This familiar passage from Dante’s Inferno might as well become the new slogan of Waterstones, a major UK book retailer that recently garnered major media attention when an American tourist was locked in their Trafalgar Square bookstore after they closed up for the night. While our hapless hero used the Internet in the upstairs section, the staff apparently clocked out, locked up and went home. Unsure of what to do, he eventually tweeted his situation from his smartphone, and was instantly flooded with book recommendations from concerned tweeters who wanted to make sure he had enough quality reading to square him away for the night. Heaven forbid he would end up with something sub-par to read! He became an overnight Twitter sensation and was retweeted more than 12,000 times by the following afternoon. The tourist was freed after a couple of hours, which, unfortunately, he did not use to peruse the length of Fahrenheit 451 or delight in the witty prose of Jonathan Safran Foer. “I people-watched from the window,” he later said in an interview. To each his own. 

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