally did something different. Instead of trying to move to Italy again and ending up somewhere else, we decided to be more practical. We took a look at other European countries, and looked for one with a good job market and good schools (because yes, we’d been homeschooling our kids all this time). That’s how we picked The Netherlands.

Exactly a decade ago today, we moved to Amsterdam with a ten-year-old, a seven-year-old, and two suitcases each. My husband and I had both come from families who moved a lot (although not as much as us!), and we wanted to give our kids the gift of staying in one place. But also, a place we liked.

We enrolled them in Dutch school, and we both got local jobs. A year later, we bought the tiniest, cutest Amsterdam flat, shipped over all our belongings, and brought home a tiny ball of fluff. And that’s how we got our European dream: a house, two kids, a dog, and an entire decade in one place.

So yes, we’ve spent the past ten years in Amsterdam, and she’s been very good to us. But we never quite gave up on that first dream of Italy, even if (like many Italians themselves) for practical reasons we had to seek economic opportunity elsewhere in Europe.

Awhile ago, my husband and I started thinking about what might be next. Our daughter was starting her second year at University of Amsterdam, and our son was going into his final year of Dutch high school. And of course, the first thought we had was Italy.

In fact, we were thinking about it so much that last February, we went on a holiday to our favourite little Italian town, just the two of us. We jokingly called it our “first house-hunting trip.” Because why not look at a couple of houses, just for kicks?

You can probably guess where this is going. One of the places we looked at was this little stone house with its own Medieval tower.

Before we knew it, we were back a few months later, signing the paperwork to buy the house. Which had a wonderful cellar with soaring ceilings, just begging to be turned into the bookshop of my dreams.

Our plan at the time was to move into our little stone house in Italy in the summer of 2025. Which, yes, would be a few months from now if all had gone as planned. But as sometimes happens, life intervened. Last October, our seventeen-year-old son was in a serious accident. We were incredibly lucky not to lose him. He was in the hospital for weeks, then bedridden at home for two months. For the past three months, he’s been slowly learning how to walk again.

The doctors expect him to eventually make a full recovery. But needless to say, we will not be moving to Italy this summer. He’s missed a lot of school, so he’ll need to repeat his final year of high school, and we want to be here to fully support him as long as he needs. So we’ll be in Amsterdam longer than we planned.

In the meantime, I’ll be making as many trips out to Italy and the future bookshop as I can, and sharing every morsel of progress. And I’ll also be learning to fall in love with Amsterdam again, and sharing my favourite corners of the city, with a focus on the beautiful and bookish.

So that’s me. And whether this is your first or thirtieth post on Escape to the Bookshop, I’m delighted to have you along with me on this journey. Yesterday I checked the back-end stats and discovered that Escape to the Bookshop is read across 62 countries and 46 US states. Which is, like, the most thrilling thing that’s happened to me this week.

In such a volatile time for international politics, it makes my restless little heart happy to imagine us all, stretched across the globe, united in our love of books and beauty in this world.

So If you feel inclined, I’d love for you to introduce yourself in the comments section. Who are you? Where are you from? What brought you to Escape to the Bookshop? And what would you like me to write more about?

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Want to hear what happened last time I went to Narni? Read this:

You’d think this would be no big deal to a person who has worn glasses since she was six years old.

My first eye exam was a routine screening of school-aged children; there had been no particular reason to suspect anything odd about my eyes. When he saw my prescription, the optometrist was shocked that I could read at all, let alone that I was already a dedicated bookworm.

I adored reading, even back then, when apparently it was hard. And though they quizzed me on this point, I couldn’t say I’d noticed any eyestrain or unusual effort in focusing on the printed page. Of course, I had no comparison point. The effort of reading has simply always been worth it to me.

When the optometrist informed me about the strength of my prescription, I was delighted, and impressed: +6. Plus six! I was six years old. Some kind of cosmic symmetry was at play.

Children are natural numerologists.

Of course, at ages 7, 8, 9 and beyond, my prescription remained plus six. Which was slightly disappointing at the time, but in retrospect rather a good thing. My lenses were already so thick my eyelashes would squash up against them. And they magnified my face like a big-eyed manga character.

Nevertheless, I was proud of my glasses. And my outsized prescription. Barely anyone I knew was far-sighted like me. The other kids who wore glasses were all near-sighted. You could tell without asking, because Plus prescriptions like mine make your eyes and the sides of your face bigger. Minus prescriptions make them smaller.

I got in the habit of examining the edges of people’s faces through their glasses. Whether adults or children, almost everyone turned out to be near-sighted. Which only served to solidify my conviction that the refractive error of my unusually short eyeballs made me special.

These delusions of grandeur might have gone away on their own eventually, had my bookishness not ascended to the nerdy pinnacle of discovering The Silmarillion sometime in my early teens.

I’d already made my way several times through The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, paying special attention to the appendices (if you know, you know).

After the first few read-throughs, I began to focus on understanding the point of view of a different character each time. Aragorn was my first love, of course. Next I became enamoured of Elrond, and then Gandalf. At some point, I fell in love with Frodo’s earnest self-sacrifice—and this was long before Elijah Wood’s blue eyes.

The time I read it through from the point of view of Sam marked what I viewed as an intellectual leap. I felt sophisticated! Subtle. I was pleased with myself for inventing social history: the story of the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the everyman.

The logical progression might have been a deep dive into Tolkien’s exploration of environmental degradation, or perhaps a critique of his reinforcement of class dynamics. But instead I veered into a desperate, fan-girlish crush on Faramir that I’ve never quite gotten over.

All this to say that if you have some stereotype in the back of your mind about the nerdy homeschooled kid behind thick glasses who spends all her time in a fantasy world, I don’t have much of a rebuttal.

It wasn’t only Tolkien. I had lots of time to read, and Shakespeare and Austen made it in there too. Also, every Hardy Boys mystery at the library (I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m reading in the photo).

But fine, it was largely Tolkien. I’d been well and truly enmeshed in Middle Earth for most of my childhood by the time I picked up a secondhand copy of The Silmarillion at a used book sale sometime in my teens.

The larger-than-life landscape of The Silmarillion swept me in instantly, not least because it reads as an expanded version of those extensive Lord of the Rings appendices I loved so much.

