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Okay, that settles it: this is National Whine About Publishing Month. Avenue Victor Hugo, a thirty-year-old brick-and-mortar bookstore in Boston, is going out of business. They’ve announced this on their website, and followed it up with a long twelve-point whine about the death of the small independent bookstore. I’m not saying independent bookstore owners don’t have anything to complain about; but Avenue Victor Hugo deserves some kind of prize for contriving to blame absolutely everyone for their demise.
They blame: Corporate law, Publishers (“marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal”), Book buyers (“those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who … prefer what is popular over what is good”), Writers (who “write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake”—a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t formulation that caused me to inhale part of a chicken-and-pesto sandwich), Booksellers, Government (local, state, and federal), Librarians, Book collectors (“now mere speculators … putting books on the same level with beanie babies”), Teachers, Editors (“offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats”), Reviewers (“for promoting what is being advertised, … and praising the obscure with priestly authority”—another damned-either-way formulation), and of course The Public (“those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization—for not caring about consequences”).
It ends, apocalyptically:
Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge—and stare into the cold abyss of night.
It’s such a fine and mournful and elevated sentiment—Emmeline Grangerford herself couldn’t have done no better—that you almost don’t want to tell him that by our best calculations, using every scrap of reliable data we can lay hands on, at this very moment more people are reading more books, reading a greater variety of books, continuing to read them later in life, et cetera and so forth, than ever before in the history of civilization.
I expect he has a point, though, about changing patterns of commercial traffic on Newbury Street.
(All you aspiring writers? Please don’t read that AVH jeremiad and get depressed about the state of publishing. Like the imminent death of the internet, the death of the publishing industry is frequently announced, and so far has failed to happen. Not that it couldn’t happen; but in our case, these fruitless announcements have been appearing for centuries.)
Of course, they got it all wrong: It's my fault that AVH is closing.
This is too funny, Teresa. Not last week and I stopped by the store on my way to a lunch meeting and told the guy (I presume the owner) behind the counter how delighted I was they were still here--reason being the Globe had all but buried them last winter with a story saying they were shutting down.
Apparently some angel stepped in at the last minute and helped them survive...another year.
Since I had a few minutes, I popped upstairs to check the SF/Fantasy section to see if they might have a copy of Ballantine's Fellowship of the Ring with Tolkien's Bag End cover. (I've got the other two as well as the Hobbit with his artwork). Nope.
No biggie. Maybe they have some of Gene Wolfe's short story collections or an older version of Urth of the New Sun?
Nope.
Not saying that this is my litmus test for book stores when it comes to SF, or anything, but I was underwhelmed.
I still felt bad for the guy as I left.
Maybe not so much now. :)
It's my fault for never having visited Boston. Hopefully that will change in August.
Well, dammit! They specifically left me off the list of folks getting blamed.
See if I stand outside their store and physically prevent customers from entering anymore.
Hmph.
That's one reason I haven't been there in quite a while myself - they hardly ever had anything that I wanted. Of course it is in the nature of a used book store that it has somewhat limited control over what it has in stock, but it still didn't incline me to make a special trip to Newbury Street (I live in the Boston suburbs) just to shop there. (I do go to Boston for other reasons, but generally it isn't convenient to pop into random stores when I do.)
I'm amazed they've survived on Newbury Street as long as they have, given what the real estate must cost them.
On Page Blue Cat:
"Many people come into the shop just to visit him."
. . . AND NOT BUY ANY BOOKS, the CAT-LOVING ILLITERATE BASTARDS!
What, they didn't blame Grady Little or the Big Dig? Sheesh. And they call themselves Bostonians.
It strikes me that what is dying isn't so much the independent bookstore as the small book store. Last I checked, large independents (Stacy's in the SF Bay, The Seminary Co-Op and the Powell's in Chicago, and of course the vast and mighty Powell's City of Books in Portland, OR against which all other books stores are but sad little imitations) were all doing just fine. Its the little guys that are getting crushed; they don't have the shelf space to be an intersting browsing experience, and if you just want *that book* you can go to Amazon. But its not something that singles out the independents -- I don't see alot of B. Daltons or Waldenbooks around anymore either.
It likely makes me an ass, but I can't find it in my heart to much mourn this trend that seems to me to replace not very good book stores with mostly better bookstores with more and more kinds of stuff. (I do kind of mourn that seems to be hard on specialty stores as well, though).
>All you aspiring writers? Please don't read that >AVH jeremiad and get depressed about the state >of publishing.
Hey listen, I was depressed for a solid month before Whine About Writing month began, and I've gone steadily uphill through the whole of March. Nothing like other people's problems to put your own in perspective. Whiners.
But be careful, Teresa, somebody might construe your reassurance as speaking ex cathedra, or leading us on with false hopes only so you can smash them cruelly, or something.
Jeez. And now that I've read the article, it sounds like it was written by the Comic Store Guy on Simpsons. The same combination of snootiness and cluelessness.
I got the impression after a while that the whole laundry list wasn't meant to be taken seriously. It seemed too nuttily over-the-top. Am I wrong?
If it was sincere, then, well, sorry....
Book buyers...who buy books according to price instead of content
If there's anywhere where someone would buy a book according to price rather than content, wouldn't it be in a used book store like this one? I know I've done that at the Strand numerous times.
It strikes me that what is dying isn't so much the independent bookstore as the small book store.And not even those, necessarily. There still seem to be quite a few small and medium-sized independent and used book stores in the Boston area, but mostly in Cambridge and Somerville, where the rents are lower than on Newbury Street, there are lots of university types around, etc.
Which is another reason why I haven't been to AVH in a long time - I don't often deliberately go on a bookstore crawl these days (though I would like to do so more often), but if I did I'd go to Cambridge and work my way up Mass Ave, where I can go to lots of bookstores (and one or two other places I like). If I go to AVH, I can shop in the rest of the stores on Newbury at the same time, none of which interest me in the slightest.
It's not their fault that their neighborhood changed under them, but I can't see it as the fault of writers, editors, publishers, readers, cats, etc.
Here in Kansas City we're waiting to see how much a 1/2 Price Books, which moved in at the Westport Shopping Center, will harm the few excellent small bookstores in the mid-town area - Prospero's, Spiveys (they should not be affected at all, they're an antiquarian, map and print place), Seldom Seen Books (which is new, but a used book store)(there may be more but I'm not remembering... or I've never been in 'em). There are two comics/game stores that are right across Main from one another, and they're not eating each other, yet. We had a Barnes & Noble move in on the Plaza, which is only a few blocks south of Westport, but that didn't seem to make an impact.
We did have a new/used science fiction only bookstore out in Johnson County that opened and closed really fast, but that was more because he had a business partner fail to live up to his part of the deal. He's now a Web only store, though.
Dan,
There still seem to be quite a few small and medium-sized independent and used book stores in the Boston area, but mostly in Cambridge and Somerville, where the rents are lower than on Newbury Street, there are lots of university types around, etc.
Absolutely right. For example, just driving fown 53 or Route 3A from Boston to, say, Plymouth, you'd be surprised what little hole-in-the-wall places there are. One shop right off Marshfield Center that used to be facing the town bookstore; then there was Annie's Book Shop in Weymouth. And in Hingham, and a great little one in Braintree on Washington Street... etc.
