When I heard that Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California, had been named Bookseller of the Year by Publishers Weekly, I felt a little sad. I realized that the bookstore had fallen off my radar a long time ago. I no longer stop in when I return to Southern California, as I did for many years. I began to wonder why we’d parted ways.

In recent years, the store has gone all fancy-schmancy, trying to keep up with the rest of Old Town Pasadena, no doubt. (A place that that used to be merely old.) You know the type: wooden shelves, plush carpeting, coffee bar. Every title you can think of; a plethora of genera giving way, somehow, to the merely generic.

The Vroman’s I fell in love with in the 1970s wasn’t pretty. It was post-war utilitarian, all clean lines and right angles, like a geometry proof. It had thick plate glass windows that looked out onto Colorado Boulevard, glary in the afternoon light. There wasn’t any wainscoting. The floor was linoleum.

I probably went there looking for paper to write a letter home. I went looking for one thing but found something else entirely. I didn’t come from a family who made a big deal about books, but here they were, shelf after shelf of them. I probably stopped to browse, perhaps pulled toward the spectacle of all those titles (far fewer than nowadays), the way one might be drawn toward any freakish thing, legions of muscle-bound men pumping iron at Venice Beach or scads of squawking parrots flapping above the Greene and Greene houses along the Arroyo.

I no longer remember what book I purchased during my first visit, if any. I may simply have been entranced by the titles. I can still be stopped in my tracks by the odd juxtaposition, words that hint at mysterious worlds: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Orchid Bees of Tropical America. At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

In this way, books crabbed sideways into my life. During the years I lived in the San Gabriel Valley, I dropped by Vroman’s several times a month — for information, inspiration, distraction, astonishment. Sometimes it felt like medicine to stand in the cool, unfussy aisles as the world whizzed past outside its doors.

When I look back on it, Vroman’s then was a stationery store with a book addiction. It was a staid operation that had gone a little mad. The idea of books must have occurred to someone — a previous manager, perhaps — and then taken over, the way books do, one metal shelf at a time, till at last the fountain pens and boxes of scented stationery and letter openers had been pushed to one side. Vroman’s was meek, mild Walter Mitty, but with the nerve to pilot its crazy dream, or so it seems now. I miss the old store.