In case you don’t recall (or, heaven forbid, have never cracked the book), The Silmarillion is a compendium of several shorter works, all of which serve as backstory to The Lord of the Rings. Though of course, if you were to ask Tolkien, his backstories are actually the main event.

Hands down my favourite portion of The Silmarillion was Akallabêth: The Downfall of Númenor. To wit: Tolkien’s Atlantis myth. I hope I haven’t just given away the ending.

The gist of the story is currently being dramatized in The Rings of Power, which I’m delightedly and unabashedly enjoying, because I’m no literary snob. Or fine, maybe I am a snob, but just randomly, not in any systematic way. (I’m loving Dune: Prophecy too.)

Nobody inhabits an archaic turn of phrase like Tolkien, aside from perhaps Jacqueline Carey. I lap up this stuff like a guilty pleasure, probably because I grew up in a religion where we read Scripture in the dulcet (but recherché) tones of the King James Bible.

This passage in Akallabêth hit me like a revelation:

Far-sighted both in eye and in mind. I liked the sound of that. It did not escape my notice that Tolkien had employed the exact same term as my optometrist. As I had long suspected, far from being a medical condition, my eagle-eyed far-sightedness was a special gift.

Tar-Palantir. I rolled it over on my tongue again and again. I was Tar-Palantir the far-sighted. Like Cassandra, without the curse. Perhaps this was one of my early inspirations for becoming a writer: I believed the way I saw the world was unique to me. Maybe that meant people would take my stories seriously.

Given this positive relationship with my eye prescription, visits to the optometrist were a yearly highlight. I guess it’s also true that growing up with a dad who was a doctor predisposed me to like the company of people in white coats. And I enjoyed the steampunk aesthetic of the oculist’s tools.

Also, the rituals were familiar: reading lines of ever smaller text, playing eye-tracking games to test peripheral vision, pushing myself to the very limits of my far-sighted vision. The one thing I didn’t like was the puff of air directly on your eye to measure eye pressure, but hey, nothing’s perfect.

Best of all was the chance to choose new glasses: the outward expression of my inner gift. I always took my time trying on a multitude of different frames. There were five of us kids in my family, and my mom was an avid thrifter long before vintage became trendy. I didn’t get a lot of chances to pick out something new to wear.

For the first half dozen years of my optometric journey, I remained one of the youngest patients. The opticians would smile indulgently and give me grown-up advice on which styles suited my face shape best. Nobody ever rushed me. I always left feeling pleased with my new spectacles, no matter how funny they look to me now in old photographs.

I’ve never been much of a fashion-follower, then or now, but it was continually fascinating to me how the whole landscape of glasses would change over time, for no apparent reason. One year it would be all giant, thin, rounded frames that took up half your face, the next, slender rectangles that covered only your eyes, but were rimmed thick and dark. Each year and each new pair of glasses felt like a chance to try on a different version of myself.

Nobody else in my family wore glasses, but all my optometrists over the years did. I don’t think it’s exactly a requirement, but wearing glasses probably ups the chances that such a career path will occur to you. Hanging out with my optometrist once a year was like a meeting of a special club the two of us were in.

As an adult, I continue to relish my trips to the oculist. I’ve been going to the same Amsterdam-based eyewear shop (Ace & Tate) since I arrived here nine years ago. Over all my years wearing glasses, my prescription has fluctuated only slightly up or down. So these days I tend to pop in, get my eyes checked, and buy a new pair at whichever interval insurance will pay for it. I’ve amassed blue light glasses, prescription sunglasses, and regular glasses that are all close enough to the same prescription that I can still wear them all.

But lately I’ve been feeling a bit fuzzy around the eyes, if you know what I mean. I also turned 44 this year, and I’ve noticed that a lot of my friends who never used to wear glasses have started whipping them out when it’s time to read.

I’ve always kind of wondered what would happen to my eyesight when I hit middle age. Presbyopia, the bookish term for needing reading glasses, is also a (less extreme) form of farsightedness. Drugstore reading glasses start at +0.5, and go up from there. Would my Plus prescription just keep going up? I wondered. Or would it go down over the years to eventually coincide with a typical presbyopic Plus prescription?

Well, I now have my answer.

My latest eye exam included a new component, in which I had to read something at normal book distance from my eyes rather than across the room. And whodathunkit, I need reading glasses.

But also regular glasses.

“So . . . bifocals?” I asked the optician, picturing Benjamin Franklin and my grandma and a conspicuous seam across the middle of my glasses.

“No, for a case like yours we have something called ‘relax’ lenses,” she said. “Relax” sounded, well, relaxing. Reassuring. No lines across the lens, she promised. Just my regular prescription and then a little extra on the lower third of the glasses for a boost at seeing things like printed pages or my phone. I’d need to move my neck a few degrees to read, that was all.

Still, this was uncharted territory. With some trepidation, I waited the few days for my glasses to be made. Would I put them on and suddenly feel creaky and decrepit? Was I ready to march one step closer to my grave? Sure, maybe these glasses would look the same as all the pairs I’d owned since I was six. But there’d be this one difference, the difference of my glasses being incontrovertible evidence I am old. Even if I was the only one who noticed.

Well, they arrived, and my misgivings melted all away. I am in love with my new glasses. Turns out I wasn’t imagining the fact that lately I had to squint a bit to read, especially in lower light. Maybe even more than a bit.

My prescription went so many decades without changing; I’d forgotten how I first felt as a child when I put on my glasses and reading was suddenly effortless. Speaking of revelations!

I guess this is a bit of a PSA: if you’re about my age and putting off getting reading glasses, here’s your sign to do something about it. Welcome to the wonderful world of presbyopia! Pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of tea, pull out those snazzy new spectacles, and treat yourself to a book. That you can actually read. Without squinting.

So. . . are they giving witchy librarian? Please say yes.

I can’t imagine a nicer compliment. Truly. If I were thinking of giving up on writing Escape to the Bookshop (which I most certainly am not; dabbling around in this little corner of the internet is the highlight of my week!), that one sentence could keep me going another six months, easily. As it is, it totally made my day. And obviously, I’m still thinking about it weeks later.

When I met my husband and we were in our get-to-know-you phase, he told me his favourite movie was Shadowlands. In case you don’t know it, Shadowlands is a 1993 drama starring Anthony Hopkins. It’s kind of a literary romance: the love story of C.S. Lewis, who penned the Chronicles of Narnia and the American poet Helen Joy Davidman. If watching that movie together isn’t the perfect, auspicious beginning to a relationship, I don’t know what is.

