J and I drove up to Kamloops for the Thanksgiving weekend (about which more later) and it was there that I was finally forced to admit to myself that the era of rewarding browsing in used bookstores in unfamiliar small towns is over. Everyone has Internet access now, which means that you’ll walk into what once might have been a promising small bookstore and quickly discover that they, too, have been swept into the modern age. You’ll find shelves of beat-up books, a sad selection which has been accumulated by the dealer with no signs of discrimination — no indication of a specialty which might reveal an owner with a genuine passion for their work, someone who spends their hours tracking down unusual books in a particular field of interest. All the books will be priced well into the upper half of the range that any www.abebooks.com query would display. Those ABE listings and their prices are, of course, more revealing of the bookseller’s hopes of windfall than they are an indication of any true market value. And so you’ll find jacketless copies of John Galsworthy novels, foxed and sun-faded copies of Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries priced in anticipation of a visit from a collector who just happens to be lacking that one volume to complete their set. And so you’ll drift out again, without having bought a thing.

This makes it difficult to persuade the next generation — my nieces and nephews — of the pleasures to be had browsing in used book stores. When you tell them the way things used to be it begins to sound like a fairy tale, something from Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm.

“Once upon a time,” the story will begin, “you could set out on a drive into the countryside, just you and your car, in search of books…”

Let’s imagine that car a Morgan roadster, red, of 1948 vintage, and that you favoured driving it with the top down in order that the crisp October wind might run its metaphoric fingers through your hair. You fancied ourself a bit of a bibliophile, more or less familiar with the specific demands of the moneyed collectors in the cities, and in those days you knew that you could reasonably expect to find in almost any mid-sized town, no matter how far that town was situated from either coast, at least one used book store run by some faded academic who had retired from a career teaching college English to unappreciative undergraduates; perhaps (to add a small frisson to the tale) he had been forced into early retirement by an administration concerned about the growing rumors of his liaisons with the more promising of his students, the ones who, under his tutelage, had come to appreciate the double entendres tucked away in Donne and Marvell, and who, newly initiate, now scorned the vast ignorance of their Jane Eyre-loving peers.

This former academic cum bookseller would have accumulated his stock through zealous attendance at church jumble sales through the years of his teaching career. Three decades and more he had been at it every weekend, first in line in his thick-soled walking shoes when the doors of the church hall were opened at ten o’clock — perhaps he’d even offered to help set up the book tables on the evening before. Methodically he would have scanned the spines of the donated books, pulling out the compact Modern Library editions of Faulkner and Poe, the Everyman’s Dostoevsky and Henry James, the volumes from J. M. Dent and Hogarth Press, ordered from London booksellers by those sad expatriates condemned to live out their final years in this God forsaken mid-sized town far from the coasts, and who had died dreaming of lost Avalon.

To this mother lode of books our about-to-be bookseller would have added the volumes which had lined the shelves of his own college office — the same office furnished with the love seat which had been the scene of his most persuasive private lectures on the marvels of Donne and Marvell — and with these had opened his used book store soon after retirement, presiding at the till in his waistcoat and spectacles, buying the best of those books brought to him for assessment by the ignorant heirs of deceased collectors, volumes which he’d paid a pittance for and which he now offered for sale at a stiff (and yet, he felt, still fair) markup.

Still: at that time there was no Internet, no www.abebooks.com to consult when pricing; this nearly-disgraced academic would have had only the printed catalogs sent out semi-annually by his peers as his guide to the market value of his stock. And you, a book scout with more worldly ways, with your knowledge of the prices obtained recently at Sotheby’s for Hogarth Press firsts, would breeze into this mid-sized town and cherry-pick the best of his accumulated horde.

This, then, is the vanished world I still dream of — or did, at any rate, until Kamloops — a paradise of unplundered bookstores waiting in the provinces, accessible by red Morgan roadster on early Fall driving expeditions. Gone now, I’m sad to say; long gone.

Replaced by a world in which the browser is more likely to find things such as this depressing collection of Chicken Soup For the Soul titles, displayed — one can only assume proudly — in the window of an unnamed used book store in downtown Kamloops two weeks ago.