I was going to be passing through a town today I hadn’t been to before. And I believed I recalled that there was a used book store in that town. So I checked on Google maps last night and found that there was such a store listed and got its location.
So today I drove to the location and found the store was closed. Very closed - the front of the store was completely covered over with sheets and plywood and I could hear vague sounds of construction going on inside the building.
But on the sidewalk in front of the store there was a lone bookcase leaning up against a tree with a sign saying “free books” taped to it. I had already stopped and figured “hey free books” so I went over to check. There was a couple of dozen books on the shelf - nothing too spectacular but a couple I decided to take home. Then I was considering maybe taking a couple more - admittedly they were not books I’d have paid for so I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be taking them just because they were free. But I decided that they were there for anyone; that being a couple of old history books, it was unlikely anybody else wandering by would be more interested in them than I was; and that as the store was apparently closed, it wasn’t like I was hurting them. So I talked myself into it and took all four.
Then I went into the store next door for a few minutes. As I was getting back in to my car afterwards, I saw that the construction people were leaving and had thrown the remaining books and the bookshelf into the loader of a backhoe with some debris. As I was pulling out, they drove off with the load and I doubt they were planning on making a stop at the local library. I felt like turning to the books and telling them “you guys owe me big time.”
The Brave Little Bookstore in my town closed after only three months. That wasn’t its real name-- that’s just what I’ve begun to call it since its demise. (Amazing how a town of 30,000 people can support ten video stores but not a single bookstore, isn’t it?)
While it was still alive, I went to The Brave Little Bookstore at least twice a week. I bought more books in those three months than I had bought in the six proceeding it, and that’s really saying something. But I knew it was doomed to failure. It was always empty with the store owner browsing the 'Net behind his counter. You could see the slowly-dawning bitter comprehension on his face over time-- he was watching his dream die.
The article in the paper when the store opened was so enthusiastic: “This city has needed a bookstore for a long time,” he was quoted as saying. “I’ve always wanted to open a store here.” His wife and he had scrimped and saved over the years and finally thought they had enough to start up the business. They both quit their jobs and opened the Brave Little Bookstore. “We weren’t hoping to get rich,” he told me. “Hell, we’d have been happy to break even.”
'Twas not to be. One day I arrived and saw the ugly words writ beside the door: “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE.” My heart sank.
“If we’d had just a few more like you,” he told me. He waved to the row of shelves and told me I’d best get whatever I wanted-- he’d let me have it at 75% off. (He was selling the rest of it at 50% off.)
God, I felt like a vulture, but he told me the books would just end up in a barn somewhere-- many of them couldn’t be returned to his supplier. I bought an armload and slowly trudged out to my car. The Brave Little Bookstore died quietly later that week.
When I was growing up, there was this little bookstore across the street and down a few buildings from my Dad’s business, stuck between a pizza parlor and a coffee shop. The owner was an awesome guy, who could find and order anything you asked for-- new, used, out of print. . . These were the days before Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. On Saturdays my mother would do the accounting at my Dad’s store, and I’d wander down the street and find myself things to read-- the owner let me run a tab, and then my father paid him later. I got introduced to all kinds of books I never would have read before.
I went away to college, and then moved out west. Every so often I’d think about that shop, and how it seemed like the everywhere the small bookshop was dissapearing, unable to hold on against the big stores and the internet. The last time I was back east my Dad and I went to get pizza. I stopped and stared at the empty windows where the bookstore had been and just about cried.
Dad takes me by the shoulders, turns me around and points-- they had relocated to a larger space on the main street. I went in and bought an armfull.
At the Big Book Sale at Fort Mason [Giant used book sale held every year to benefit the SF libraries] I found a late 80’s publication that was a guide to San Francisco area book stores. Depressingly few were still in business as of 2005.
I had a book so bad I thought of throwing it out, once. It was the kind of book that, in the wrong hands, instead of expanding the mind of its readers, would have shrunk it.
But that’s what Midsummer’s Eve bonfires are for. The book helped start one.
Your heart breaks? Consider this – I’ve been to a couple of research libraries at private companies that have beenm completely or largely decimated in the past decade or so. The books weren’t donated to schools or sold to booksellers. They were simply dumped outright.
Entuire libraries. Entire print runs of hard-to-find journals.
Some “Friends of the Library” organization had a big book sale at NC State’s brickyard this past April…something like a box of books (of your choosing) for $15. The price of this self-filled box went down as the week progressed. People were really enjoying it, and the organization had a nice variety of books – everything from 60-year-old textbooks to new paperbacks. Because this event was held in the brickyard, they set up all the books under a large tent with flaps on the sides. I was visiting the tent for the third time or so when a freak thunderstorm showed up. The tent was nearly torn down (the flaps were ripped open, anyway), and the brickyard itself was flooding, so everything was soaked within minutes. (They had lots of books stacked on the ground in cardboard boxes.)
They were giving away books for free later that week…
For the first time in my life two weeks ago, I threw out a book. It was horrible and I’d finally had it with the asinine writing and poor character development. I’d made it half way through, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I pitched it in the bathroom trashcan.