Just be warned, you will cry.

One of the lines that has always stuck with me is when Lewis says, “We read to know we are not alone.”

I think I would take it one step further and add this: I write to know I am not alone.

There is just nothing like sitting down and spilling out all the things you didn’t even know were in your heart, feeling a moment of terrible vulnerability as you hit “publish,” and then being totally blown away by how many people say they relate to that one weird thing you thought was only you.

So thank you, reader, for being here, whether we share company in silence or you feel moved to share a little of what’s in your heart too.

As you might know by now, a corner of my brain is always busily at work, designing my future bookshop. My latest idea is to paint “We read to know we are not alone” somewhere in the Wardrobe Bookshop. I know just the spot: a massive concrete ceiling beam that’s pretty hideous, but keeps the whole thing (bookshop, Medieval tower, house) from crashing down in some catastrophic earthquake.

Catastrophic earthquakes are kind of a thing in central Italy.

The map is pretty pixelated, so I’m not quite sure where Narni is. Yellow? Orange? Red?

You’d think that given my propensity for anxiety I’d be worried about planting myself in an earthquake zone. But I guess this just goes to show that human risk perception is a squishy, incoherent thing. I grew up in California, so earthquakes feel like a familiar hazard. They’re all wrapped up in childhood nostalgia, and I know what to do about them.

When we moved to the Netherlands, I was shocked to find that people here don’t tether their bookshelves to the wall. But of course they don’t. Earthquakes aren’t a thing in Amsterdam. Here all you have to worry about is the sea rushing in and flooding half the country.

Yes, the half of the country that I’m in.

Anyway, I digress. The earthquake-proof concrete beam in my future bookshop in Italy reminds me of my childhood, but it also feels like it needs some dressing up to make it presentable, hence the idea of painting a quote up there.

Bookshops ought to have words everywhere, don’t you think? One of the (many, many) things I love about Shakespeare and Company in Paris is the abundance of nooks and crannies and irregularly patched walls, and how each and every one serves as a canvas for a snippet of meaningful text. I mean, look at this! You don’t even notice the irregular plaster, peeling paint, or random holes. All you see is the words.

Even the stairs are painted red and emblazoned with poetry.

There's just something magical about words out in the wild, escaped from the pages of a book.

My alma mater, Leiden University, specialises in this kind of magic. And it’s not just the university, it’s the whole city, really. Have you heard of Leiden? It’s a perfectly picturesque little Dutch town about half an hour by train from Amsterdam.

Yes, on a sunny summer day it really looks like that. In winter, it’s more like this:

I’m so enchanted by this place that for the past few years I’ve been writing a novel set in Leiden just so I have somewhere to pour all this gorgeousness I don’t know what to do with otherwise.

Here’s how I became an honorary Leidenaar. When I was nearing the end of my thirties, I got to thinking about things I still wanted to do in my life. I had been fantasising about grad school since before I graduated from university in 2001. I was very Mormon back then, so instead of actually doing the thing I wanted, I went on a mission to Chile, got married, and had a baby all within the next four years. Another baby a couple years later, and then we were gallivanting around the world with toddlers in tow, and the timing was never right.

In 2019, suddenly it was. My baby was starting high school. I’d quit my job the year before to help my husband start a business. We had a great year together, but the business wasn’t exactly a smashing success. So we were at the end of that little project. He’d just started a new job. University tuition for EU citizens was €2000 per year. So why not go for that long-wished-for master’s degree?

The only question: would they let me in? My decades-old BA from an obscure religious university in the U.S. wasn’t exactly impressive as a sole academic credential.

Fortunately, I had an unexpected ace up my sleeve. True, my university days mostly took place during the same century as Downton Abbey. But turns out it’s downright luxurious writing an application essay when you have all those extra years of experience to draw on. Sometimes the thing you’re most insecure about is actually your secret superpower.

That September, I sent my son off to high school and headed off to grad school myself.

I really couldn’t believe my luck. For the next seven months (until the pandemic shut down everything and my university experience became for all intents and purposes an online one; we won’t talk about that) two or three times a week I got up, dressed in what I imagined was an approximation of what 20-somethings were wearing these days (you can laugh here, along with my daughter), and rode the train to Leiden.

One of the first things I started noticing was the poetry written on the walls. I don’t mean scrawled ad hoc as one often (wonderfully) sees in cities. These poems were carefully planned and lettered, and also sanctioned by the city.

They are part of an initiative called Muur Gedichten (Wall Poems). Over a hundred poems in dozens of different languages adorn walls around the city of Leiden. They appear on university buildings, cafés, private homes, anywhere there’s a likely empty wall.

One of the fun things about the project is that the lettering styles and aesthetics vary enormously. Each one is a little work of art, made to match the wall where it resides. Most poems in languages other than Dutch or English have the translation lettered up on the wall alongside the original.

The project used to have a wonderful website with a walking route of all the poems, translations, and background on the poets and their connections (if any) to Leiden. Sadly, the website seems to have disappeared, probably for lack of funding. Here’s a third-party website that appears to be an attempt to reproduce some of that information. It’s all in Dutch, but in case you plan to be in Leiden, it’s definitely worth plugging it into a translator and setting aside an hour to wander the city in search of poetry. Maybe even pausing for a coffee outdoors in the shadow of a poem.

Do you have a favourite poem or other writing you’ve encountered in the wild? I’d love to hear about it, wherever you are in the world.

If you’re an ancient luddite like me, reading this on a computer screen, Substack will let you put a photo in a comment. Otherwise, just describe it. Tell me about a time when words on a wall cast a spell on you.

It’s true that the physical space of the bookshop technically exists at a specific and real location on the planet. However, even I have to acknowledge that it doesn’t look much like a bookshop yet. But it has good bones! And a very solid metal front door.

Walk through that door and turn to the left, and you’ll find yourself in a sort of short hallway, at the end of which is this inspiring view.

At least, I find it inspiring. I hope you do too? All it takes is a sprinkle of fairy dust to see that this arch is the entrance to a magical future bookshop.

I have it on the good authority of my husband that the unsightly metal framing isn’t structural, and can go. So I’m thinking of putting in a stained-glass window up at the top of the entrance there, or some other kind of decorative glass that will let in light. What do you think?

