If you open a copy of Montaigne’s ‘Essays’, you won’t find a well-structured treatise. Instead you will find speculative pieces with titles such as ‘Of Friendship’, ‘Of Liars’ and ‘Of Smells’. In the same spirit, I write of books and bookshops.

I have much to thank bookshops for. When I was 12, I walked in to Mary Martins in Adelaide and bought a copy of ‘The Green Years’ by AJ Cronin. A book which by today’s standard, is fairly crusty but as a young boy, I’d never encountered anything like it.

I was hooked. It led me to writing. I became a journalist, then I taught writing and communication at university. Now I work in the area of generational change and I help people get jobs. All because of ‘The Green Years’. Well, at least it played a part.

While the Internet has cut counter sales of books, the biggest slug to profitability is rent. I walked down Charing Cross Road in London a few years ago looking for bargain, and there were half the number of bookshops trading as there were ten years before.

Book shopping is a tactile and sensual experience. Smell the pages of a new book. Run your fingers up and down its spine. Admire its colour, design and heft. It feels good in the hand.

How many happy hours have I spent in bookshops? Eons. One day, many years ago, I walked in to a now defunct second hand bookshop in St Kilda, Melbourne. On top of a dusty cupboard, I pulled down an original copy of Ernest Hemingway’s novel ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

A young woman was minding the shop. “That’s an old one,” she said. “It is, how much?” “How about $10.00?” I paid and ran out of the door.

I admit to not being totally in control when shopping for books. There’s an invisible person who walks five steps ahead of me, scopes out potential book stores and then pushes me inside. They select too many books, hand over my money, and I’m out without having any say in the matter.

Bookshops old and new are havens of tranquillity. To step inside and browse is to leave the hurley burley behind and enter – not an environment – but a world, which is part lucky dip (boys and girls), for who knows what you will find?

For us older readers, it is also part nostalgia, for stories read in our teens (our green years): ’Great Expectations’, ’Siddhartha’, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Under the Volcano’, ‘Catch 22’ and more.

Books form a part of the great web of meaning we spin for ourselves. They can bind us to a chair for hours as we launch ourselves on a voyage that may consume us for the rest of our lives.

Such is the power of the Word. A book is not a sound bite. It can’t be hurried. Books are a tangible resisting force against the perpetually vanishing present. It doesn’t require much technology except light.

To make sense of our emotional lives, we need to dip inwards to work through the content of our feelings. There is no greater guide and companion on this journey than a favourite book, whose well thumbed pages helps to make sense of the story of our lives.

Most of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse are expressed through the Word. Exposition requires the ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially. It says ‘stop – and think’. In a world of KPIs, downsizing, offshoring, TV cooking shows, a book requires only one thing – your full attention.