Is pandemonium books [if I've named it wrongly, I mean the SFF specialty bookstore in Harvard square] doing badly? I would mourn its passing. And if it isn't doing badly, I have to wonder why Victor Hugo is. My hope is Pandemonium is doing well and competing with the big box stores because I think it can/could/does - larger inventory of its niche, used books, imports, a somewhat broader interpretation of SFF than my local Borders (i.e., Christopher Moore, Ian (no M)Banks). They also get new SFF releases on the shelf a week or so earlier than Borders (at least for Lord of Castle Black). So if they are doing well or surviving comfortably, I could attribute V-H's troubles to something else.
Is pandemonium books [if I've named it wrongly, I mean the SFF specialty bookstore in Harvard square] doing badly?I have no idea how they're doing financially, but they're still there, which says something. I have no reason to expect them to have the same problems as AVH, given their location. They're upstairs in a little urban mall in Cambridge - granted, in Harvard Square, which ain't the cheapest commercial real estate around, but I am bound to think this is cheaper than on-street space on Newbury. They're also in proximity to related stores (other bookstores, Million Year Picnic, etc.) and lots and lots of university people.
This is definitely the best of the two whines I've sampled today. Jane Austen Doe's whine was simultaneously fruity and bitter, not to mention immature. I suspect that it became spoiled somewhere in the bottling process. Lastly, it left a sour aftertaste which took some time to fade. I gave my complimentary bottle to the bum at the freeway offramp.
The Hugo whine was by far the better of the two. It had a deep and sullen flintiness, which stopped just short of being bitter, and there were some darkly mellow overtones which were obviously the product of careful, long fermentation. Unlike the Jane Austen Doe, which was clearly the product of a huge, metal tank, the Hugo showed the kind of richness which can only be acheived by careful aging in ancient oak barrells. I took a couple bottles home, and I'll serve it on the porch this summer. I have no doubts that its truculant flavour will create a lovely contrast with the green hills which surround my home.
Alex
Um. They're a used bookstore, no? (from the comments I'm reading; I'm not From There, so I don't know.)
How'sabout blaming Used Bookstores for stealing customers who'd otherwise buy new?
Just a thought.
-j, used book buyer but, still... put the blame where it properly lies...
So I'm good if I write the new as long as it is for something else's sake? Like, say, the love of a good cat or to save the spotted subjunctive? Just checking. I wouldn't want to inadvertently cause the death of the independent bookstore while I'm figuring out how to make my outline work.
What is the level of Beanie Babies anyway? Somewhere below the prodigal and above the sullen?
I feel for the plight of the independent retailer. But it is a remarkably similar plight across industries – I write for a gift trade magazine, and the problems have a lot in common. So do the solutions, at least at the level a storeowner can implement. If he’s so convinced that it is some kind of sacrilege to treat books like any other product, it seems rather gauche of him to have expected to make money.
Other Change of Hobbit's closing will not try to blame publishers (who do the best they can) or our regular customers (ditto); much more blameworthy is the effing Bush economy which seems to have been particularly hard on the people who want to support small businesses. When we go, we'll go with a desire to move forward rather than blame.
And hey -- 27 years is a very good run for an independent bookstore. Don't see what the AVH folks are bitching about having managed 30.
Twenty-nine, actually, but I was being lazy.
>Is pandemonium books doing badly?
Given that they're a specialty store, as of last weekend, they looked good. They recently had a large signing event that sold out (of the book I was looking for, actually), and they're selling the books for the largest class in the Harvard anthropology department, "Anthro 121: Humans, Aliens, and Future Home Worlds: An Anthropologist Looks at Science Fiction."
Also healthy as of last weekend, walking from Harvard Square to Central: WordsWorth (discount new); The Coop (new and textbooks); The Harvard Bookstore (new and used); another used bookstore I can never remember the name of; and Rodney's Used Books. And I can name at least six more specialty shops in the Square alone. We have lost a couple shops in the past few years, and I heard that the Grolier poetry shop is in trouble, which is a shame. But Boston unable to support bookshops? Nope.
"Anthro 121: Humans, Aliens, and Future Home Worlds: An Anthropologist Looks at Science Fiction."
Just curious--what's on the reading list for that class? I'm a couple hundred miles too far west to take it, but it sounds interesting.
Northampton has a great SFF/mystery bookstore (The Space-Crime Continuum, if you're anywhere nearby). A couple of months after we moved in, the owners had figured out our favorite authors and were pulling them without our asking. That'll get you customer loyalty every time. On the other hand, when I lived on Long Island an hour plus drive from the nearest indie bookstore, I was pretty grateful for Borders.
This reminds me of a famous magazine editor who briefly directed an SF magazine during those heady days in 1977 when it looked like the market in Italy could sustain one. On the last issue of the magazine, before it folded, he published a long, bitter, angry rant about the necrophiliac public who didn't buy magazines for the posthumuos (I'm sure the sp is wrong here) pleasure of being able to mourn them. Of course the only ones who got to be lectured at were those, like me, who actually _did buy_ the magazine to the bitter end.
Tom, I trust you are speaking hypothetically? If not I really should have bought more last November the last time I was in Berkeley . . .
Ashni: The anthro 121 reading list with all the shorter articles is pretty long, and the class has movie screenings as well. There's a number of nonfiction books, including Adam Roberts' Science Fiction: A New Critical Idiom; and Camille Bacom-Smith's Science Fiction Culture, wherein our hosts are interviewed. The fiction is Childhood's End, The Left Hand of Darkness, Wild Seed, The Forever War, War of the Worlds, and I, Robot; plus some short stories. The course homepage is at http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~anth121/, and I think they have a syllabus up.
You know, I've never actually seen a finished copy of Science Fiction Culture. I wonder what we said.
All this discussion of Boston-area bookstores moves me to note that, honest to gosh, New England is probably the least typical piece of the US when it comes to bookselling overall. I mean, there are probably more bookstores in Vermont towns of 5000 people or less than there are in some entire states.
Claude, sadly, Tom was not speaking hypothetically (sigh).
When I read the title and the first sentence of this post, this flashed through my head: "You don't mean a Hugo winner is now the latest to jump in and moaning about publishing?!"
No? Phew.
;-)
I worked at AVH for three years in the early nineties when I was in college. There were so many funny stories about the place! I think some of the best stories are about the cat. The cat that preceded Smoky Joe, Jupiter, developed diabetes. After taking him to the vet, Vince wondered what to do: should he have the cat put to sleep? Ultimately, he said that if everyone on the staff agreed to learn to give the cat an injection of insulin. One of the store's longtime managers, Tom, had a wry sense of humor and the most efficient injection technique on the staff. He'd snatch up the cat and have the injection finished by the time the cat could blink. One day, he followed the cat behind the counter with the loaded syringe, plucked the cat off the floor, plopped him onto the counter and BANG! Mission accomplished. One problem: a customer was in front of the counter with an armful of books. She was so startled that she yelped, dropped the books on the floor, and ran out the door.
Another curious thing: Who's John Usher, the person the list is attributed to? That's not the owner's name. Is the list a quote from a book or article?
One thing that's also rarely noted is that it's quite possible for a used bookstore to have bigger margins than a new bookstore. Back when I worked at a new bookstore, we never got more than 40% off the cover price, so if a book cost $10, the store made $4. But at used bookstores, we bought books by the crateload from library and estate sales for as little as ten cents (like most used bookstores we also bought books from patrons, giving them 20-40% of cover price on new books, but that represented only a small minority of total stock). A decent new hardback bought at that price could sell for $5-7 dollars. The thing was, you couldn't control your stock to make allowances for popular titles or subjects as easily as you could at a new bookstore.