By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered an expert in renovations or shop design. But my idea for the perfect way of embellishing this doorway is to buy an antique wardrobe, remove the back, and let it become the entrance to the bookshop.

Is not The Wardrobe Bookshop simply begging for such an entrance?

I have a lot of ideas like this. And sometimes it’s hard for me to distinguish between what works well in my head and what is actually practical in the world. For instance, how easy would it be to even find such a wardrobe? And how prohibitive the cost if I did? These are the kinds of questions that are hard to answer from a different country.

So during our September trip to Narni, I was delighted when we decided to take a peek in an Italian secondhand shop near our new house. And of course, I became immediately and hopelessly distracted by all manner of treasures and their potential uses.

We weren’t actually in the market for bookshop furniture yet. Rather, we needed basic things like dishes, pots and pans, maybe a light fixture for the kitchen to replace this monstrosity in the shape of an ugly wooden flower, which is so oversized the kitchen cabinets send it reeling every time you open them.

I certainly did not imagine needing the delightful little piece of furniture pictured below. But sometimes it’s love at first sight, and you wonder where this delicious chair has been hiding all your life.

I’m talking about the telephone chair on the right, not the little upholstered stool next to it, which I also love. Bless his heart, my husband agreed to buying these frivolities (essentials!!) even though we had no sofa or dining table yet. For most of our time in Italy in September, these two pieces were the only furniture (at least furniture meant for sitting on) that we possessed. Hence our breakfast laid out on the checkered cloth.

I had never even heard of a telephone chair before I saw this one in the secondhand shop in Terni, Italy. Fortunately, it was labeled as such, or I truly never would have guessed its function. There’s a lot of inexplicable furniture floating around Italian thrift stores and antique markets. Sometimes it takes quite some googling to figure out what purpose something used to serve.

Apparently these chairs with a little tabletop attached came into usage after the invention of the telephone in the nineteenth century, and reached peak popularity between 1930 and 1960. They’re also known as “gossip benches,” because what else would one be doing on a telephone in a stylish foyer in the early to mid-twentieth century?

Based on the style (Downton Abbey over Mad Men) mine looks like it’s toward the older end of that range; but it’s also true that Italians love a good old-fashioned look, so it could well be younger. It’s in quite good shape, though it tends in the direction of delicate over sturdy. My husband was a bit nervous about sitting in it himself. It seems more designed for someone of my height and build than his.

You’d think this was a one-of-a-kind find, wouldn’t you? That’s certainly what I thought when I scooped it up and claimed it, half expecting to be forced to fight off a gang of other shoppers. Strangely (at least to me), the tag indicated it had languished in the shop for months. And for every month an item remains unbought, the price goes down. This delightful little chair had been at the lowest price on the tag since June.

I still don’t get why someone didn’t snatch it up. Or at least I didn’t get it at the time. After we visited a couple of other secondhand shops and saw a similar piece in each one, I realised there might be more vintage telephone chairs floating around Italy than I had imagined.

Evidence (if we needed more) that the world is full of wonders, and all we have to do is open our eyes. And buy the chair, of course. Which we did, and carried it straight out to the car.

Fortunately, rather than our usual tiny rental car perfect for squeezing into Italian-sized parking spaces, we’d rented one slightly bigger. Because we were already premeditating the idea of buying secondhand furniture and hauling it home ourselves.

The size of the car was only the first—and simplest—hurdle. I should point out here that there is no shortcut to moving furniture into the “historic centre” of an Italian hill-town. This is Via del Monte in Narni, the street where I optimistically say I live, although what I mean is that I visit as often as I can. The street where someday you’ll be able to find The Wardrobe. In fact, the (future) bookshop is just out of sight beyond that scenic arch.

I use “street” here in the very loosest sense. This is a walking street, although an enterprising Vespa (or even conceivably a tiny car driven by an intrepid Italian) could possibly go up it. A furniture van decidedly could not. Nor could a rental car driven by Americans, even if they had furniture from the secondhand shop to carry.

And carry the furniture we did, me the upholstered stool and my husband the telephone chair. First we carried them from the car to the parking lot elevator. The public parking for Narni is below the city, which one then reaches either by means of several flights of stairs or by one of a few elevators that come out in different quarters of the city.

It’s a very clever system, since it results in plenty of parking for both locals and tourists, while keeping the noise and smell and general modern unsightliness of cars to an absolute minimum in the Medieval centre. But it means a decent little hike every time you go anywhere by car.

I’m convinced, by the way, that this very inconvenience is one factor in the longevity of Italians, not to mention their continuing mobility as they age. So many of the bugs in Italian life are actually features if you look at them from another angle. My forty-something-year-old back loves the endless stairs in Narni. Though my knees, it’s true, are not so sure.

After we emerged from the elevator at city level, we carried the furniture right through Narni’s main square. I felt uncomfortably conspicuous, but we’d been through that main square with so many things that week already (a mop and bucket, wet clothes washed at our AirBnB because we didn’t have a washing machine yet, obscene amounts of garbage, etc.) that nobody blinked an eye.

Once through the main square, we carried our furniture up many, many more picturesque steps than pictured in the photo.

The bookshop, alas, is not yet a hospitable place for furniture. And we had nothing to sit on yet upstairs. So the choice of where to put the telephone chair for the moment was an easy one. All we had left to navigate was this final, steeper staircase to the front door.

OK, and then the final, FINAL staircase inside the house. This is not me, but the secondhand shop delivery person, carrying up a later, much heavier piece of furniture (kitchen cabinet) we wisely determined we could not manage on our own.

You get the idea.

It was while staring at my beautiful new telephone chair in my otherwise empty living room that I hit suddenly on the reason I so desperately needed a telephone chair in the first place.

Can you guess?? Let’s see.

A few days later, we were wandering through a nearby antique shop, which held many of the same sorts of items as the secondhand shop, but at higher prices. They had their own telephone chair, of course. Slightly inferior to mine, to which I had in the intervening two days conceived a fierce loyalty. And also a good deal more expensive.

But here’s the clincher: several aisles over, they also had a phone! A delectable old-fashioned wooden telephone, complete with that handle you turn frantically as you yell into empty static when there’s an emergency in a period drama. I’m not super clear on what that handle is supposed to do, but this one was still turnable.

