Photographer: InfoMofo

I wish I could take credit for this post, however, it was featured on Trazzler. It is such a great slide show, I wanted to share it. InfoMofo is the photographer for the photo above. These stores are still around, you may have to hunt for them.

Endangered Culture: Beautiful Bookstores

W. Somerset Maugham called books “a refuge from almost all the miseries of life”—and as fun as travel can be, being far from home can also be exhausting, hectic, and fraught with flashes of sweet misery. For literate travelers, a good bookstore is a sanctuary.

What makes a bookstore beautiful? As their numbers dwindle in so many places, just having the doors open may qualify. Many of the shops in this slideshow took over repurposed buildings whose previous tenants were once-important local institutions like glove factories, theaters, friaries, and grist mills. All of them are brimming over with beauty of one kind or another—opulent architecture, quirky one-of-a-kind collections, unique ways of encouraging exploration, teetering stacks of mystery and chaos that reflect a community’s reading habits… —Megan Cytron, Editor of Trazzler

If you enjoy the above, why don’t you let Megan know.

CityRoom, JustLuxe, Big Blend, Spa Review Magazine, Global Writes

Finalist in the Writing and Publishing category of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, “$uccess, Your Path to a Successful Book,”