Ok, ok, that list is a bit whiny - but can we cut them a little slack? Going out of business is a pretty miserable process, and people aren't at their most sensible when they're living through a massive disappointment.
Also - note the list is "From THE HOUND by John Usher, copyright 2004." Is John Usher (I don't know of him) any relation to the store? It feels a little different if they're reprinting someone else's ready made rant.
*finally stops laughing at Lisa's anecdote long enough to post*
Yes, Patrick, New England towns have a plethora of bookstores. Something about long winter nights and not wanting to relate to one's neighbors, I'm sure.
I grew up on what I considered an intellectual stimulation void on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Having moved to an 'artsy' city in the North Carolina mountains, I realized that, taking population density into account, there were about twice as many bookstores within 10 miles of where I lived on the Cape than where I live now, and roughly five times the number of independent bookstores. Main Street, Hyannis alone had two used bookstores, a well-stocked library and two independent bookstores.
There may have been no place to eat after 10 pm, but nothing to do?
Go figure that I preferred Borders.
But then, Borders is where I discovered one of my current favorites, Charles de Lint. And where I stocked up on my favorite poet, Billy Collins. And the people working there were more approachable.
But despite a Borders and a Barnes & Noble being located more centrally, plus outrageous rent, the independent bookstores are still doing fine.
rant deleted: no blame, just a catalog of difficulties. We hope to have a press release out by the end of the month. We expect to close at the end of May, and we're hoping that most of May can be a celebration of what we actually managed to do over the years. We made a few books, we helped a few authors, and we've been (in my opinion and much by my hand) probably the most fannish SF specialty store. The end of May is our 27th anniversary -- not a bad innings, I'd say.
Alice, I suspect you now live in Asheville. Trust me, the book situation thereabouts has improved markedly in the past couple of decades, probably starting with when Malaprop's opened in '82. I grew up 40 miles away in Brevard, leaving in '78. Back then, there was no bookstore in Brevard (a 5,000 person town, seat and largest town in a 20,000 person county), and the only bookstore I knew of in Asheville was a B.Dalton in the Asheville Mall. Now, *that* was an intellectual stimulation void. :-) Asheville wasn't even noticably artsy or hip back then either.
Ashni, some fannish friends of mine currently taking Anthro 121 say it's not stellar, but they're working, with some success, to improve it by their contributions.
As for AVH, John Farrell has it exactly right about selection -- I visited this summer, and couldn't find anything I was looking for. Lucius Shepard and Tim Powers are the only ones I can remember right now, but I looked for many names major and less major, and the cupboard was bare.
Perhaps we should invade large printing presses and B&N warehouse distributers and throw doc martins and berkenstocks into the machinery :-)
Seriously - indie bookstores that stock lots of popular books, have a good location and a nice staff can stay in buisness. Encouraging customers helps. Childrens books are a huge market. So's the latest John Grisham or Jan Karol. Specialty bookstores have it tough.
I hope some good will come out of the sucess of the LOTR trilogy in terms of further investment in fantasy/scifi. It's certainly working that way with comic books.
In my capacity as a member of categories three, four, eight, ten (just barely), and twelve: If that’s how you really feel, then screw you, Avenue Victor Hugo. I’m glad I never had the opportunity to shop there.
For some reason, I’m reminded of nothing as much as Charlie Stross’ recent comment: “then why are you obsessed with placing your masterpiece . . . in front of an audience of idiots?”
I hope they're offering 50% off on Jane Austen Doe books.
I lo-o-oved AVH when I was in high school. I made so many good finds there, and in retrospect so many other finds that I didn't appreciate at the time and wished I'd splurged to pick them up.
At some point in the 90s, AVH went downhill, in my opinion. The quality of their used books - talking mainly science fiction here - really declined, to the point that I would find maybe one book every four or five visits (spread over 3 years, since I don't live in the area anymore). They started carrying new books, which held no attraction for me since I always bought new books elsewhere (usually patronizing indy stores near where I lived, since I didn't live in the area anymore).
By the year 2000 I went there more out of nostalgia for my younger days than because I actually had success finding books there.
I don't really know what happened to cause its stock - the stock I was interested in, anyway - to decline like this, the policies of used bookstores being something of a black box for me. But, based on my own experiences I'm not surprised it went out of business.
Alas.
It likely makes me an ass, but I can't find it in my heart to much mourn this trend that seems to me to replace not very good book stores with mostly better bookstores with more and more kinds of stuff. (I do kind of mourn that seems to be hard on specialty stores as well, though).
Specialty stores? If by that you mean stores that sell only one kind of books (like, say, San Francisco's marvellous Stout Books), then that doesn't seem to be the case at all. When people I know are looking for a general bit of reading, they go to Barnes and Noble, but when they want more depth than six shelf-feet of stock can give, they head to a book store that specializes in one kind of book. I rarely buy a book that costs more than $25 at B&N, but I often buy expensive specialty books at specialty book stores.
As for general used book stores, I am very choosy about where I bother to drive, park, and browse. Even in the Bay Area, which has a relatively low concentration of such beasts.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of used book stores. But lately I've been buying books at thrift stores. They rarely price a book over $5, they don't think a ragged, jacketless 1954 copy of Ulysses is a rare book that should be priced at $25 (a form of insanity known to afflict the secondhand book dealer), and they get huge turnovers in stock on a regular basis (largely because the local used book dealers are also there, buying stock for their stores).
Most used book stores set their prices unreasonably high. I like supporting local businesses and having my money stay in the area, but I really dislike being treated like a chump.
I guess in that way, the book trade has become like the Beanie Baby trade. But why bother to buy a stuffed animal when you can buy a book (or ten) for the same price?
> It ends, apocalyptically:
Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge—and stare into the cold abyss of night.
How about:
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the [bookstore], in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened --there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind --the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight --my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder --there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters --and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "HOUSE OF [John] USHER."
Now THAT is apocalyptic.
Ayse: being treated like a chump is how you describe being asked to allow us to offer folks reasonable prices for their used books and still try to make a profit? The community doesn't stop with you, it doesn't stop with the bookstore, and it doesn't stop with me.
Thrift stores are as cheap as they are because they get books for free. I'll shop in them too, but I also shop in other independents who are trying to +make a living+ out of selling books. Which thrift stores, unfortunately, aren't.
The Other Change of Hobbit is closing? Dang it! Tom, if you're inclined to posting your rant on why anywhere, I'd really like to read it.
I guess I need to go to downtown Berkeley and visit you guys some more... Damn the lack of parking, full speed ahead! :(
I'm going to miss you. Great atmosphere, reasonably-priced stuff, got in some darn neat used books, and didn't deface them with black marker or (god forbid) hole punches through the part of the cover that contains the book's original selling price... (Siderant: What is wrong with bookstore people who do that? Did something eat their brains?)
We decided to use grease pencil to price our books because it would come off (in almost all cases -- doesn't work on magazines, drat the luck). We're actually careful to use white grease pencil when we think black might stain a white part of the book. Both Dave and I are collectors, and Deb was willing to listen to us.
The rant included swabbing out the piss that people leave in our entryway, the fact that Amazon can lose billions and still be the apple of many people's eyes, the number of people who wish they could afford books at all, and a sad feeling for not being able to keep building community the way we started -- there's at least half a dozen people who post here regularly who we nurtured, some with very little visible potential at the start, all with a love for our genre.
