I inherited my love of books from my Sister. She was the voracious reader in the family, while I would not sit down for a minute. I remember the first book that I, after a lot of exhortation, finally got around to reading: Famous Five versus the Black Mask. I got so excited with the mystery that my reading speed could not catch up to my curiosity, and I skipped right past the middle of the book directly to the end to find the secret identity of the villain. Not a resounding success, but I was hooked on books.

There was a small but mighty one room library where I would spend hours during summer and on the way home from school, just browsing through the catalog and choosing the next book I would read. Going to bookstores became an activity I would look forward to. I loved the crispness of the pages and the smell of new books. And I loved going to different bookstores, to see the organization that thoughtful book store owners had put in to arrange these. Some of the books stores would read my mind in terms of which books were clustered together while others missed the mark. When done well, it felt like magic.

As I got older, life went by faster, and reading took a back seat. Technical material took over. And slowly I lost touch with reading. And so it went for years. And then came the killer blow: an hour long commute. Paradoxically, this turned out to be the push that got me all the way back. Spending a couple of hours, held hostage to the traffic, I turned to audiobooks. And just like that, I could read, listen really, for far more than I had in a very long time.

Things changed again when the pandemic hit. Working from home became the norm, and with it both the commute and the visits to bookstores stopped, and along with that the joy of browsing physical books. Along with the entire world, I was stuck at home. It was on one long indoor day that I thought about replicating parts of the bookstore experience. While I could not replicate the smell and the touch, I could make the browsing and organization better. And the core idea behind Lore and Quill was born.

I hope to create for myself, and for fellow book lovers, a place to browse our favorite books, to talk about them, and to get suggestions that feel magical. I hope you enjoy this journey with me.

MG
Founder
Lore & Quill