On 8 August PN Review received an e-mail headed 'Please help save our local bookshop - sign and forward'. How easy it is to e-mail solidarity! A key-stroke and conscience is clear. We flatter ourselves that we have helped to make a difference, which in a statistical way we have. (If you wish to support the campaign, visit http://www.PetitionOnline. com/Bookshop/petition.html.)

In this case, the villain is Waterstone's, a company which has been held responsible for many aspects of the end of civilisation as we know it (a civilisation which it was instrumental in establishing when the first branch opened in 1982). Plaintively, our correspondent writes: 'In far North London we have a tragedy on our hands in that they are closing the local Waterstone's bookshop on Wood Green High Street and turning it into a clothes store. This would be a complete disaster for the area. We do not need another clothes shop, mobile phone shop or fast food shop. Our kids need bookshops.' So do mothers: 'This is not just about somewhere to buy books. This is about supporting a place where mums can have a coffee while their kids browse the books and develop an appetite for reading at an early stage, where the staff are actually knowledgeable and helpful, where kids can meet local authors at signings which bring books to life.'

'Tragedy' and 'complete disaster' may be disproportionate. And it's disquieting to read that books come to life only in the presence of their authors. Is the shop selling dead books (and not enough of them) the rest of the time? What is the life of a book? More to the point, if mums were buying sufficient coffee and children sufficient books, Waterstone's would not be moving out.

Still, the unacknowledged legislators of mankind and other distinguished persons have added their names. Appeals have gone to the press and to local worthies, including David Lammy MP (much good may that do them). Yet a bookshop is unlikely to be saved by a petition. What it needs is customers. The protesters might organise a commercial congregationalism, busing in people from other parishes to buy, and making the shop so profitable that Waterstone's would reverse its decision.

Three days after the Wood Green petition, BBC Radio 4 News reported a campaign in Paris to save the Latin Quarter from developers. One guidebook tells us: 'The area is stacked with second hand bookshops, including those specialising in English books, and masses of bistros. Try to find one with good traditional onion soup. Be wary of the over priced ones on the main roads and instead dart down the side streets.' But these little businesses are vulnerable to forces at work, also, in Wood Green.

Radio 4 reminded us that the Left Bank was for a time the intellectual and spiritual habitat of Camus, reverend sire, of Sartre and his formidable minder Simone de Beauvoir, among many others, not all of them twentieth-century or French. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Ford all at one time cast shadows there, and there Gertrude Stein pitched her tent. Wood Green boasts Judy Dyble, Paul Furlong, Leonard Whiting and Jack Hawkins, not quite the same thing.

Similar imperatives, however, are changing North London and the Rive Gauche. The amenities of an area only survive so long as they are perceived to be amenities by the community that sustains them. The Deputy Mayor of Paris could not confirm that there were sufficient customers and spending tourists to maintain the neighbourhood. Still, she felt strongly that it must be preserved. The interviewer did not ask why. The culture of Sartre and the rest is remote from that of the twenty-first century: are those ghosts a sufficient reason to dedicate the area to a perpetual retrospect? Tourist-filled cafés, bookshops selling postcards and nostalgia, might seem ideologically at odds with the spirit of those who wrote feverishly at the café tables and argued into the small hours. As Sartre might have said, we confuse things with their names. We come to believe in the names only through things, and in the works only through the living presence of authors or authors' absences from the carefully preserved streets in which they moved. Wood Green is thinking of its mums and children; Paris is concerned with the dead and tourism. Chances are, the Paris protest will succeed, the area be atrophied with subsidies, pedestrianisation and tourist routes. And Wood Green will probably lose its Waterstone's because the future is not privileged over the past, even though we might wish it to be, believing that there is value in cultivating reading, as in cultivating writing. Perhaps 'tragedy' and 'complete disaster' aren't so disproportionate after all.