In New York City last summer, I went for a run and passed a corner where a man sat selling used paperbacks from a card table. I stopped running long enough to notice that these weren’t the same wholesale bestsellers and self-help books being hawked from tables all over the city. The man was pushing vintage paperbacks from the ’40s and ’50s, pulp nestled next to Faulkner. I struck up a conversation with him, handled a few Ian Flemings, had some literary revelations and went on my way, stopping to use the bathroom in the Barnes and Noble across the street.

In New York, or in Pittsburgh where I grew up, stopping to browse in a used bookstore or stall on the street was as much a part of my daily life as eating breakfast. This was because while I was usually on my way somewhere, the way almost always passed directly through the heart of a unique business district, which was not complete without a selection of cast-offs from the library or rare copies of The Lord of the Rings.

In Oberlin, our only — though quite good — used bookstore is MindFair, which makes a point of displaying everything that’s been recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. Although Oberlin students are arguably as bustling as New Yorkers, especially during the last week of classes, there are few lunchtime browsers to be seen in MindFair. The frequent window-shoppers seem to be mostly Kendal residents.

Why would three thousand liberal arts and music students — purveyors of the life of the mind — ignore a freely searchable bookstore seconds from where they live? The answer is that it’s not on the way, the same excuse one could give for building a coffee bar in Mudd instead of letting people trek through the snow to the DeCafé. While it’s hard not to cut across Tappan to get from King to the Art Library, with the exception of Firelands and Tank, all student housing is lined up west of Tappan Square, letting one zip from classes to dorm without so much as a glance downtown.

What is sad about this is that, as the administration allows fewer students to live off-campus each year, there will be fewer and fewer chances for us to have a daily routine that involves the Oberlin community at all. And as the Oberlin Bookstore (read: Barnes and Noble without even a convenient bathroom) now has the monopoly on books students need for class, we’ve ruled out the two most obvious reasons for students to visit MindFair. They happen there accidentally or they happen there on purpose. What’s left?

Measures taken to strengthen the effective bond between the College and the community (of which downtown is only a frontispiece) have often taken purely symbolic forms, but lately, we’ve seen small ways that we as an institutional community can have a direct impact. Voting for LEAP, for example, or just sticking around the neutral zone of Tappan Square on the day of the Big Parade, make sure we as students have a responsible role in even our temporary community. As an addition to these measures, and as a last hurrah plea, let’s encourage the new presidential finalist to consider the opportunity afforded to students off campus for a daily routine that includes a landscape that isn’t so, well, landscaped.