Andrew Hiller’s nostalgia for a venerable used bookstore that has closed is something public radio listeners will care about. People who tune in to “Prairie Home Companion” may own Kindles. The chances are, however, that they’re more likely than commercial radio listeners to turn the pages of real books, including Garrison Keillor’s books, than to scroll through an electronic text.

Hiller’s recent homage to the American copper centavo, our penny, resembles his elegy for Bonifant Books, the neighborhood indie store vividly described here. Like so many brick-and-mortar stores, Bonifant Books has bitten the dust. Much has been said about change, generally considered to be a good thing. Hiller is certainly no reactionary when it comes to progress. But he’s aware how Amazon.com, as well as Barnes & Noble and Borders with WI-FI and comfy chairs, have replaced indie bookstores whose “rich pulpy smell” suggests “the kind of place where, if you dig for a while, you can find some really cool treasures.”

Such riches include a favorite old sandwich shop—or shoppe—that is not closed but simply “gone.” Hiller makes no mention of a McDonald’s or a KFC that may have replaced the shoppe. The point is, as Robert Lowell wrote about change in Boston 50 years ago, “a savage servility / slides by on grease.”

Direct from the DC area in the Old Line State (Maryland), Hiller has an abiding affection for the old line, what historians might one day call the dyed-in-the-wool culture of these here United States.

Go Andrew Hiller!