Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

We will speak for the books."
...
"Like the Lorax?"
"The Lorax speaks for the trees," I remind her.
"Books are made out of paper. Paper is made out of trees."
"What about e-books?"
"We can speak for them too."
"Audiobooks?"
"Audiobooks speak for themselves." She grins. "Get it?

Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned.

"Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure.

I loved them all.

And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often.

Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.

The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.