George Steiner on the death of the bookstore

In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good bookstores have had to close, and what we have now are textbook emporia which are not bookstores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great bookstore has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a bookstore.

—George Steiner, Do Books Matter?