An encounter with the crooked house

2023.8

On a lazy day during our trip in Canterbury, we strolled to the corner of the street, and discovered this grotesque, hidden building.

It looks very foreign indeed. At first I thought it was going to collapse. It leans precariously to the right side, which completely tangled my little brain that was packed with incomplete ideas of gravity and the Earth. 

So it was when I courageously stepped closer to its facade that I discovered this grotesque, hidden, spectacular, and one of the most honourable designs in the world. Yes, its shape was the architect's design. 

I made a few guesses of what the shape of the building could mean. It might be a twist of waist, resembling a dancer in a ball. It might be the extension of neck, to whisper a secret to the cobblestone street beside it. It might just be for making the building stand out and puzzling and intriguing any curious pedestrians, like me.

That day I spent three hours in the bookshop. Yes, I found out as soon as I entered that it was a bookshop. I also found out that it was a historically famous building called the Crooked House. And there was every reason for it to be famous. The timeless scent of the wood shelves and walls still lingers at my nose. The joy of swimming in a sea of good old books still fills me every time I come back to it. The peace of the bookshop - the volunteer cashier's smile and friendliness and the flipping of old, weathered pages - still makes me feel heavenly.

What the bookshop taught me the most was three boxes of books on one of the shelves. Those books were all covered in leather-coloured paper packages, with a different sticker on every one of them. When all of the words are put together into a complete picture, I finally understood that those were gift books. The owner of the books passed the life of the books on by donating them to the bookshop and giving them to a new owner.

This both astonished and infected me. Imagine holding a book that someone held before, thinking about the plot that someone thought about before, getting so elated and laughing so loud in the climax which someone also did before. This is not only about sustainability; it's also about the power of sharing the same feeling with another unknown person in this very very big world.