Basically, we can't afford to keep losing money at the rate we have. My inheritance is eaten up, Dave hasn't gotten his, and there's only so far we can go with selling off our own collections. Not enough people in the door, not enough money per person coming in.
Does it hurt to think about letting it go? Fuck, yes. If I were rational about it, we'd probably have closed many years ago. But now it's time, and it's time to do something else. None of us can lose what we had, but we can know that it won't come again in the same way.
Patronize Borderlands in SF as much as you can.
Datapoint from one avid reader and consumer:
We do virtually all our book shopping in Barnes & Noble, Borders and online. Short, four-word reason why: we're satisfied with them.
Longer reason why: I don't feel like I do as much browsing as other book-lovers seem to do. I think of browsing as a sort of random walk through a bookstore, pulling out books as they catch my eye, and basing a buying decision on the cover, and random reading of a page or two. Whereas, generally speaking, when I browse, I'm more purposeful than that. I'm looking for things I've already decided, through some other channel, that I will like. I'm looking for new books by authors that I know I like, or books and writers that I heard good things about.
And when I do browse, when I feel like truly wandering at random through a bookstore, I'm generally pleased with the selection at B&N/Borders.
The last time I did a true browse was Monday night, actually, and I did it spontaneously, because I was going to the supermarket and there is a B&N in the same shopping center as the supermarket, and I figured, WTF. And I came away with a pretty good score, too - only two books, but they were two very nice finds: The first book was a biography of Diamond Jim Brady. I got sold on that when I opened a page at random and came across a discussion of the role that trains played in the pop culture of the 19th Century. The second book was a third volume in Tom De Haven's Derby Duggan trilogy, which I didn't even KNOW was a trilogy - I read "Derby Duggan's Depression Funnies" years ago, and I loved it, but it didn't even OCCUR to me that it might be a series. Then I came across "Funny Papers" and I said to myself, holy crap, there's more than one book about these guys? But it never occurred to me that it might be a TRILOGY. Woo-hoo!
I bought a third book Monday night: "Summerland," by Michael Chabon. Am reading it now. It is migh-T-fine. Is it sf or is it fantasy? I'll let you know when I finish, but my answer so far is: yes.
P.S. I drink at independent coffee houses when I'm home, but when I'm travelling, I often find myself in a Starbucks. And we buy Starbucks coffee from the supermarket, although our brand loyalty is fairly slim there and we may well buy some other brand next time.
Tom G. - yes, exactly right.
Don't get me wrong. I use 'artsy' in quotes because it's not a word I'd use to describe Asheville, though it fits. The random art on downtown sidewalks is enough to convince me of that. And Asheville certainly isn't an intellectual void, either. The number of bookstores is nothing to sneeze at. But my hometown in New England had a lot, too.
I suppose what my post was doing was marveling that I had the gall to whine about the lack of things to do when there was practically a bookstore on every corner.
The Other Change of Hobbit is closing? Damn. I'd heard rumors of it for a while, including from you guys, but I was always hoping you'd decide to shoulder on. Tom (& Dave), I'm really sorry to hear this. I too wouldn't mind seeing your rant -- this particular comment thread doesn't seem the most appropriate place for it, of course, but somewhere.
As far as used/small/independent bookstores go, while I enjoy the feeling of walking through a huge room surrounded by books, I enjoy the feeling of quirky possibility and personal service even more. Where I live I've watched most of the used/small/independent/specialty bookstores take a dive whenever the book warehouses like Borders or Barnes & Noble appear. (The one exception is a new/used bookstore in Palo Alto *right next to a Borders*, and I have no clue how they survive. ("It's not very easy," they've told me. I buy from them whenever I can, and eschew the hulk next door.)
Tom W.: Wait, I lied, this is the *exactly* right thread to post your rant in. :)
Mitch W.: My definition of browsing includes "browsing within a category," not just random walks. I regularly browse only within a particular section of a store. As for looking for new books by authors that I know I like, or books and writers that I heard good things about, my experience is that 90 percent of the time, the staff of a smaller store will have a better line on that than that of a large chain.
Not only that, the depth of knowledge frequently available at a smaller store can whittle down my browsing time even within a category, especially when I'm looking for something new but trying to winnow through the chaff. A question I've heard several times in the Other Change of Hobbit, paraphrased: Which authors do you wish you could read all over again? Tom W. (or Dave N. or whomever) mulls over my answer, compares it to what's new and interesting in the store, and directs me to books I otherwise might never have picked up.
...to save the...subjunctive?
Oh, would that we could.
Vanessa: I don't really take recommendations from bookstore staff.
On the other hand, maybe I should: I used to frequent a small, indie bookstore in Newton, N.J. and one day the staff there gave me a gift of some kind of pre-publication galley of a book called "Mohawk," by some fella named Richard Russo.
I thanked them nicely and stuck it up on my bookshelf and forgot about it.
Six or seven years later I took it down again and read it over and now I'm a stone Richard Russo fanatic.
Xopher:
>...to save the...subjunctive?
Oh, would that we could.
Isn't that an optative rather than a subjunctive?
[/language geekery]
Honestly, I've found more Barnes and Nobles and Borders that I've liked than small bookshops. In fact, my first memory of a small bookshop comes from when I was six or so and accompanying my father into a little bookstore...the owner, a crusty old woman in a dirty sweater, freaked out, since kids weren't allowed in her store. So I waited out in the car. Yes...the "dusty and the unique", indeed. Dave Barry once wrote something to effect that malls often crush out Small-Town Businesses because the malls don't have window displays featuring dead bugs and crepe paper that hasn't been changed since the Eisenhower administration.
Granted, it's totally unfair to characterize something from one experience. However, I remember when I was a poor college student and took the bus everywhere. Naturally I took my backpack with me, since it's the easiest way to carry stuff on the bus. Once in search of textbooks I went to a huge used bookstore, three floors of stuff (stank of cat urine, incidentally, as the owner was rather fond of cats and less fond of cleanliness). The owner actually called the cops on me, since I had a backpack on and, for some inexplicable reason, was convinced that I was shoplifting from his pornography section (in fact I was shopping for a medieval history textbook). Never got hassled for carrying a backpack when I went to a Barnes and Noble or a Borders. So admittedly my bias is somewhat against independent bookstores.
But then again, I have found some superb little, independent, and used bookstores. Renaissance Books in the Mitchell Airport at Milwaukee is the best I've found...used and new, and a prime location, being in Milwaukee.
It was also a small bookstore that got me started on Stephen King. While a poor college student, I took the train to Milwaukee to visit a friend and within a matter of hours was totally lost. I found this neat little store called "Little Read Book" somewhere in the suburbs and asked the propreitor, a gracious middle-aged woman, for directions and if I could use the restroom. She graciously provided directions, but said if I used the restroom, it was considered only polite to buy something in return. I agreed and bought, at random, a copy of "Salem's Lot". On the ride back I started reading it, and later neglected all work for a day as I finished reading it. "LOOK UPON ME AND DEEESPAIIIR!" indeed.
So I suppose the moral is that indepedent bookstores can be a lot of fun, provider the propreitor isn't a crazed, embittered tyrant.
Tom --
May it is. I'll be there.
Patronize Borderlands in SF as much as you can.
I second that emotion! Sorry to hear that OCH is going under.