Reader, I was sorely tempted! Despite the fact that we were at an actual antique store rather than a secondhand shop, so the thing cost a whopping €140, more than I’d spent on the telephone chair itself.

We went home without the telephone. My husband relieved, me with many a piteous backward glance. He pointed out that if we returned in a week or a month having changed our minds, odds were very good it would still be there. Which I had to admit was likely true.

Imagine my delight when we went back to the original secondhand shop where we’d bought the chair, and I discovered something I’d unaccountably missed the first several times we were there. I’m going to say I missed it on account of always feeling rushed. No matter how many times we go back, I never seem to have enough of the uncounted aeons of time I’d love to spend in this shop.

You’re not going to believe this, but yes.

Yes!!!

I’ll just pause for a moment so you can take it in.

I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect telephone into being if I’d tried, even with my certifiably overdramatic imagination. This telephone weighs an actual ton. It appears to be made mostly of brass and quartz. And the old-timey twisted cloth cord ends in a strange three-pronged plug that actually fits a couple of outdated outlets I’ve been idly wondering about in my Italian house.

(Why didn’t I try plugging it in to see if it would somehow still make the static noise??? Why? This is just the sort of thing that would open up an idiosyncratic portal in time. But now we’ll just have to imagine it. This is the torture of being three countries away most of the time. So many things I forgot to do, so many camera angles I forgot to take, so many weird little nooks I forgot to measure.)

Time portals aside, this telephone chair setup would be amazing enough on its own, just to look at and sit in and perhaps browse through a book you’ve found while perusing The Wardrobe’s shelves. But I have bigger plans! I’m going to rig up the telephone so that when you lift the receiver it starts reciting T.S. Eliot poetry.

Doesn’t that seem like this telephone’s destiny?

Why no, I have zero idea how to even start researching what kinds of electrical hijinks this operation will require. I’m guessing it could maybe start with an old ipod? What’s inside these antique telephones anyway? Could you fit a tiny speaker in the receiver? Is bluetooth the answer? Do I need to modify that amazing cord?

So many questions.

If you have answers, ideas or any clue where to start, I am ALL EARS.

I’m not sure why I’ve kept it back; maybe it’s just fun to keep a secret, a beautiful thing that belongs only to you. But it’s also a little like a present you’re planning to give someone. And you can’t stop thinking about how much they’re going to love it.

I hope you love this.

Here’s where the story begins. Last week I told you about the podcast I started listening to when I first realized I had always wanted to start a bookshop. The Got Books podcast began as a way for the host, Antonia, to explore her own dream of starting a bookshop. She interviews owners of bookshops from all over the world. And I mean ALL over the world. While listening to Got Books as I walk my dog through the streets of Amsterdam, I have vicariously traveled to wonderful bookshops in Egypt, Berlin, Singapore, Puerto Rico, Senegal, Australia, Latvia, and Canada, to name just a few.

At first, I would dip in when the mood took me, at random. Once I was hooked, I started listening to new episodes as soon as they came out. Finally, I went back to the beginning, to experience the whole back-catalog from the very first episode. And I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing.

Antonia’s first interview is with Shaun Bythell, who owns The Bookshop, the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland. The Bookshop is located in Wigtown, a town of 800 with 17 bookshops. You’ll have to do your own math on how many books per capita that works out to. Designated officially as Scotland’s National Book Town, it hosts a literary festival each year. Already, this Wigtown sounds like a book-lover’s paradise, does it not?

But here’s where it gets even better. During the course of the interview, Bythell talks about another of those 17 bookshops: The Open Book. The Open Book is a bookshop you can own yourself. Yes, you read that right. You can book a week-long holiday at The Open Book, during which time you become proprietor of the bookshop. You are the bookseller. You can change the window display, rearrange the books, organize events, and just generally sit behind the counter and preside over the quaint, secondhand bookshop you’ve always dreamed of starting.

Of course I immediately headed over to see about booking myself a holiday at The Open Book. Unfortunately, I was not the only one with this idea. The place is booked out solid for the next five years, with an additional two-year waiting list. They do occasionally post last-minute vacancies, but so far I’ve been unable to snag one. In the meantime, I follow the adventures of each week’s current bookseller on The Open Book’s Instagram.

The whole thing got me to thinking, though. Isn’t that one of the things we love about a bookshop? The secret fantasy that comes over us every time we step in the door and the smell of books washes over us: that someday we might open a bookshop ourselves.

That’s definitely how it is for me.

But life and its inevitable practicalities mean that most of us will never actually manage to do it. For almost my entire existence, I was sure the dream of owning a bookshop would remain just that: a dream. It’s only a weird set of very lucky circumstances that resulted in my dream turning into an increasingly concrete plan.

Which made me think, why not give other people that same chance to live the dream of owning a bookshop? At least for a week. Why not? Why couldn’t I build my dream bookshop in Narni, Italy, and let a fellow-dreamer run it from time to time?

That’s how the idea of The Wardrobe Bookshop was born. The more I thought about it, the more it felt right. I could create a place where dreams come true, where that perfect little bookshop just around the bend on a cobblestone street in Italy belongs to you. Long, sun-drenched days that begin with a cappuccino in a piazza, then a walk back up the ancient stone staircase to the bookshop.

You turn the key in the lock, flip the closed sign to open, and settle back in a comfy chair behind the counter to wait for your first customers.

After a few hours of this, you turn the sign to closed for five minutes while you pop around the corner to the bakery for the best simple pizza rosso you’ve ever tasted. You bring it back to the bookshop, which will be quiet for the next couple of hours because everyone is lunching and resting during afternoon riposo. So you spend a few hours going through book donations and re-organizing the shelves. Things pick up mid-afternoon, but there’s still time to pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy another chapter of that novel you’ve borrowed off the shelf.

You close up around six, which is not quite time for dinner in Italy. So you take a stroll through a charming maze of cobblestone streets, and then sit down at a table near the fountain for an aperitivo. The swifts are calling above you, and you spot a cat curled up in a doorway, enjoying the last rays of sun. You finish your spritz and wander around several crooked corners. Unexpectedly, you step through an arch to a sudden, magnificent view of green hills and a river gorge.

Walking along the railed boardwalk, you come to a bench with a perfect view of the glorious pink sunset just dipping behind the hill, limning the stone of Narni with golden light.

