Prestige Bookshop is the place to be ...

Many are the times, as a book lover, I have walked into a bookshop and left, an hour or so later, feeling drained, assaulted and insulted.
The routine is: Walk in, 'shelf' shop, flip through titles, pick a title, two or three or ask for particular titles, pay and leave.
I feel drained after endless shelf/title hopping. Throw in the feeling that I may never get to read as many interesting titles as I may wish and the fact that I cannot afford as many books as I'd love to own, the drain is complete.
The assult and insult comes in the way the staffers respond to your queries - as if they are swatting a fly. So easy, so effortless and with such a bored look, you feel an idiot, a million times over.
However, today at the Prestige Bookshop, none of these 'ill' treatments were given. Indeed, if you happen to be in Nairobi and you are a lover of books and you love order, neatness, technology ... name it, go to Prestige Bookshop, (Mama Ngina Street, I think).
There is a way you feel when you walk in and are met by these warm, custom-made shelves, neatly and appropriately labelled: Fiction, Classics, World Affairs, Self Help, Business, School etc.
You get the feeling that so much thought was put into arranging/stacking the books on the shelves. It is not the size of the book noor the name of the author nor ... but, in my view, the cover of the book that attracts you. I thought this is a good thing: Let the book sell itself to you.
The staffers, as good and neat as they were, had half of their work done for them. Apart from a question or two about this or that title that could not be found on the shelves, they were more or less left to idle around.
I went looking for Frank McCourt's 'Angela's Ashes' but didn't find it. I tried John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, nil. Of Mice and men, nada.
Not to despair, Sara introduced me to Frank McCourt's other works: 'Tis and Teacher Man. I found Teacher Man interesting. I should buy it over Christmas.
Oh, and Gabriel Marquez Garcia's A Hundred Years of Solitude,hardcover no less costs a friendly 880/-.(Elsewhere, the paperback costs 990/-).
It is a nice place to go for books.
Kudos Prestige Bookshop