The Last Day of Pomfrey's

[1] The sign in the window has been there for six weeks now, curling a little at the corners: CLOSING DOWN — EVERYTHING MUST GO. Today it finally means what it says. At five o'clock the doors of Pomfrey's Second-Hand Books, which have opened onto this narrow lane for ninety-four years, will close for the last time, and I — the fourth and final Pomfrey to stand behind this counter — will turn the key.

[2] You have to understand what a shop like this is, and is not. It is not tidy. It never was. Books rise from the floor in leaning towers that a customer must edit their way around, sideways, breathing in; they colonise the stairs; they have, over the decades, quietly eaten two armchairs and a grandfather clock. The smell of the place is its truest inventory — a warm, brown fog of old paper, glue, dust and the ghost of my grandfather's pipe, a smell that regular customers claim they can carry home on their coats. No screen has ever managed to bottle that smell, and I suspect no screen ever will.

[3] People say the shop is dying because of the internet, and they are half right. It is easy, now, to summon any book you can name to your door by morning, cheaper than I could ever sell it. I do not blame my customers for choosing the easy road; I have driven down it myself. But a machine that fetches the exact book you asked for can never give you the book you did not know to ask for — the one that falls open in your hand as you reach past it for something else, and changes the whole shape of a wet Tuesday afternoon. That small, sideways magic was our only real stock, and it cannot be ordered online.

[4] There have been mornings this week when I could scarcely bear it. A woman came in on Monday, perhaps seventy, and stood a long time before the poetry, and then bought a slim green book she said her husband had read to her sixty years ago, before he could no longer read at all. She did not haggle. She held the book to her chest as though it were warm, and thanked me, and it was I who had to look away. On Wednesday a boy of about nine spent his entire pocket money on a battered atlas of a world that no longer exists, its countries all the wrong colours and the wrong names, and left glowing as if he had bought a piece of treasure. In a sense he had.

[5] I will not pretend the numbers lie. For ten years the shop has lost a little more each season than the one before, and no amount of love keeps the roof on. My children have good lives in distant cities and no wish to inherit a beautiful, failing thing. Progress, my accountant says gently, and he is not wrong. But progress is a word we use to make a loss sound like a gift, and I notice we only ever use it about the things that are being taken away.

[6] So at five o'clock I will do what four generations have done: I will straighten the towers no one will now disturb, run a cloth along the dark oak counter, and stand for a moment in the brown, book-scented quiet, listening to ninety-four years of turned pages settle at last into silence. Then I will switch off the light, step out into the lane, and lock the door on all of it. And somewhere in the darkened shop, on a shelf I will never reach again, a book I never read will keep its secret for good.