JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

In the early days of globalization, before Amazon and Google, we acquired our books on trips or relied on friends abroad to get them for us. To personally step inside Swindon was to have a bookgasm. Peter Greenaway saw the connection between bookstores and sex and used Swindon (or a bookshop that looked like it) as the location of his pretentious movie The Pillow Book, now remembered mostly for Ewan MacGregor’s naughty bits.

I hadn’t been to HK in years, and as luck would have it my hotel is three blocks from Swindon. From outside the bookshop looks the same, surrounded by retailers on Lock Road. Inside it seems smaller, or maybe it just looms large in the memory. Near the door is a table full of current bestsellers. It’s when you go to the shelves that you see where the years have taken their toll. Most of the books are old, the pages turning brown. These were probably the same books I didn’t buy the last time I was here. And despite having older titles in stock, they did not have a single one of John Le Carre’s Smiley books. Nor did they have John Burdett’s new Bangkok novels. The store itself has a slightly shabby air. It has been beaten by the megastore chains and the Internet, but it continues to exist like a beacon to the brain.