EVER since I learned to read I have been a haunter of libraries and bookshops. The public library was like one of those international-food restaurants where you could sample anything that took your fancy. The choice was amazing but rather daunting. Where to start? For someone like me, it was a window into worlds real and imagined. Others might travel for their holidays to far-flung places. All I had to do was stroll from my home to the town centre.

Bookshops offered similar opportunities, except, of course, you had to pay for the pleasure they offered. I still have many of the books I bought with pocket money when I was young, carried through life like a lucky charm. TS Eliot’s Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I have measured out mine with Puffins and King Penguins, Peregrines and Pelicans. If pressed, I could tell where I found each one.

Like radio, the demise of the book has been often foretold. Books, we were unreliably informed, were yesterday’s technology, so 19th century, so redundant in a digital age. I well recall the gleeful obituaries. The internet would sweep them away with tsunami-like ferocity. Kindles, apparently, were the future, and even I owned one once. Who knows where it lies unloved now. And who cares?

Similar prophesies of doom were made about bookshops, for what need was there for them if no one wanted books? And for a while things did look a bit glum. With the demise of the Net Book Agreement, which determined that books must be sold at their cover price, many privately-owned bookshops found they couldn’t compete with the discounts offered by supermarkets and chain stores. Inevitably, sadly, some went to the wall or sold out to more voracious competitors.

Of late, however, in what has been the bleakest of midwinters for the high street, there are signs that reports of the death of the bookshop were premature. In the last couple of weeks, I have heard of two new bookshops opening in Edinburgh. And last Saturday evening, I attended a mini book festival in Linlithgow, organised by the local independent, Far From the Madding Crowd, which was very well-attended, a testimony to the loyalty and warmth the shop engenders.

The best bookshops are like that. When one of them is threatened it is a cause for mourning and resentment and the raising of petitions. For me, a town without a bookshop is unworthy of the name, a place where civilisation is yet to reach, where culture must surely fail to thrive. I have been in such outposts and nothing would drag me back.

Where there is at least one bookshop there is hope. A year ago, I visited Christchurch in New Zealand, which is still struggling to recover from the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The centre of the city was preternaturally quiet and the shopping mall was bereft of customers. But the one shop that was buzzing was Scorpio Books, also independently owned, which against all odds had managed to resurrect itself. Would the same, brave decision have been made by the fund managers who control chain stores? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.

One of the new Edinburgh shops will be Topping’s, which has a wonderful branch in St Andrews. The company’s founder is Robert Topping, formerly of Waterstone’s in Manchester, which he left after being told to limit the size of the stock. The story is told in a new memoir by Glasgow-born Sir Tim Waterstone, of whom I was briefly an employee – the least said about which the better. “The Waterstone’s model,” recalls Sir Tim, “was simply this: the highest class of heavily stocked literary bookselling run on a national scale by an unusually enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable young staff.”

Waterstone’s was born in 1982 when the book trade was in dire of need of modernisation. Complacent, rival shops kept short hours and unsatisfying stock, and their staff were more inclined to turn custom away than welcome it. Waterstone’s – which was in the vanguard of Sunday opening – initiated a bookselling revolution and played an intrinsic role in making the literary novel cool. In the store in which I worked, on any given night you might catch a reading by Gore Vidal, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver or Edna O’Brien. It was like a club of which anyone could become a member.

Scratch any writer and they will regale you with tales of their favourite bookshops. I have one – Main Street Trading in St Boswells – a handful of miles from where I live in the Borders. Some prefer charity shops, others, such as my biblioholic husband, emporia like the Strand in New York with its eight miles of books. In Browse: The World in Bookshops, Ali Smith hymns Leakey’s second-hand bookshop in Inverness in which I always try and spend an hour or two when I’m in the vicinity. As she says, the books are what most matter, but it also has a log-burner, a cafe and an unique atmosphere. Moreover, it has to be one of the Highland capital’s “main attractions”.

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