Vanessa, have you been to Know Knew Books? It's in the other Palo Alto downtown area, on California, and they have hundreds of shelf-feet of well-organized used SF and fantasy.
Kepler's in Menlo Park is as large as a Borders but much nicer, and Wessex across the street is small but very tasty.
I'm not totally against the big boys--they're certainly preferable to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's of my youth--but living in SF there's really no reason for me to go to one unless I need a lunchtime Calvin & Hobbes fix or something. Like Starbuck's, it's fine if there's nothing better around, but no more. And Borders (my local one, at least) is a miserable record store--I wish they wouldn't even bother, and just put more books in.
I'm a committed browser and only order on-line as a last resort. I don't really know why.
And I'm glad I got to go to A. Amitin's in St. Louis before it closed. Now that was a bookstore experience.
Brian: Don't worry about Pandemonium--I'll be moving to the Boston area in the near future.
Know Knew Books is amazing. I'm sorry I didn't get to go more than once or twice, but I was already busy blowing my nonexistent spending money on popular math books for my student-teaching classes. Found Kuttner's The Dark World there, for which I am eternally grateful to them. If I ever get to return to Palo Alto with a bookbuying budget...
Found Kuttner's The Dark World there
As did I!
One of these days I'm going to have to check out the other used book shops in the Bay area. The only trouble is, to get to any of them, I have to walk past BookBuyers on my way to the station...
There were a good bunch of Kuttner's pulp adventures published by Ace in the mid sixties -- have you folks read the others? I don't find them as interesting as the later Kuttner/Padgett etc, but they're some fun anyway.
Alex--I'm always saying "Would you like some cheese and crackers with that whine?" to a particularly whiny friend of mine, but you've got me beat by a mile.
I'm sorry to hear about AVH closing--I would usuallly visit it when I was in Boston and certainly have found some cool obscurities there.
I find all of the establishments mentioned (chains, inependents, thrift stores) useful. E.g., speaking of Chabon, I recently picked up a perfectly nice trade pb copy of Kavalier and Clay, which i've been meaning to read for a while, for 79¢ at the local Salvation Army. If I have some specific thing I must have at once, it'll probably be B&N unless I know St. Marks Books will have it. But StM has really good remainders...
I'm also a great fan of the street booksellers, who are out mostly in the summer, despite the cops' unconstitutional hassling. Some of the rarest books I own are from them. I'm incorrigible. I remember walking rapidly on the way to a movie with a bunch of friends and yelling "I'll catch up with you in a second" as I snatched up a nice copy of the Conan the Conqueror Ace Double, handed the seller a dollar, and dashed ahead...
But of course the best place of all to get books is from the trash. I have an 1839 Thomas De Quincey collection of essays that I found in a trash can on First Ave. I have strange Santería handbooks, bondage porn paperbacks from the '70s, Black Muslim literature, and the entire Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. Just last night, it was what looks to be a great bit of military history, The Armies of Wellington, by Philip J. Hawthornthwaite (London:Arms and Armour, 1994), 1st ed. mint in DJ, with a clear plastic wrapper to boot! Who are these people who throw this stuff out?!
And let's not even talk about vinyl...
I've only read The Dark World of his pulpy stuff, and it's alleged to be one of C. L. Moore's anyway (I'm a big Jirel fan). I have Fury and Valley of the Flame on my to-read shelf, though.
As for the Padgett era, well, one of the tracks on my latest album is called "Rattle-Geared Narcissus"...
Ayse: being treated like a chump is how you describe being asked to allow us to offer folks reasonable prices for their used books and still try to make a profit? The community doesn't stop with you, it doesn't stop with the bookstore, and it doesn't stop with me.
No, Tom. Being treated like a chump is something that dishonest secondhand booksellers -- the ones who go out of business in two to four years and blame Barnes and Noble for their demise -- do to me. It's secondhand bookstores charging way more for a piece of crap than it is really worth, it's a dealer telling me that a reprint is a first edition when it's clearly not, it's a seller thinking that I'll be fooled by the age of a book into thinking it has value beyond the words on the page.
I don't object to secondhand stores charging reasonable amounts for books I can't find elsewhere. I object to a bookseller who is very obvious about thinking, "These people will buy anything." That attitude will make me shop elsewhere.
If you're paying sellers more than stock is worth, that's really a business problem. If paying too much for used books means selling them for too much, the market will correct you on its own. "The community" doesn't buy me books, so I don't feel any need to support "the community" in my book-buying endeavors. (I very rarely sell books, as I only buy what I want.)
Note that I don't buy SF at all, unless the author is a friend of mine. Don't know the genre from Paracoccidioidomycosis brasiliensis. It might be a totally different deal for that market and I would never know. But the next dealer who offers me a jacketless, foxed 1950's Grosset & Dunlap for $100 is going to get a stick in the eye.
I get most of my news off the net these days but somehow I never expected to hear something like OCH closing in a venue such as this one.
I remember when I first encountered the store. I must have been about ten, and was walking with my family through the shopping building south of campus and my mother pointed out the sign. (The original one in black on orange wood.) I didn't realize that it was a new store, I thought it had been there for a while and I'd just never noticed it.
I remember being in there chatting with Debbie about this and that, and feeling the shake of a truck driving by overhead. Only it wasn't a truck, it was the start of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Fuck.
When we lived in the Bay Area, we bought a lot of books at OCH. Not because it was convenient; it was a 45-minute BART ride away, and we had a Borders 10 minutes from our house. Not because the selection was better than at other stores; sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn't. Not because it's independent; I support bookstores based on other things than that.
We went to The Other Change for two reasons: a few odd magazines we wouldn't find at chain bookstores, and the clerks. At least two clerks there recognized my family on sight. I don't know if they knew our names, but they knew that we'd been in there before, that I'd come in looking for Judith Merril stories and left with a Jonathan Carroll novel instead. They would chat with us over what we'd bought, what we were buying this time, what else we thought was good, what we thought was eye-rollingly bad. They knew how many people were in my family and would ask after whoever wasn't there. It got to the point where we knew our favorite clerk's work schedule and would put off going in if he wasn't going to be there that day.
Now we shop at Uncle Hugo's, where they rarely send books back to the publisher, so I can buy The Fortunate Fall new. Where -- surprise! -- we have a favorite clerk who knows who we are and reads out bits of Locus to us while we're in the store and talks to us about what we're buying and what we bought last time and all of that.
It's possible that this sort of "our own clerk" thing could happen at a local chain store. Heaven knows I'm not opposed to the chain stores. I remember how my high school friends and I used to make pilgrimages down to Lincoln's Barnes before Omaha got one. I remember how we got sneered at and asked to leave one of the local independent non-genre bookstores for the horrid sin of being teenagers who wanted to look at lots of books before selecting a paperback apiece. Compared to that, Barnes was a fabulous place to buy the things Star Realm and Merchant of Venus didn't have. (And besides, my mom was none too sure she wanted her 15-year-old daughter wandering around on 42nd St. at a place called Merchant of -- Merchant of what?, she demanded. And B&N stayed open late.) I don't feel sorry for AVH, because they're acting just like the people who kicked us out of their bookstore when I was a teenager. I am sorry that OCH won't be there if we visit friends in the Bay Area again. It was a good place to go.
