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Books are the stuff of life - as are good bookshops.

Sit back and enjoy this montage of photos on Salon, here, of the world's most inspiring book shops.

"W. Somerset Maugham called books "a refuge from almost all the miseries of life" -- and as fun as travel can be, being far from home can also be exhausting, hectic and fraught with flashes of sweet misery. For literate travelers, a good bookstore is a sanctuary.

What makes a bookstore beautiful? As their numbers dwindle in so many places, just having the doors open may qualify. Many of the shops in this slide show took over repurposed buildings whose previous tenants were once important local institutions like glove factories, theaters, friaries and grist mills. All of them are brimming over with beauty of one kind or another -- opulent architecture, quirky one-of-a-kind collections, unique ways of encouraging exploration, teetering stacks of mystery and chaos that reflect a community's reading habits. It's terrifying to consider that the generations alive today may be the last to experience the serendipity of scouring shelves of books side by side with other bibliophiles."

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