The shelf that went ordinary

There is a bookshop in Zamalek that people used to cross Cairo for. The owner stocked what she loved: translated poetry nobody else carried, old travel writing, a whole shelf on the Nile in a dozen languages. You did not always find what you came for. You usually left with something better.

Word spread, and more people came.

Each newcomer wanted something a little more ordinary. Did she have the novel everyone was reading? Could she keep some greeting cards by the till? Were there any children's books with the characters from the cartoons? Every request was reasonable. Every yes was small, and most of them paid.

A few years later the shop looks much like any other bookshop in the city. Nobody ever decided to make it ordinary. It got there one sensible request at a time.

This is the quiet pull on anything that grows. The thing that made it worth finding came from one person's taste, and taste is particular. Every fresh customer, every supplier added, every person hired to work the counter brings a gentle pressure towards the middle. Not all at once, and never on purpose. Just a little, and often.

Holding out against that takes effort that does not stop. It means turning down some sales. It means letting a few people walk out without the thing they asked for, and being at peace with that. It means growing more slowly than the shop could have.

Most of all, it means being willing to say something that sounds unkind and is not: this place may not be for you.

That sentence and the word special have always travelled together. A shop that cannot bring itself to say one will, in time, lose the other.