I ran a comic shop/used book shop/used record shop/etc for a year or so in the 70s. I liked educating my younger patrons in the history of my beloved comics medium, and some of them were regulars. I only found out later on, by accident, that they not only were robbing me routinely (so the jerk who managed the place before me was right, "the little bastards are robbing me blind!" -- but then, so was he, it turns out), but they actually thought I knew about it and tacitly encouraged it.
Perhaps it's just as well I only found out later.
I've worked in bookselling or publishing for exactly twenty years this past March. [Jeez, scary how time flies!], and have heard every dire prediction foretelling the end of bookselling and/or publishing that I can think of. None of them has ever come true.
Where I grew up, on a tiny island off the Jersey shore, there weren't any bookstores. None. But that's the beauty of mass market publishing. There were always books to be had in the drugstores, grocery stores, AM/PM minimarts, convenience stores and even in motel lobbies along the beach. And lo and behold, books will always find a way into a buyers hands' no matter what circuitous route they may take. So I always had books to read when I was a kid.
Bookselling is in a constant state of evolution, and always has been. So is publishing. If you read Michael Korda's book, Another Life, you'll see that in the 1950's, old school publishers and booksellers were complaining that things weren't as they had been in the 1930s. In the 1960s Jacquelyn Susanne practically invented the concept of media hype for her book The Love Machine. She made her publisher do things nobody had ever thought of: courting boooksellers at the bookselling conventions, giving away prizes and incentives and coop, etc. And old-school publishers again cried that these new tactics would destroy the industry. They didn't. They helped it grow in leaps and bounds, and more bookstores opened than had ever existed before.
When audio books came along, some cried foul again, the end of the paper book is near. Didn't happen. Then Rocket Book came along and the old school turned up their collective collars again and despaired, certain that the era of the printed book was doomed. Again, didn't happen. And now publishers are getting bigger and eating each other up. No, no! This must SURELY be the preordained apocalypse of bookselling. Well, ya know what? It isn't going to happen now, either.
The fact is that in bookselling and publishing, as in any other business, there will be winners and there will be losers. Borders and Barnes & Noble were once single independent bookstores. Obviously, someone there had some business sense once upon a time, yes?
There are also great thriving independent bookstores, stores like Tattered Cover in Denver, Stacey's in San Francisco, Powell's in Portland. They recognize that bookselling is first and foremost a business, a money-making venture, a way to pay the rent. After you have a business plan, then you can add your bookselling mission statement. Thus they stay in business. When the smaller independents around them go belly-up, those that haven't ever grasped the concept of a business plan, will they then point fingers at their fellow independent stores and cry foul too? Probably.
You know, I do hear a lot of grumbling and complaining about the state of bookselling and the state of publishing, and once in a while, when I am having a weak moment or am not properly caffeinated, I find myself among the whiners. But then I slap myself, and get over it. Because ultimately, I love what I do, I love books and being around books and publicizing books and sharing books I love with others. It's in my blood. If it isn't, you have most likely have no business IN the business.
My two cents...
Colleen
I'm a former longtime SF resident who grew weary of the condescending attitudes of many of the indie bookstore staffs. To them, reading/writing romance/women's fiction was beneath contempt. A Clean Well-Lighted Place, IMO, had the snottiest staff. Stacey's wasn't much better.
Now I live somewhere where there's neither a library or a bookstore. I've ordered from Blackwell's in the UK, and half my orders are stolen by customs here. An order from B&N.com took six months to arrive. A recent Amazon order arrived in under a week.
I also have to say that in general--there are specific exceptions--I don't much mourn these kinds of closings. Because in general--there are specific exceptions--many small bookstores bring it on themselves. The only reason to favor such places is when they offer that sense of being a "great good place", a gathering, or when they offer through specialization and backlist a depth of selections that the gargantuas (independent and corporate) can't offer.
Many small independent bookstores offer neither, but act as if their resulting struggles are a matter of dire community concern. I can think of one independent store in the Midwest with a good selection where the owner went out of his way to insult almost everyone who went in, and refused to help patrons find particular books. I can think of another store, a SF-focused one, in the mid-Atlantic (that probably isn't there anymore--I haven't been to the city in question for about seven years), that was dank and foul-smelling and where the owner's many cats were permitted (encouraged?) to litter the floor everywhere with feces. And I can think of an indie in my very own neck-of-the-woods (NOT the superb House of Their Own, which is a great place, but another store in downtown Philly) that has a mediocre selection of almost everything and no particular compensatory virtue.
So yeah, those stores, if they go bye-bye, I can't especially get too worked up about.
There are a few used establishments which are really special, to be sure, and I'd feel terrible if they disappeared. Acres of Books in Long Beach CA is especially worth mentioning in this regard--better by far than the Strand, and more reasonably priced to boot.
Bay area folks, let me second Know Knew (Palo Alto, California Avenue between El Camino and the train) as a great place for used books. Their SF/F section is pretty darn well-stocked, and if you're a social sciences geek like me, they've also got a reasonably good history section. Mystery and thrillers are both smaller but good selection. I can't speak to the general fiction section as I rarely read such beasties but it's a good size.
I also like Book Buyers in Mountain View, but they're a little out of my way so I don't go very often. It's the sole reason I miss living in Mountain View. They carry both used and new, plus CDs and movies and software, and if Caltrain would just start running on the weekends again, I might even go there more often.
I go to places like Know Knew when I'm just looking for generic 'books'. But when I find an author I like, I prefer to buy new, which isn't an option there. Independent new-book sellers are harder to find (and I have no car, so it's not like I can range far afield), so most of my new-book and specific-book purchases are either online (meaning mostly Amazon, occasionally elsewhere) or at Barnes and Noble.
Now, if someone wants to open up a small bookstore that carries sf/f, mystery, and social sciences books, both used and new, in San Jose, I'll be there about once a week. (Alternately, if you know of one, preferably in the Willow Glen area, please do let me know.)
I admit to shopping at Barnes and Noble as well, although Lee and I do get all our comics from a small independent shop, which rocks the hizouse. (Said comic store also stocks a large selection of used and almost new books, which I raid every time I go. Once the owner gave me free books since I sold a shitload of books--some OSC, some Barbara Hambly, some Pamela Dean--to a browsing couple just by telling them what I liked. That kind of personal interaction seems almost impossible with the larger stores.)
My love for Barnes and Noble sprang from the obscene amount of books they'll have on almost any subject. Which means that Lee and I can to our local B&N and look up books on ibizan hounds, the Better Homes and Garden's Big Book of Home Repair, the latest Spectrum (a yearly art periodical), issues of Locus for me, road maps, yoga videos, vegetarian cookbooks, a copy of the Kama Sutra with a tiny plasticine wall frieze featuring Vishnu and several apsaras, coffee cake, Mormon history books, the occasional CD, and of course, mounds and mounds of beautiful, lovely, destined-to-be-read-in-my-bathtub skiffy and fantasy!
(Oh, and the kid lit section is usually nice and chunky with lots of variety. I might not want to read the Gossip Girl series, but I'm sure there is a thirteen year old somewhere who does. Unless an indy is devoted solely to kid lit, I've been rarely impressed with their selection of YA, which is often small and bleak.)
Plus, I'm amazed by the tiny bonsai trees you can purchase just before hitting the register. (I'm such an impulse shopper.)
Re: childhood bookstores
I grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, your basic middle-class NYC neighborhood. Until I was 10 or so, there were _no_ bookstores in Forest Hills. A couple of places had spinner racks, but it was easier to find comics than real books for sale. I spent a lot of time at the library and reading through my parents' SF collection, much of which was bought through the SF Book Club.
