What stays with you about Jimbocho is not a book but the shelves: some hundred and thirty shops, each of which has quietly decided what it is for, so that cinema sits beside law and a few doors on a shop stacks nothing but mountains. No single store will finish your errand, which is exactly why the afternoon goes. Publishers, specialist dealers and coffee houses occupy the same few blocks, so you can buy something, read two doors down, and come back an hour later for the one you had talked yourself out of. The shops are narrow and deep, and the stock runs from the window to the back wall without much concession to browsing comfort; in several of them you will need to turn sideways to let another customer past, and neither of you will remark on it.

Prices are pencilled inside the cover in a hand that assumes you already know what the book is. Almost nobody lives here. Three subway lines arrive, people come to work and then leave again, and on a Sunday evening the street is startlingly quiet — a disappointment, if atmosphere was what you came for.

Return on a weekday at noon and look instead at the backs of the people standing at the shelves, at the particular stillness of someone reading a spine before deciding. Every one of them is after something different, and none of them appears to be in any hurry at all. The air smells of paper and dust and, from somewhere just out of sight, of coffee. You will not find the thing you meant to find, and you will stay considerably longer than you intended to. The street is at its best on the days you arrive without knowing what you want.