Used bookstores possess a certain inscrutable charm: the warm, stale smell of old books; the maze-like rows; the disheveled shelves; the sometimes-surly employees. These hole-in-the-wall shops, overflowing with volumes of literature by obscure authors, are a paradise for some, daunting and impregnable for others.

“You either get it or you don’t,” said Jay Platt, owner of West Side Book Shop on West Liberty Street in Ann Arbor. And from the look of his shop, it’s clear that Platt is someone who “gets” the appeal of books. Stacks of them surround the desk in his quaint shop, and shelves brimming with them tower over him. A glass case in the middle of the room displays the store’s most prized volumes, including pristine first editions of “The Scarlett Letter” and “Through the Looking Glass.”

Platt, a University alum with a degree in naval architecture, became interested in books when he went into a used bookstore in New York City in 1970.

“It was like turning on a light bulb,” Platt said.

He got into the business that year and opened West Side in 1975.

One of the store’s most impressive books is a Bible printed in 1610. It’s a giant volume, close to five inches thick and a foot tall, with intricate gold inlay on the cover. Holding the book in your hands, it’s hard not to feel some sense of wonder at its history and sheer substance.

“We all like the physical presence of a book,” said Bill Gillmore, owner of Dawn Treader Book Shop a few blocks away on East Liberty. Gillmore started his shop the same year as Platt, but the founding of his store was more accidental.

“Basically, my landlord pushed me into it,” Gillmore said.

Gillmore had been working as a bookbinder in the basement of the Michigan Theater when his landlord told him he had to come up with a retail option or his lease wouldn’t be renewed. And so Dawn Treader was born, and Gillmore got to keep his lease.

Dawn Treader is deceptively large, extending farther back than the small storefront suggests, and containing 70,000 books.

“This place has more books than it can hold,” Gilmore said. The shelves reach almost to the ceiling, and knee-high stacks of books line the floor.

The allure of the tangible

Though some used bookstores have closed in recent years, Ann Arbor is still a more supportive environment than many other cities, contends Pablo Alvarez, curator at the Special Collections Library at the University.

“I think Ann Arbor is very fortunate because, considering the size of the town, there are so many secondhand book stores, and that is really unique,” he said. The Special Collections Library, housed in the Hatcher Graduate Library, holds historical and culturally significant books ranging from ancient medieval manuscripts to contemporary novels. Among the collection’s more noteworthy holdings are a second folio of the works of Shakespeare and a manuscript in Galileo’s own hand, written in 1609.

“Some of our books, I would argue, are in a very similar condition to the way they were read 400 years ago,” Alvarez said.

This, according to Alvarez, allows one to reconstruct the reading experience of the book’s original audience, a process that is only possible with a physical, printed book.

“If you see many digital collections, exhibits, very few of them tell you how big the book actually is, and that’s very important because you really need to know whether, for instance, the Bible was held in only one hand or if that Bible was actually meant to be read in a cathedral,” he said.

“I like the idea that you could learn, not necessarily from text, from the written word, but from an artifact.”

However, the Internet is changing the way people buy and read books.