Eventually we had a small Barnes & Noble and a tiny Waldenbooks. No used bookstore or independent bookstore. If we went to a mall (3 stops on the subway), there was a bigger B&N, but we weren't mall people.
When I was 12ish, I began commuting to Manhattan for school. I spent a lot of time and money in bookstores after that, in various parts of Manhattan. Regular bookstores, specialty bookstores, used bookstores.
A few years later there were 2 comic book stores in the neighborhood as well. I rarely went in them because their staffs suffered from "girls don't read comics" syndrome and the male patrons either patronized me or tried to pick me up.
I still live in Forest Hills. We have one bookstore, a big B&N. A small number of books, mostly bestsellers, can be found in Walgreen's and a few other chain drug/etc. stores. No independent bookstore. We still spend a lot of time in the library. One of the comics stores has survived, but I think they make most of their money from gaming leagues these days.
As a AVH shopper for over 20 years, I'll be sorry to see it go. But... I haven't been there that often since I moved to the suburbs. I think one of the real things that has probably hurt them more than they know is Abebooks. If there is an out-of-print book I am looking for, I can just go online and get it. No months of spending hours hunting through used bookstores. Plus I'm buying from a small independent bookseller, just one in another town.
Seeing as I spend more time in Harvard Square rather than Newbury Street, I'd like to comment on the decline in Wordsworth Books. First, no overstock stacked on top of shelves. Then, more books facing out, top or bottom shelves removed. Now I go in and see that in both the mystery and sci-fi sections have whole shelving units removed. (Three apiece instead of four.) The place is often empty. But Harvard Bookstore is jumping. Lines before you buy, shelves fully stocked, great used selection downstairs.
Interesting how this happens. I remember Wordsworth as being the far more jumping spot ten years ago.
Regarding used bookstores, the leases on retail storefronts can be quite expensive, particularly in tony neighborhoods like Newbury Street.
However the Internet has been a massive boon, allowing people to sell books online from home (or inventory in cheaper warehouses) without the hefty overhead of keeping everything presentable to foot traffic.
I'm somewhat surprised Avenue Victor Hugo didn't go that route, although I suppose it depends on what one gets out of running a bookstore.
Colleen, from my viewpoint as a reader, *I'm* one of the losers too. There were three or four small &/or specialty bookstores in my immediate area that died when Barnes & Noble came in. The stores probably did have a business plan, but I suspect that plan didn't include a huge chain store opening within a quarter of a mile of them.
I notice that you praise Stacey's as the fine independent bookstore that it is: the Palo Alto branch of Stacey's closed shortly after the Borders opened down the street from it. (The branch further south also closed around that time.) Stacey's had been there for many years. The store's business plan worked as a whole, I guess, since the original store survives in San Francisco, 30 miles north, but for me, the local reader, they're basically gone. The store staff told me it was the combination of Borders and Amazon that did them in at the Palo Alto location. Reading is in my blood, but driving 30 miles isn't.
Could've been worse -- at least Barnes & Noble didn't buy the smaller bookstores and then close them (as Rite-Aid did with our local pharmacies, and it was pretty darn funny, ha-ha, when most of the Rite-Aids then closed too because they weren't making their nut, so we had empty stores *and* fewer pharmacies).
Isn't there some way that the evolution of the bookselling business could work to the benefit of someone who wants to be able to walk in and physically pick up a book, occasionally getting knowledgeable advice from store staff? (Personally, I blame the inventory tax laws, but that's another post.) I buy many fewer Del-Rey books these days -- the B&N staff doesn't know Del-Rey from Del Taco.
Ogre-Eyed & Tim Walters & Mris: Yeah, the character of the store owner becomes paramount in a smaller store, which is why a big, understaffed, impersonal store can seem much better in comparison to a small store owned by paranoid people-haters. But when the owner is a good sort, you get places like Know Knew Books in Palo Alto, where the owner will remember your preferences in used books, hire like-minded staff, and let you put that book of illustrated Toulouse-Lautrec menus on layaway. Kepler's (new) and Wessex (used) in Menlo Park are similarly fine. Don't forget to patronize Megabooks in Palo Alto -- they're the new/used store next to the Borders on University, and they keep Borders-comparable prices on well-known new books while offering reasonable prices on the rest of their new & used stock. I still don't know how they do it. Maybe they're selling crack out of the storeroom -- if so, buy it there too.
I remember Megabooks! Spent too much there, too. Great place.
The guy at Know Knew Books also gave me fair warning on the Peter F. Hamilton "trilogy" when I picked up the first two paperbook volumes (or first book, trilogy-wise). Enjoyed them, but he was right: way long and involved.
Haven't read any other Kuttner/Moore novels, though a decent amount of the shorts. I'm still working off a dozen library books, and four more are on hold for me right now. Whoops. :-p Being able to place books on hold from online is dangerous, but sooooo good.
As far as independent booksellers go, I am sadly reminded of a bookstore in Houston some 10? years back where my mom used to take me. We found great stuff there, like Mad Mazes. But at one point I, being a tactless 6th? grader, mentioned that I was looking for a Dragonlance (yes, Dragonlance--I was in 6th grade, what can I say?) book that wasn't there, and would I be likely to find it in a bookstore at the mall? The kind old woman's face got red as she stammered something out, and my mom was so mortified that she hauled me out of there, explained to me my lack of tact, and never took me there again. I have repented that moment many times over the years, but I can't help thinking that I would have continued to be a customer if my mom had only let me, assuming the proprietor ever allowed me back in. :-] Maybe there should be a Bookbuying 101 course for tactless children...
I used to work at Borders in downtown DC. Loved that job - if I could've made a decent living at it without becoming management, I might be there still. I sure like the money I make at my office job, but nothing I've done there in four years has felt as satisfying or as significant as putting Charles de Lint or Robin Hobb or Thomas Ligotti in the hands of a wide-eyed new reader.
I don't recall meeting very many people at that job, even the ones at the corporate level, who weren't in it because they loved books. Most of the folks I talked to were there because they'd had the same experience I did the first time I was in a Borders: Ohmygodthisplaceisfulloffuckingbooks. Indeed, one of the best things about that line of work was spending all day around books, and people who loved books and loved talking to people about them and sending them off to good and loving homes. The Decline of Literacy in the West (a beast I have heard much of, but never actually seen) is not a creation of the Big Chain Stores.
I've lived near, and loved, a number of really great indy bookstores, and happily fed them my money and patronage. I've also been in a lot of crap ones, with awful lighting, a bag check (I understand this, but it still sucks having that we-have-to-assume-you're-a-criminal thing hit you right on the way in) and surly proprietors. And I can't tell you how many times a sign promising USED BOOKS has led to a tiny shelf of SF in no particular order, if it can be found at all. (Sometimes this disorganization is charming, and hunting through the stock is half the fun - depending on the atmosphere of the place. Usually, though, it's a great big pain in the ass.) There's something to be said for knowing what your shopping experience is going to be like. Independent booksellers are a gamble - great when they pay off, but you don't always want a gamble when you're looking to satisfy the book-jones. Even a second-rate Borders is still a Borders, dammit.
Thinking back in greater depth on my own experiences with indie bookstores, I found that I had some bad experiences: surly clerks, mainly. Also, some great experiences - I mentioned the place in Newton, N.J, which I went to so often that the staff and I knew each other and they gave me a gift of a book I liked. Also, there was the used bookstore we frequented in in San Francisco where the clerk was always playing eclectic music, which we frequently and vocally admired - one day he just gifted us with a compilation tape.