Hallboy came to me later, with the book in his hand. “This was in the trash?” he asked, very confused. It was if he’d found bound $20 bills in the trash.
Y’know, I hang out with quite a few librarians, and they all have this to say: “BULLSHIT!”
It is so freaking hard to get rid of books no one wants. You have a book you don’t want, so you donate to the library. They may put it on their shelves, but usually they have three copies of it already that never get check out, so what the heck to they do with it and 1000 others like it? The Friends of the Library sales are a start, but there’s still a bunch left. So then they try giving them away in a box at the front. Still there’s some left. So then they throw the box into the dumpster, but someone always brings the books back to the front desk, telling them that “someone” threw these out, the heathens, and they’ve rescued them.
One of the librarians tried bringing them to our bonfires for firestarters, but that didn’t go over so well, for obvious symbolic reasons.
So now the librarians are forced to spend time packing up unwanted books into cardboard boxes, wrapping them in newspaper and tape so no one knows what’s in them, and driving them to the recycling center on their way home from work. :smack:
When I was in high school, I often drove to the small, local bookstore up the road from my dad’s house to browse, listen to the live music they usually had on a Saturday night, and sometimes even buy something (hey, I was in high school, I didn’t have a lot of money). Then, a Borders announced that they would be opening a store in the shopping center across the street. The local bookstore didn’t even try to compete; by the time the Borders opened, they’d had their going-out-of-business sale and closed up. I’ve never bought anything from Borders.
On the other hand, a couple years ago I lived with a couple other recent college grads who were complaining one night about the lack of any bookstore in the Boston suburb where they’d attended college. Somebody suggested they open one, and many months later, they did! They’ve been open for more than a year now, and they’re doing well.
Not to hijack, but isn’t it possible that the video stores stay in business because they’re in the rental business. They can make money by renting, for a few dollars, a movie which costs $20.00 or so. Now, many people don’t want to buy a DVD of a movie they may only watch once.
Bookstores aren’t renting books. They also have strong competition from libraries.
Yes, libraries do have DVDs, but they tend to not have the latest blockbusters and certainly don’t have as many copies as a video store will.
I’ve started more than one thread in the past mourning the closing of a bookstore. But I can’t feel myself getting too worked up over the closing of this one; I’d never even been inside it much less been a regular. I just decided to post about how four books that came within minutes of being turned into landfill are now sitting on my bookshelf and how my internal debate on whether I should take them or leave them for some other potential reader turned out to be unnecessary.
Hey, it says “mundane” and “pointless” right on the label.
And yet I can never find the book I want at the library. (no, not that one. Not that one either. If I wanted to read the latest megahyperbestseller, I’d BUY it :mad: ) Which explains why I never go to libraries. :mad:
Ludovic, It depends on the library system. If you have access to a good library system you may find yourself not buying too many books. I use the library system in a neighboring county to DC*, and they have a great system. I can search the library catalog online and place a hold on what I want to read. The catalog lets me search anything that the county has on its shelves, and the selection tends to be pretty impressive. They send me an email for when the books are ready to be picked up and they will hold them for a few days. I usually stop by on Saturdays to pick up my books. The best part is that they are metro accesible, so I could even take the Metro out there.
The point being that for the most part, I am not going to buy a book that I am going to read once. As it is now in the house, we have too many books taking up space, I even have boxes of books stuck in the storage closet.
The DC public library system is not very convenient. There is a branch less than 5 minutes walk from my house, but they are never open. I think that their hours are M-F, 10-5.
I work as a baker in a cafe that is housed withing our public library.
There is a strong “Friends of the Library” organization, and just this past weekend was the annual booksale. It’s alway crowded, all three days. Books and some other materials are either donated or culled as no longer needed from the shelves of the library.
With our city’s library it works like this. Books are donated. There are several donation sites, including two at the library itself. After the donation boxes are emptied the material recieves a first sorting. Certain things are automatically thrown out. Reader’s Digest Condensed books, damaged books, 99-44/100% of the magazines, dated textbooks, etc. Next volunteers sort the books into different subjects and categories. Some go to the library’s own used bookstore, within the building itself. Others are packed into boxes, to be stored for the annual sale, and books that dont’s sell upstairs are also packed up, along with those culls from the library shelves I mentioned earlier.
When I first started working in the library building(I don’t actually work for the library) I was scandalized at the good books that still get thrown out. But gradually I saw the sheer volume of what came in, and realized that no matter how much storage space there was for books awaiting sale, there would never be enough. And some use the donation boxes almost as a dump for unusable material, moldy magazines, battered and marked kids books, you name it.
Thrown out books are taken for recycling, so at least they aren’t carted to a dump. I have a horror against throwing out a book myself, but I can understand why it’s handled here the way it is.
This thread has strengthened my resolve to start visiting the little used bookstore/coffeeshop that’s not too far from my new apartment.
And I NEVER throw out books. Even the bad books that I couldn’t finish they were so bad.
No, but someone cared enough about those words to put the effort into creating a physical object from them. Books are a way of looking inside someone’s head, and if the writing is good enough, into their “soul.” THAT has value.
