I have always loved bookshops. I love browsing in them having no intention of buying. I am Magellan and the shop is my ship that circumnavigates the world of my feral imagination. In the early days of my travelling , it was cerebral, it was language inspiring the mind and heart. It was a sort of magical realism where I could be a river, mountain , tempest, a sole survivor on a desert island eating coconuts talking to a basketball, it’s all there right? The imagination of journey without ever moving outside the bookshop unless you need to take a leak. The great bookshops have the same faces behind the counter, five, ten, sometimes twenty years. You know them even without knowing them. They give you a grounded certainty that everything will be okay. Take the Theosophical Bookshop on Russell Street next to the music store and not far from the army disposal store and Taco Bill’s. I’ve been going there for close on thirty years. The same faces greet me as I ramble past their counter in a disheveled haunted desperate mystic looking for answers that can never be answerable. As Krishnamurti said, ‘truth is always fluid, you can never know it for it keeps changing’. Still the desperate mystic refuses to accept such folly and onwards he plunges into the Bhagavad Gita, Sufism, Christianity of the mystics, Ufology , Mythology, Reiki, and maybe buy a soothing CD of chanting from a Tibetan Buddhist monk chanting along with a new age melody. There I am lost in space as it were among the incense and feel consoled that everyone else who visits the shop makes my craziness bearable. Hell the world is crazy, don’t you know. Bookshops are a pilgrimage of the soul to ideas and aspirations. Take City Lights a bookshop in San Francisco famous for its poet owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was there a revolution was born when Allen Ginsburg’s Howl won a court case against a ruling calling for the book to be banned calling it obscene bankrolled by Ferlinghetti. It became a rallying call to the disenchanted youth of the day where readings would be held by Ginsburg, Kerouac, Cassady spawning the Beat Generation. The bookshop was a live movement not dead shelves with dead authors, it was a celebration of life not to be ignored. Up until I wandered into the Nicholas Building one day looking for the Writers Centre, my life was bookshops great as they are , it wasn’t till I saw those old beaded curtains that were so hip in the seventies with a sign saying Collected Works Bookshop that until I walked through those curtains I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I felt I had come home. I had come to feel safe with my weirdness, as the owner guffawed over this writer or that writer. A bookshop that had SOUL. A bookshop that embraced madness, with its clutter of magazines, posters, paintings, postcards, Jazz. I had found my family. And like all families, some were difficult , challenging, others fun, exciting to be around. Wine drunk, cheese eaten and more wine drunk. A poet rolls in, a conversation begins, a painter discusses Japan, a musician dressed in black hunting for a free drink. Friendships made, conversations with strangers , book launches, literary events such as Howl where I became Michael McClure for a day. And afterwards we would retire to Young & Jackson drinking, laughing , loving under the ample bosom of Dame Chloe , a painting by French artist Jules Lefebvre in all her glory as we sang and recited words from Dylan Thomas. Finding that bookshop changed my view of bookshops who up until then, although thrilled by its content, it felt after the Works like all the bookshops of my youth were spent looking at words in a mortuary. Collected Works gave a voice to the voiceless, it was there my true Magellan was found.