At the end of The Hours, in the Acknowledgments, Michael Cunningham thanks Three Lives and Company for being in existence. He describes this bookstore as “…a sanctuary and, to me, the center of the universe.  It has for some time been the most reliable place to go when I need to remember why novels are still worth the trouble they take to write.”

It’s the real books–made of paper and ink–that I find in libraries, bookstores, and on my own shelves, that give me this same feeling of being worth the trouble they take to write.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, writes, “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.  The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”  from The Shadow of the Wind

It’s the real books that create this feeling of a hallowed place–this feeling of sanctuary.  It’s sitting among them, holding them, smelling them, running your finger down the soft creamy pages…