Downtown, past the nightclubs and unsavory attractions, half a block from the Coffee Exchange and right across the street from my favorite shawarma restaurant, is a little alley called Maiden Lane, where bubble tea can be had on the corner and chess can be played on checker-topped tables. There, until a week ago, a little sign proclaimed each day: Works On Paper: Used and Rare Books. Open.

Stepping inside, the traveler would be greeted by the sounds of classical music, the sight and smell of hundreds of books, neatly arranged and prettily displayed, and sometimes tea, cheese or shortbread. Handmade labels adorned the shelves: Children's Literature, Ideas, Theatre, The Far North, Modern History, Canadian Authors.

I've spent hours among those shelves, flitting from the hardbound classics to the religion shelf with its volumes of C.S. Lewis brought from England, from the musty books of poetry to the history of ballet. I have spent hours, and I have perused worlds.

So it was with true and sincere sorrow that I entered Works on Paper for the last time last Saturday, bought an armload of books at 50 percent off, claimed one of the solid wooden shelves for my own, and thanked the store's 78-year-old proprietor, Betty Wilkinson, for all she had done to bring light, culture and imagination to the city of Windsor.

She closed her doors sometime after I left, never to open them again.

I am blessed with a small group of friends who are as enchanted by books as I am, and we had made Works On Paper one of our regular haunts. On Robbie Burns' Day, St. Patrick's, Michaelmas, the Ides of March — any occasion, in short, when we could find time and an excuse — we met downtown for a Thai lunch, a cup of tea and book shopping before ending the evening reading aloud and eating haggis at the local pub.

Our tradition will be sorely missed, for without Works On Paper, the heart and soul has gone out of the whole thing. We feasted not primarily on pad thai or sheep's stomach, but on words — poetry — ideas — meaning.

On our second-to-last visit, made a few days before the store closed, one of my friends lamented the tastes of people who will keep the nightclubs in business but drive a bookstore out. "Well," someone said, "you can't change the world."

"You can try, though," my friend replied. "One person at a time."

And Betty, who has owned and operated Works On Paper for 13 years and whose knowledge of her shelves has been intimate, looked up from handwriting receipts and said, "Well, I did my part."

And she did. Because books, as long as people will read them, are powerful things. They are more than ink and paper, more even than words. Books are personalities, philosophies, great minds and mediocre ones. They do not just reflect culture; they are culture. They demand a great deal from readers: they demand that we engage with them, that we think abstractly and clearly, that we imagine deeply, that we learn, that we grow, that we care.

Leigh Hunt, in his essay "On Books," wrote of the great minds that have loved books. He exulted,

How pleasant it is to reflect, that all those lovers of books have themselves become books! Consider: mines themselves are exhausted; cities perish; kingdoms are swept away, and man weeps with indignation to think that his own body is not immortal.... Yet this little body of thought, that lies before me in the shape of a book, has existed thousands of years, nor since the invention of the press can anything short of an universal convulsion of nature abolish it.

I found these words of Hunt's in a little hardbound book entitled Essays and Essayists, published in 1925 and shelved under "Ideas" at Works On Paper. "In one small room," Hunt continues, "like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be gathered together 'The assembled souls of all that men held wise.'"

Such is the power of books. How often I have wished that the apostle Paul still lived, and overlooked the fact that we have him still — we have him, in fact, more succinct and brilliant than he likely ever was in person. We have the results of his thought, his study, his work, and his revelation; we have the words God poured through him.

In the same way we have David, and Moses, and John the Beloved. We have even God Himself. Why has God chosen to reveal Himself in words, to offer His mind and His heart in the pages of a book? Because in no other way can He be revealed so effectively, so clearly, and so lastingly; in no other way can the revelation be passed down from generation to generation with renewed power and no loss of truth. "God is there, and He is not silent," as Francis Schaeffer put it.

God wrote a book: That is a powerful thing!

Books do not just tell us about things, they bring those things to life and show them to us. Hence their singular power to change our perceptions of life. In books, particular people show us what they have seen in their particular world, and the power of their vision changes ours. We learn the dreams of men in the past, and perhaps our own dreams are enlarged. We learn their morals, their social customs, and their taboos, and some light is shed on our own. We are inspired by the commitment of saints, missionaries, preachers, and workers of the past and present, and by their light we see light.

Even the simplest things, the physical realities around us, can be deepened by books. Who can hear a storm in quite the same way after Emily Dickinson wrote, "It sounded as if the streets were running/And then the streets stood still"?

I wish that more Christians would read, and not just the Christian-life books and novels churned out by Christian publishing houses. I wish they would haunt used bookstores, delving into the thoughts, the poetry, the stories of yesterday and today. I wish they would fellowship with the world's great thinkers, with Christianity's most faithful workers and with the deepest imaginations and longings of our race. They might be surprised at how often they find God in the written word. C.S. Lewis said of books that "A young man who wishes to remain an atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."

We should of course be careful in our reading. The voices of men have been tainted since Eden, even their best voices. Nineteenth-century clergyman E. Paxton Hood wrote, "Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter."

But we have also, since Eden, been marked with the image of God, and like the intricate patterns of snowflakes, we betray our origin at every step. W.E. Channing perhaps said it best: "God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages."

Next time you find yourself at a loss for something to do, consider sitting down with the distant and the dead, with the voice of a single human soul, speaking directly to you in what may be the most intimate form of human communication — for a book speaks directly from the mind to the mind, from the soul to soul. Listen, enjoy, ponder; and in your own life, your convictions, your writings, your speech, respond.

Books are more than ink and paper. They are a living conversation with the power to enrich our lives in powerful ways. "A good book," wrote novelist William Styron, "should leave you ... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."

I think he is right. In any case, by reading, I live my life more fully. On ink and paper I peruse the mind and soul of the human race, and even the mind and soul of God; I see their interactions clearly laid down; and I am challenged to interact with all my heart, soul and strength: to take my own life as a gift, to think about it, to enrich it with imagination, to live. God did not will us to live in a world without books, but neither did He will us to go along never turning their pages, never haunting used bookstores, never finding out what are the treasures in the snow.

I miss Works On Paper already. A spark of life has gone out of downtown, but it's not really extinguished: I carry it around in me, as do my friends, as does everyone who chooses to read and read well. To mangle the advice of yesteryear, Go to a bookshop, young man, and grow up in its pages.

You cannot but be enriched by the adventure.