Bookshopped

This little bookshop has closed down, these pavement bookshops were killed, this Scottish bookshop is haunted, this little bookshop explains why it's all so hard.

And the Babu's thinking, hell, I come from Delhi, only ever visited Lotus Bookshop, the pride of Bandra, twice or thrice in my life--so why am I so sorry it closed down? Because Lotus had books on military history, film and theatre, in particular, that I couldn't get anywhere else in India; because the people who ran the bookshop were Book People whose interests went well beyond the bestseller list; because like the best independent bookshops, Lotus made you feel that you were part of a community. I was terribly disappointed when I went back in February this year: it had the dismal inventory and apathy of a place that was going out of business. (Prufrock has a lovely post on Lotus here.)
Zigzackly wrote a piece on New and Secondhand that explains why even the most hard-headed bookseller isn't entirely about the profit-and-loss column:
"Jamalbhai would frequently told customers who couldn’t afford books, “Go ahead, pay later. Learn, learn!” And his son, Sultanbhai’s uncle loved to say “Saraswati and Lakshmi can’t sit in the same place.”