9 years ago: David Brooks & Teenage Sophistication

David Brooks’ description of Wayne in general was a bit strange for anyone who’s been there. “Over the past six years or so … a new culture has swept into town and overlaid itself” he writes, citing examples such as:

A fabulous independent bookstore named the Reader’s Forum has moved into town where the old drugstore used to be (it features literary biographies in the front window), and there’s a mammoth new Borders nearby where people can go and feel guilty that they are not patronizing the independent place.

Reader’s Forum is a gloriously idiosyncratic place where books aren’t so much shelved as piled and stacked seemingly at random, yet the proprietor seems to know exactly what’s in stock and exactly where it is. I just talked to him to confirm that what I remembered was accurate — the store has been in Wayne since 1986.

The proprietor noted that Brooks’ parents still come in once in a while, just as they did at the store’s old Ardmore location before it moved to Wayne. “Nice people,” he noted. “Teachers.” It seems odd to cite a store your parents have shopped in for decades as evidence of a new trend.