About three weeks ago or so, we happened to watch “Hannah and Her Sisters,” an old Woody Allen movie from the mid-1980s on one of the movie channels.

It’s supposedly one of Allen’s best; we somehow missed it the first time around.

Two things immediately jumped out that had nothing much to do with the movie’s theme: the scenes where Allen (or another character) made calls from a pay phone booth in Manhattan and, second, the numerous ‘chance’ meetings at small, quirky looking book stores.

It brought home — jarringly — the stark differences between the 1980s and today and was reinforced last week with the good news that independent bookstore Politics and Prose will remain in local hands right here in Chevy Chase thanks to the sale to Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, both former reporters at The Washington Post.

It’s a hopeful sign that the individual attention and care that Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade brought to the store for nearly 30 years will be maintained under the new ownership.

It’s clear that Graham, no relation to the family which owns the Post, and Muscatine were chosen precisely because they can maintain Politics and Prose’s long-held reputation as a community gathering spot and as a place to thrash out new ideas and political issues in a civil manner. It’s likely to remain a tremendous plus for our community going forward.

Contrast that with Bethesda, once home to as many as eight small independent bookstores, all of which have disappeared in recent years due to the rise of Internet book outfits like Amazon and others. The only real bookstore left in Bethesda these days is Barnes & Noble, a pleasant enough place but identical to thousands of other such outlets nationwide.

The character of the independent bookstore is special. There were a number of Bethesda independents which flourished back in the 1980s. My favorite was Georgetown Books on Woodmont Avenue near where the Starbucks now sits. Its owner was a colorful and quirky character named Andy Moursund, and he specialized in books about military history, baseball and sometimes off-beat political topics, all favorites of mine.

You could stop in there almost anytime and chat with Andy about the old Brooklyn Dodgers or just about any other subject. It was also a place where one might unexpectedly run into friends and neighbors, just like the Woody Allen movie. Or Politics and Prose.