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.