I got the saddest letter a few weeks ago from Mike Edwards, the CEO of Borders, notifying me (and 1.8 million customers) that his mighty giant of a bookstore was going out of business.

Mr. Edwards wrote that Borders would be “closing its doors after more than 40 years of igniting the love of reading,” and that even though they had “fought valiantly to save the company,” they’d failed because of a “rapidly changing book industry, the eReader revolution, and a turbulent economy.” He ended by saying that he felt “privileged to have had the opportunity to lead Borders … in the true and noble cause of expanding access to books and promoting the joy of reading.”

The passion of his letter, and his use of language one would expect to find in The Waverly Novels by Sir Walter Scott, reminded me that people who love and sell books are no less courageous and often no more practical than Don Quixote mounting Rocinante to attack windmills.

There is a foolhardy loveliness to a bookseller’s bravado that deserves a twenty-one-gun salute.

Here is mine. Subtitled: Gone But Not Forgotten Book Stores That I Have Known And Loved.

The first was Dauber and Pine on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, an old-fashioned maze of shelves as tantalizing as they were orderly, wherein dwelt an atmosphere of reverence and a wonderfully eclectic collection of books. I still have two treasured volumes on The Birds of North America that I bought there, as well as my original receipt.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a young wizard enters a small store on Diagon Alley to purchase a wand. As I watched the movie, I suddenly realized why Mr. Ollivander’s enchanting shop seemed so familiar to me. Except for the merchandize that it sold, it looked exactly like Dauber and Pine!

Sheila Heaney was proprietress of the second bookstore that comes to mind. Sheila is a charming, unsentimental, gray-haired widow who was born in England and engages in Scottish country dancing in her spare time. Continuing the Harry Potter analogy, Sheila, like Ron Weasley’s mother, is a sweetly eccentric and warm-hearted woman with a lot of children. Christine (blond), Ellen (redhead), and Jim (redhead) worked at the store. I plucked a third daughter, Mary (brunette), out of the store as if she were a best selling novel, and I brought her home to work for me.