Through the deepening twilight, you make your way to a quaint restaurant where the homemade pasta comes matched with local wine. By the time you’re walking home, all the street lamps are aglow, and you’ve lost track of just which century you’re living in.

You close the bookshop door behind you with a contented sigh. The last thing you see as your eyes flutter shut is the top of the rolling bookcase ladder that goes all the way up to the leather-bound miniature books on the uppermost shelf. Tomorrow you’re going to climb up and take a look.

Are you with me? For the past few paragraphs, no lie, I forgot I was even writing this. My whole soul was immersed in living that ideal day in my future bookshop in Narni. I think it’s no accident that the little Umbrian town I fell in love with just happens to be the same one that inspired C.S. Lewis to create the magical land of Narnia. In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the children step through an ordinary wardrobe into a country of fauns and talking animals, perils and wonders beyond compare.

And that’s what I want my Wardrobe to be: a portal to another world—a world where our most impractical, beautiful dreams come true. Would you do it? Would you spend the night in a bookshop? All night dreaming with the books, and the next day sharing those books with the world.

These are dreams that will soon come true.

Coming in 2026 (or maybe 2025, if we’re very lucky): The Wardrobe Bookshop. On this very street, in the beautiful, magical town of Narni.

So keep on reading, and keep on dreaming, because from now on, the Wardrobe isn’t just my dream. If you want, it can be your dream too. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, a pinch of luck, and a fair amount of patience, since I’ve spent enough time in Italy to know that nothing there happens very fast. But that’s OK. I’m going to savor every moment of making this dream come true.

In the meantime, thanks for coming along with me on this journey to a place that had to exist in our minds before it could flicker into being in the world. Whether you become a Wardrobe bookseller, walk in the door some bright day to browse the shelves, or just enjoy reading along with us from afar, thank you for being here.

Together, we’re going to make something beautiful.

During my cryptozoology phase, I requested microfiche tapes of the local paper around the times of major Loch Ness Monster sightings. Disappointingly, I found nary a mention of obscure news from Scotland in nineteen-thirties issues of The Daily Democrat.

I was over the moon when I found out about interlibrary loan, since I’d already read everything at my local branch by and about my crush, T.E. Lawrence. Never mind that he was gay, and dead these sixty years. My library gave me access to a world beyond my own.

I was born in the early eighties. The closest thing we had to the modern internet back then was calling the “Time Lady” and hearing her say mechanically, “At the tone, Pacific Standard Time will be. Eight. Fifty. Seven. A.M.” Beep! For information on any other topic, you had to resort to your own bookshelves. And if you exhausted the books at home, the library. I would spend hours going back and forth between the stacks and the card catalog, doing research for homeschool projects and my personal fascinations.

I sometimes go back my childhood library when I visit my parents. The card catalog is no longer in use. But it’s on display at the library, and sometimes I get this desperate urge to open the drawers and riffle through in search of my memories.

To me, that card catalog felt like a mystical receptacle of knowledge. It had all the wizardry of the algorithms we love to hate these days, but with an appealing human touch. Someone had chosen each word, thought about which subjects to include, typed it all carefully out on those cards. It was like that long-ago librarian was holding your hand, guiding you in discovering the many things you wished to know.

I still feel such nostalgia for the card catalog. In the depths of the pandemic, we put our bed on stilts to carve me out an office in our tiny Amsterdam flat. Since we were renovating anyway, I turned my wooden drawers back to front, added brass pulls, and recreated that card catalog.

My pens and notebooks, sealing wax, ribbons and research no longer spill out over my desk. And every time I look at that homemade card catalog, I feel a burst of happiness.

Believe me, those drawers are magic.

As a teenager, I spent summers volunteering at the library. I would make photocopies, put together prize bags for the summer reading program, and—best of all—reshelve books. You know the signs in the library: “please do not reshelve the books”? Ah, the thrill of being the one who’s allowed to go behind the librarians-only desk to retrieve the book cart, then lovingly restore each book to its proper place.

Why, in retrospect, didn’t I grow up to be a librarian? Good question. Would it be strange if I said it never occurred to me that I could? I wasn’t supposed to grow up to be anything. Anything but a mother, that is. I was raised Mormon. Education for girls was encouraged; preparing for a career was not. A degree from the same Mormon-run university where my parents met was a backup plan—in the unlikely event that my life failed to follow the accepted script. But a major function of college was meant to be four years of opportunities to find a suitable husband. These were the facts of my life.

It took me an iffy couple of extra years after graduation, but I managed to safely settle down at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I’d been an old maid for a few years already, so I breathed a sigh of relief when my future husband (considered a “menace to society” as a still-unmarried man of twenty-five) proposed, four months after we met. As expected, when I got pregnant a year after our wedding, I quit the secretarial job I’d been working to put my husband through school. He became the breadwinner. My mother said it strengthened a marriage for the woman to be dependent on the man.

Nine years of righteous full-time mothering later, a feminist awakening and desire to contribute to family finances led me back to work. By that time it felt far past any talk of what I might want to be. I focused on my skillset and felt lucky to get a decently paying job in marketing. I worked in that field for a few years. Then my husband asked me to quit my job and help him start a business. So I did. I made his website, wrote copy for his marketing brochures, and served as his regular sounding board. After a year of that, he leveraged his considerable skills, hard work, and demographic privilege to get back into a career he’s been doing ever since.

He makes a lot more money than I ever did. More than I can imagine being able to make. I know that’s partly because the shape of my imagination came from what little-girl me was told about herself. Needless to say, I speak to my daughter differently. I try to speak to myself differently too, but sometimes old habits are hard to break. I’m not meaning to complain. There’s tremendous privilege in having a partner whose financial means let you pursue the tenuously remunerative craft of writing. I’m just explaining why I was in my late thirties before I let myself think about what I’d like to be when I grow up.

I went to grad school at 39. I realized halfway through my master’s degree that I didn’t actually want to be a professor. Then I spent a couple of years writing a novel. A few months ago I finished a memoir I’m now querying to agents. It’s about all the crazy things I did in the years after I left the Mormon Church. This is the first time I’ve confessed in public to writing a memoir. I didn’t mean to; it just tumbled out. I hovered over the backspace key, then let it be. It feels embarrassing, hubristic: insisting your life story is interesting enough to be published, even read. Being willing to spill your secrets. It must be a blend of masochism and exhibitionism that leads to a person hammering out a book of all the intimate, terrible, wonderful things that ever happened to them.

