This is an opinion column

I miss bookstores — the old fashioned kind.

I bought a book from a big-box store a few days ago. The people who worked there were helpful, and some were even knowledgeable. They seem well trained. But they didn’t know what I like to read or what I should read next. There wasn’t a book club meeting in the corner or a sign up sheet for new members. There was no list of local poetry readings or fiction writing groups. There was none of the personal touch bookstores used to have.

Most bookstores these days are corporate, not local, and they’re on the way out. They flourished before anybody had heard of Amazon or ordered books online, back before there was an online.

Book stores — the brick and mortar kind — are anachronisms, like telephones hanging on a kitchen wall or attendants that filled your car up with gas. For the most part, they’re gone. They can’t compete with with the huge inventories big-box stores carry and they can’t compete with e-books and audible ones.

But there used to be bookstores in every city of some size. My toddler daughter learned to walk up stairs at a bookstore. The Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina was known throughout the country. It flourished from 1938 until finally closing in 1999.