I managed to forget my fanny pack today, so I ended up in town with no license, no money, no nothing. Well, I could at least browse in the bookstore.
I picked out three books, left them and my name at the desk, called in my CC number when I got home, and my books will arrive by mail Saturday. Monday at the latest.
The owners are wonderful. The store is the first floor of an old house which enhances the browsing experience. Wonder what this room used to be? Big old windows; creaky floors. The only thing missing is the smell of old books tucked into cubbyholes under the stairs or in old closets.
The shop hasn’t changed in the 25 years I’ve been here and I hope it never does.
I had one of those for ages before the owner finally decided to throw in the towel. I was enough of a regular that if he got called away while I was still shopping, he would flip me the keys and tell me to slip them through the mail slot of his house on the way out. When he did close for good, he loaded me down with almost a Saturn SW load of “my kind of books” which I am still reading on ---- 15 years later. Although I have bought other books since and the pile is down to maybe 100.
Screw eBay and the huge chains — give me the neighborhood business any day.
I support my independents whenever IU an. I’ve been posting the closing of bookstores recently, and it breaks my heart – two in Amesbury MA this past summer, two in Medford MA in the past month. They’re dropping like flies. One bright note is that the eccentric Derby Square books in Salem, when it closed, was replaced by Wicked Good Books (which was much less congested.)
The old joke. But have you ever been there? Derby Square wasn’t too congested with people, it was congested with BOOKS. And not in a good way.
Here’s the way the store used to look on the outside. Those are books, stacked up on the side, filing the windows:
Here’s the interior:
If you wanted to get a book from somewhere besides the top of the stack, you had to risk a Book Avalanche. Some corridors you had to walk through sideways. Some of the tables the books were piled on (yes, some were not in bookshelves, or piled on the floor) were held together with bungee cords.
The check-out counter was completely hemmed in by books. A chink was left in the stacks so you could actually see part of the face of the checkout guy.
Here’s what Wicked Good Books looks like now:
https://twitter.com/WickedBooks
You can actually walk around. Books are in shelves, not stacked up. There’s room to display books. You can actually see the clerk. And the cash register. They told me they had to throw out all the books in the basement, because it was evenb worse than the upstairs.
Even with all its faults, though, at least the old Derby Square store was a functioning bookstore. There are worse fates that “way too many books”.
I have a huge collection of bookmarks from independent bookstores. When I look through them, I’m shocked by how many of them don’t exist any more, stores I loved liked Gringolet and Orr Books in Minneapolis, Odegard’s and Hungry Mind in St. Paul, Cody’s in Berkeley – how could Cody’s close?
These were all fantastic bookstores, with personality, books selected by the buyer’s with thoughtfulness and care. They were dedicated to stories and story telling, to the life of the mind, and most of the employees were intelligent, thoughtful, and knowledgeable.
Now we have software programs at online bookstore, that can only recommend what you’ve already read, that have no originality, no mind, no heart. No conversation. The world is worse for it.
I love books, and in THEORY, I love indie book stores… but as a practical matter, I’ve always had a better chance of getting what I want at a big box store, and an even better chance online. And best of all, Amazon has never blown me any attitude, the way many indie bookstore clerks (envision Jack Black in High Fidelity) have. Computers are always happy to find and sell me what I want- people often aren’t.
I probably should miss indie bookstores, but truthfully? I don’t.
It’s not a matter of getting the books I want – it’s a matter of being introduced to the books you’d otherwise never know about.
Browsing on the B&N or Amazon website is no substitute. And their book recommendations are never at all close to the mark. When I go to an actual bookstore, I can se what’s available.
Plus I’ve never been able to give a reading on a bookseller’s website.
