At last, we get a local bookshop. But I fear the writing is on the wall

A new bookshop has opened in my neighbourhood and you would think it was the second coming, the excitement it has caused. A bookshop! Opening! (Obviously, a third of the space is given over to a cafe where the cakes are roughly $2 a bite. But still.) Reports on the death of the bricks‑and‑mortar bookstore have been going on for some time, peaking last year in the US when the chain Book World closed 45 stores and the New York Times predicted “the death of Barnes and Noble is now plausible”. Stores that remain open wear the baffled air of those not entirely sure what their purpose is.

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And so I was excited to visit the new store. This wasn’t a chain – it was that mythical creature the independent bookstore. Or independentish: it’s owned by a holding company with one other branch in New York. (I have to confess, I’ve always hated Strand Bookstore, the legendary and aggressively pleased‑with‑itself secondhand book emporium in New York that is fending off an effort by the city to list the building and bury it in paperwork, and which, for example, invites its customers to climb up ladders to find things.)

But the best small bookstores in New York remain soothing places, with excellently curated tables on which you want to buy everything displayed. The new store was particularly exciting for my neighbourhood, given that the last to open locally was the Amazon bookstore, which doesn’t take cash, and arranges books according to online marketing principles such as those titles that have “more than 10,000 reviews”.

Shakespeare & Co is not like that, and just seeing it on the street – stoutly facing down a branch of McDonald’s, and on the site previously occupied by Albertina’s Fine Food – was deeply thrilling. Walking inside was like joining a convention of slightly fetishy people who roamed around touching the books and saying “Isn’t this wonderful!”, as if they had dropped in from Mars.

And, of course, it is lovely to have a bookshop in the neighbourhood. Still, while I tried very hard to have a beautiful experience, several things interfered. My God, real-world prices are shocking when one is used to shopping online ($18, with tax, for a 230-page paperback that is $11 on Amazon).

And, ruined by the warehouse sensibility of all products, all of the time, I found myself annoyed by the thinness of the stock. Only one Marilyn Robinson – and Gilead, not Home; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, for which I know I should be grateful, but no Good Morning, Midnight; and neither of the children’s books I wanted.

This is ridiculous on my part, I know. And yet the atmosphere wasn’t quite the comforting hug I’d been expecting either. Instead, it felt a few stages shy of panic: a question, like civil war reenactment, of walking around open-mouthed, staring at a set of quaint exigencies and trying to generate goodwill towards something we all knew, in spite of ourselves, to be doomed.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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