Booklovers in San Francisco

“You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. – Susan Sontag, from ‘Letter to Borges’

Whenever I am in a bookstore, I lose all sense of time. Usually, the buyers want to buy a particular book and don’t have the time to go and look at a shelf of books just like that. And here I was, spending hours browsing books, always waiting to be surprised by something that I want to find that I’m not looking for.

In exploring San Francisco, I have found these fantastic places for Booklovers. The smell of paper as soon you enter a bookstore, overhearing other people’s literary and otherwise conversations :) the galleries I found at some of the bookshops, I loved every bit of these places. Here is a list of places that I have put together for anyone interested in books.

Walking Map 1

Walking Map 2

Expand the Legend on the left for details