More on that later, maybe. I think I brought it up because when I started researching how to open a bookshop, I came across a podcast called Got Books. Antonia—the host—interviews bookshop owners around the world. Something I noticed right away was how many of them got their start in middle age, or even after they retired. It felt like a kind of permission to rethink seeing myself as a failure.

Innate perfectionism and religion can be a difficult combination. I’ve spent much of my life consumed by guilt. I used to feel guilty every time I did things not directly related to motherhood. Who did I think I was? Why was I putting time into anything other than raising my precious children? I imagined the women around me feeling completely fulfilled by stay-at-home motherhood, and wondered what was wrong with me.

(No shade if that’s the life you choose, and it nourishes your heart. Motherhood as an identity was chosen for me, and it wasn’t the greatest fit.)

After I left the Mormon Church, I felt guilty all over again. What kind of example had I set for my daughter all those years? Why wasn’t I smart and driven enough to instantly catch up professionally? It took a long time to unravel these expectations of myself, to loosen my hold on shame, to start feeling less alone. Turns out waking up partway through life in need of a drastic change of course is nowhere near as uncommon as I thought.

People do lots of different things at a time like that. Opening a bookshop is one. It’s not like being a librarian: there are no gatekeepers to ask for qualifications or a relevant degree. A lot of people who start bookshops have zero prior experience selling books. Nobody seems to go into it for the money, though most are trying their best to make a living. I guess it’s the kind of quixotic venture raw passion keeps aloft. Until it doesn’t. It’s easy to find statistics on how likely you are to fail. Late capitalism isn’t built to nourish the soul.

We have to do that kind of building on our own. Building lives, building dreams, building spaces where we come together and nurture our humanity. Meeting ourselves and each other where we are; letting parts of us blossom that were root-bound before. That’s why I want my bookshop to have the feel of my childhood library. I envision the kind of place I don’t mind if you just come in to browse. I want to make it somewhere you long to return because you love how it makes you feel. I’d be the first to admit that my future bookshop is all wrapped up in my identity. But it also comes from a need for community. I think that’s why I started writing here. I keep thinking of something Goethe once said:

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

I’m talking about you. Yes, you. Wherever on this wide green earth you are, I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for coming along with me. Someday I hope we have a chance to sit down in the bookshop with a cup of tea and chat books. Until then, feel free to comment if you feel so inclined. I love hearing what you think.

Unaccountably, my husband insists that no, not everyone does; he claims even to have personal experience with this. And I guess I’ll have to take him at his word.

There may also be others who live their lives untroubled by visions of labyrinthine shelves, leather covers, marbled endpapers, the inimitable smell of books. But for those of us in thrall to the enchantment of the written word, nothing is quite so alluring as the idea of spending whole days reading behind an antique desk, presiding over a small kingdom of books.

In this fantasy, my main job is to read, with occasional moments of rearranging the bookshelves according to my latest fancy, or dispensing recommendations to customers who hang on my every word. But mostly what draws me is the way it looks and feels, a hypothetical space somewhere between Jose Luis Borges’ Library of Babel and Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop.

I’m well aware, by the way, that this is a vastly idealized image of the actual day-to-day of being a bookseller. And I’ll certainly cross that bridge when I come to it, along with the gargantuan task of starting a business in Italy. But we’re talking about inspiration here. The stuff of dreams.

Shakespeare and Company

I believe I owe this ideal of a bookshop at least partially to my first trip to Paris in 2017. In the course of less than a week, I visited Shakespeare and Company not once, not twice, but three times. It was on the third and final visit that I dragged my husband along with me, and he snapped this photo.

What is it about this bookshop? The location, of course, must play a role. What more romantic spot than the banks of the Seine, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame?

There’s also the whiff of literary history; Sylvia Beach herself christened Shakespeare and Company the “spiritual successor” of her own eponymous bookshop, which hosted the likes of Baldwin, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Pound, published Joyce’s Ulysses when every other publisher considered it too obscene, and served as a gathering place for the “lost generation” of Anglophone writers in 1930s Paris.

But it’s not just the history. The physical space is perfect too. If there were a Platonic form of bookshops it would be Shakespeare and Company, with its worn floors, crooked doorways, painted quotations on the stairs.

Every room seems composed entirely of odd nooks, secret corners, remnants of decades past. It feels like a world unto itself, a thing that has grown organically from stories and dreams and ink-stained nights.

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

Long before I dreamed of owning a bookshop, I was collecting books. I inherited this obsession from my mother, who homeschooled us and would take all five children to the library each week.

We each had a sturdy plastic crate that could fit more or less the twenty-five books the library allowed you to check out at once. We had our own library cards, and I often maxed out mine.

Our house was full of other books too. My mother taught me to shop for books at thrift stores and library book sales. She filled the house with bookshelves, and those shelves with everything from Shakespeare to my dad’s old medical textbooks.

And yes, I was one of those kids who read the dictionary and the encyclopedia for fun. It was an old set of World Book encyclopedias from the 1960s I think, with mostly black and white illustrations and a few colored plates.

We also had a huge, crumbling volume of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which I would pore over for hours, writing my favorites on index cards I kept in a little blue recipe box with horse stickers on the top. Pretty sure I’ve still got that box somewhere.

Everything you need to know about my psyche (and our relationship) can be expressed in the fact that a few years ago, my husband bought me my very own (ex-library) copy of the 125th anniversary edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and it was the most thoughtful gift I could imagine.

One thing I love about this compendium is that it contains not only excerpts of published works, but also things like private letters, Parliamentary speeches, jokes people are said to have made at dinner parties. I remember reading it as a teenager and having a strong sense that it gave me access to the essential humanity of people long dead—not only their writings, but quirks, personalities, moments from a life.

Of course it was always heavily biased toward the type of white, male, privileged people who have tended to end up in history books. But I think it was that same hunger for intimacy with the lives of humans from the past that led me to write my master’s thesis using cookbooks as sources. What better way to glimpse the everyday lives of women than through the lens of the kitchens to which they have too often been confined?

So much of such work involves reading between the lines, extrapolating from little clues, wondering how much we’ve gotten right, and how much of the past remains forever hidden from us.

