Yup, the one on Union Square is one of the ones still open, as well as one at 46th and Fifth, one on the Upper West Side, and one far downtown near the World Financial Center, which I think is fairly new.
Gone are the old flagship store on Fifth, the one on the Upper East Side, the one in Chelsea on Sixth, the one on West 8th Street… I’m sure I’m forgetting many.
I used to go browsing in that one in Prudential Mall all the time when I was still working downtown, it was really big, and a great place to search for sales or gifts. Sorry to see it go.
We still have one near us in Norwood, and occasionally we go to the one that’s near Medway…
There also used to be a Borders on Boylston, and one in Downtown Crossing, both of which I went to…all those bookstores will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Ironically, the Barnes and Noble at the Pru also sells classic movies on DVD, including Bladerunner. I’ll have to get down there and see what I can find before they sell out.
Dammit! All the bookstores remaining, aside from a few Barnes and Nobles and books a Millions and the odd indie are going to be college bookstores, bookstores at train and airplane stations, and at vacation haunts of the wealthy (there are still bookstores on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Wolfeboro, Meriden, Centre Harbor, Bar Harbor, and the like. I’m still surprised that Innisfree books in Lincoln, NH closed. I guess the folks at Loon Mountain don’t read anymore)
Barnes and Noble sells digital books. They use the Nook app which is free.
Yeah, there are a few indies left as you say, but we don’t get to them - for example, Booksmith in Brookline is way the heck out of the way, and An Unlikely Story in Plainville, which we’d like to support, frankly doesn’t have much selection.
I hope B&N survives, but they might just be shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle physical vs. online. With that said, they might not have many other choices.
A few years back I posted a rant about how I went to B&N looking for some photography books and found a few quite expensive ones, say one for $30 and the other for $50. I do like to support them, but I found the prices a bit steep so I checked Amazon and found the same two books for, say, $15 and $29.
I then went to the B&N online site and was surprised to see the same two books for $15 and $29.
I found a manager and asked her about it and asked if they match their online prices. She spent ten minutes explaining how they have the overhead of the brick-and-mortar business and they do all of this to give me the experience of being able to hold a book in my hands, and so on and so on.
In other words, no, they don’t match prices from their own website (at least at that time they didn’t).
I was disgusted by this. They want to have their cake (i.e. use the Barnes & Noble name) and eat it too (i.e. say they are are two separate entities that have no relationship whatsoever).
That kind of attitude doesn’t encourage me to want to shop there.
Perhaps the best used book store in New England is Brattleboro Books in Brattleboro, Vermont. Well worth a day trip. It’s a nice town too, there’s a decent used record store on the main stem. Get lunch at the food co-op or dinner at the Marina seafood restaurant.
I went by the site of Mulholland’s Rare Books and Prints a couple weeks ago, and it’s long gone.
I didn’t know that. But Commonwealth Books, with its large collection of rare expensive used books is still around, as is Brattle Books with its less expensive and more accessible collection.
Sadly, the New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton (which was never mobile when I visited) first moved out of its warehouse-like home several years ago. God knows what happened to that monumental collection, all organized by publisher rather than subject. They moved into a downright minuscule store where Radio Shack used to be in a nearby mall, but then during COVID they disappeared from that site, as well.
Most of the Greater Boston area Used Book Superstores are gone, too. The only one I know of that stull remains is in Burlington.
One other bright spot is that the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore that used to be on Newbury Street near Mass Ave for many years, and which closed long ago, has re-opened! But it’s way up in Lee, New Hampshire. Well worth the drive, though.
Aw man. I used to work at the CPK at the Pru when I lived in Boston, and I loved wandering through that store on my way home from lunch shifts. Retail stores have really been hit hard by the pandemic, and a lot of the ones that have weathered the storm up to this point are finally closing. I live in Pasadena now and there are so many empty storefronts.
There’s an old Polish proverb that says “no matter how much yeast you use, a trail of breadcrumbs usually leads to an oven”.
There was no Mulholland’s Rare Books and Prints, except on the TV show Banacek. Thomas would ask his friend Felix Mulholland to do research for him.
I did go by that location just a few weeks ago. Doesn’t look like it was ever a business, just a nice townhouse across the street from the Common; only a few blocks up the street from the bar on Cheers. I wonder if the people who live there have any idea of their place in TV history.
We used to have three big bookstores within 5 miles: Two Borders and a B&N. They are all long gone. Now the closest B&N is 12 miles away.