I have a melancholic temperament, I guess. I think a lot about the things we’ve lost along the way. I used to work at an archive, which would seem like the ideal job for a person with my psychological makeup. But I was dismayed to find that a large part of the work of archivists and librarians involves sifting through to decide what deserves to be kept forever, and throwing the rest away.

Left to my own devices, I keep everything. Books most of all. They’re also a thing I compulsively collect. When my children were little, I homeschooled them too, and like my mother before me, I collected books. I’d go to the library book sale on the last day when books were $3 a bag, and fill two or three bags worth.

They weren’t just any books, mind you. These were books I felt were useful, or at least delicious to have on hand. Old cloth-bound classics. Novels I’d checked out from the library and loved. Children’s encyclopedias, guides to crafts I might take up, anything I might ever regret not purchasing.

Originally I thought I was doing all this collecting because eventually I’d be living abroad, and it would be hard to get ahold of English-language books. That was true to some degree twenty years ago. Back then, if you can believe it, I had a friend who took the extreme step of cutting the bindings off all her books and scanning them in preparation for a move abroad.

I didn’t go that far, though I did eventually break down and buy a Kindle. But it didn’t stop me from collecting books: real, physical books. Fifteen years ago we moved to Florence, Italy with two toddlers and only suitcases, and one of those suitcases was at least half full of books.

Station Eleven

When we moved to Amsterdam nine years ago, I left most of my books in storage in the United States. It was a big deal when a year later we bought our first house and shipped everything we owned across the Atlantic Ocean, including over a dozen boxes of my books.

Since then, I continue to collect, even though these days I do a lot of my reading on ebooks borrowed with my American library card. There’s something about ebooks that feels, well, intangible. One day I started thinking, what if something happened, and the internet went down? What if the only knowledge and literature I had access to was contained in my home library?

The world changes so fast these days. Isn’t it strange, for instance, that 8-track cassettes or floppy disks from a few decades ago are unreadable without specialized equipment, yet you can pick up a book that’s centuries old and read it with just your eyes? So I kept collecting books, even though they were filling up my little Amsterdam apartment.

It wasn’t until I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (for the first time, long before the pandemic) that I realized this was my way of preparing for the Apocalypse. If the worst happened—whatever disaster spelled the end of civilization—my home library could very well end up safeguarding the only books left in the world.

Delusions of grandeur, I know. I can’t explain why I imagined my own books uniquely likely to survive a global cataclysm. I think it was largely a response to my constant simmering unease about climate change, war, political instability—all the things that trouble us in our times.

Looking around at my full bookshelves, I felt safe. Somehow, knowing I had at my fingertips more books than I could finish in a lifetime gave me a feeling of control, a sense that even if the world fell apart, I had everything I needed right here. And not only control, but meaning. ”Because,” as Mandel puts it, “survival is insufficient.”

The risk of a world without books—however unlikely—was too awful to contemplate. Keeping it from happening was something I could take steps toward right now, with every book I welcomed home. And in the worst case scenario, who knew? Maybe others would need my library too. I could be a guardian of things that truly matter, a bulwark against the dark.

Which was what brought me to the idea of a bookshop. Because why wait for the ultimate catastrophe? Why not be a bookish bulwark now? “The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another,” Paul Lynch tells us in Prophet Song; “The end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

We live in trying times, times that make us seek refuge for our souls even if we are lucky enough not to need it for our bodies. When will we need books more than we do now? Or places we can go where books are cherished, where these small objects that bring us together and teach us empathy for each other find their rightful place and importance in the world?

It’s a grand vision for a little bookshop, but it’s a dream I’m not afraid to dream. Books are the most powerful things I know. We read and find ourselves in the mind of another human. We read and learn to see the world in a different way. We read and know we are not alone.

And when we walk in a certain bookshop—imagine yourself there now, wherever that bookshop is for you—there’s a thing that makes us want to catch our breath.

I think it’s our sense that the space feels sacred, like a temple to everything we know a book can be. And that’s the kind of space I want to make. I knew it as soon as I opened that weathered metal door in the stone wall beneath my new house in Italy to find an unfinished cellar with a soaring ceiling and a sense of home.

Meet me there when the world ends, or perhaps even before.

It’s full of gold and light, and when you walk in, you feel just like Belle trailing the Beast into the most perfect gifted paradise. As anyone who grew up watching the movie knows, she definitely married him for that library. And I’m pretty sure that’s where we also learned at a formative time of life that the key to perfect happiness is a rolling library ladder.

Yes, as I made my way through the library in a trance of wonder, I was taking notes. The Wardrobe, my future bookshop in Italy, will most assuredly have a rolling library ladder. I don’t have quite as much space to work with as the Austro-Hungarian royal family, but at its highest point, my cellar soars to a good four metres (13 feet), which I think we can agree more than justifies a rolling ladder. Other things to love here: the warm wood and gilt flourishes, as well as the light streaming in through all those windows. And have I mentioned the painted ceiling?

I won’t be painting any Baroque scenes on my bookshop ceiling, since I lack the talent and want to keep the original finish intact, including a delicious heavy wooden beam. But part of it includes the unsightly beginnings of a half-finished renovation, so I definitely need to do something to cover up those messy cemented bricks and drywall. Any ideas?

The Austrian National Library houses several large antique globes, another point of inspiration. What is it about globes and maps that makes them feel magical? Maybe it’s the suggestion of other places, other times, the intimation of parts unknown that might be reachable if we just look hard enough; and the magic of compass roses, shifting borders and “Here there be dragons.”

Several years ago I snagged this little world map lamp for €10 from a secondhand shop. It will definitely be finding a home in The Wardrobe. Is that enough, or should I get a globe as well?

The Austrian National Library is currently home to several small exhibitions, including one with facsimiles of its oldest illuminated manuscripts. Here’s a page from a textbook specially created for 7-year-old future emperor Maximilian. Isn’t it delightful? If you’re going to make a young child read Latin, here’s the least painful way to do it, with whimsical monkeys and musical bears and rabbits in the margins. More distracting than helpful? Perhaps. But what a work of art.

You probably won’t find anything this old or expensive when you visit The Wardrobe in the future, but who knows? Used bookshops are known for hiding unexpected gifts. You never know what you’ll find if you spend an hour or two browsing through the stacks.

So that was my summer adventure/research trip. What’s your favourite bookshop or library you’ve visited on holiday? Or one close to home you’d recommend to someone visiting your home town?