From which I draw the profound conclusion that indie bookstores are businesses, like any other, and some are good and some aren't.
Alex: Jane Austen Doe's whine was simultaneously fruity and bitter, not to mention immature. I suspect that it became spoiled somewhere in the bottling process.
That's where these ranters usually fail--neglecting to put the cork in.
Meredith: So I'm good if I write the new as long as it is for something else's sake? Like, say, the love of a good cat or to save the spotted subjunctive?
The Usher rant could have been poetic with a little more work. For instance, symmetry demands that there be an out for those who write the old, say if it's not for the sake of predictability or nostalgia or, oh anything.
Tom: Other Change of Hobbit's closing....
That's so damned depressing, even though I never got there. I think I've been sensitized by seeing Larry Smith's bag at Lunacon, with the Somniorum Mercatores logo from Moonstone Bookcellars.
Jill Smith: When I read the title and the first sentence of this post, this flashed through my head: "You don't mean a Hugo winner is now the latest to jump in and moaning about publishing?!"
On the way to that very idea, my eye chanced on the second word of the second sentence, and I decided this was another of those high culture moments in Making Light where we get to hear a fine French auctorial whine of the nineteenth century. Eventually I engaged the reading muscles and was otherwise enlightened. "Never mind."
Lisa: ...if everyone on the staff agreed to learn to give the cat an injection of insulin.
Everyone's hitting my maudlin buttons today. I, too, learned to inject from a cat, now ten years gone.
Josh: Perhaps we should invade large printing presses and B&N warehouse distributers and throw doc martins and berkenstocks into the machinery....
Or take a line from Cory Doctorow--invade the presses and warehouses and do their job better (seventh section, "Bitchun wars", and passim). I've become a real Cory fan in the last week.
Tom again: The rant included swabbing out the piss that people leave in our entryway....
Another unfair advantage of the dotnets, except that it reminds me of a National Lampoon parody of A Connecticut Yankee that used this as the Achilles heel of the electronic future. I wish I could remember it better. Something about our hero engaging in trial by combat, and single-handedly shorting out the master mainframe using the most convenient fluid.
Vanessa --
I agree that readers lose out when bookstores close, but these things happen and you cannot always lay the blame at the feet of Amazon.com, B&N or Borders.
I worked at the Stacey's in San Francisco for about five years as a marketing manager and set up their event system. The overall management of Stacey's [which used to be a local chain in the Bay Area] was very good. The business model they developed made them decide to shut down their outlying stores. The Stacey's in Palo Alto suffered from a number of problems, not just from Borders and Amazon. Stacey's was originally a technical and business bookstore; they never did well as a general bookstore and Borders offered a larger space with better selection of general books. The physical location of the Palo Alto Stacey's was very small and leasing a larger space in downtown pre-dot-com-bubble-burst Palo Alto was prohibitively expensive. The powers that be decided that for the good of the business as a whole, it made more sense to shut down and focus on expanding the San Francisco location. The Cupertino location of Stacey's, which was about 80% technical and computer books, closed down AFTER the dot-com bubble burst. There were no surrounding businesses left to feed customers into the store.
There were a number of very good bookstores in the Bay Area that closed down in the late 90's. The Larkspur location of A Clean-Well Lighted Place for Books closed, and the closing was blamed on a nearby Borders opening, but the factswere very different. In reality, Book Passage -- which is located across the street from the Borders in question -- is a very healthy and thriving independent, and recently opened a new location in San Francisco as well. In truth, the interior of the Larkspur ACWLP was designed poorly, and became a haven for shoplifters. The shrinkage due to shoplifting was enormous, and they could never recoup their losses. In addition, the management was difficult, so they constantly lost good booksellers to other stores.
Likewise, Printers Inc in Palo Alto on California Street was a wonderful store with owners who had very little real business savvy. The fact that they stayed open for twenty years was a miracle. They had a great staff, great selection, a nice little coffeeshop, a deep love of books and....not much else. Then the foot traffic decreased when the rents in the area went up during the dot-com craze. Every other store on the block had closed, and the downtown shoppig became more focused on University Avenue, a good mile away. And the owners decided to expand. Common sense said "Hey, no foot traffic -- why expand? Why sink more money into this?" But they did, and then went almost immediately belly up.
I could go on and on about the hidden reasons independent bookstores go belly-up.There is always more than you see at the surface, and rarely have I actually seen a bookstore closing that can be blamed solely on the opening of a nearby chain.
Yoon Ha wrote: "Maybe there should be a Bookbuying 101 course for tactless children..."
If only the "can I find it in store X?" was limited to clueless children. I find it kind of cute, coming from children. But by the twentieth (no hyperbole involved) time an adult asked if he could find a movie at Best Buy or Wal-Mart, I snapped. Smiled very sweetly and said, "I don't know; I don't keep track of their stock."
The worst part was that he didn't realize he was being insulted.
My long, extended rant (which I won't punish anyone here with) involves making people work one day in retail before they can ever step foot in a store. And that day must be the Saturday before Christmas.
Alice --
Actually, thats a great idea. I always thought that anyone who worked in publishing, but particularly editors, and even more particularly NON-FICTION editors, should have to work at least one week in a bookstore at Christmas before they are ever allowed to buy a manuscript. For once, see what real people in real bookstores actually are drawn to, pick up and buy. Watch how many times they come to the information counter, carrying a book with a cool trendy vellum cover that happens to be shredded after one day in the shelf and asking if they could possibly get one that wasn't so torn up [please, publishers everywhere -- give up on vellum! it's always a bad idea!]...or see how often they pass over those stunning works of literary genius and award-winning plotless short stories which are biding their time on the shelves before they find their ultimate destiny at a remainder house. And see how many parenting books the reading public actually buys at any given time [Hint: not many].
It would be most entertaining, I think...
I have been known to ask "Do you have X?" and after being told no, "Is there any place around here that might?" I assume that if they don't carry it it's by choice, and that they will be willing to direct me to a place that does, if only for my future goodwill.
Different if they're just temporarily out of it, especially if they can tell me when it's coming in. (I might still ask if I need it in a hurry.) And I'd agree that asking a small store about a huge faceless chain's stock is gauche.
Way upthread Asni wrote:
"Northampton has a great SFF/mystery bookstore (The Space-Crime Continuum, if you're anywhere nearby). A couple of months after we moved in, the owners had figured out our favorite authors and were pulling them without our asking. That'll get you customer loyalty every time."
I went to college with Deb and Chris, the folks who own the Space-Crime Continuum. They are extremely good people, Chris has a hard corps fan and gaming background, and I'm not at all suprised to hear they run a great store.
Plus, Deb's hair smells really really good. (Or, at least, it used to.) Whoops, darn, probably more than you needed to know.
Xopher wrote:
>I have been known to ask "Do you have X?" and after being told no, "Is there any place around here that might?" I assume that if they don't carry it it's by choice, and that they will be willing to direct me to a place that does, if only for my future goodwill.
I'm pleasantly surprised how often staff at bookshops (and other places like hardware stores) refer me to their competitors when they don't have what I'm looking for.
Also, at my local big-chain-but-pretty-good-anyway store (Reader's Feast) they have a staff reccomendation section, and the blurb for a particular Philip Dick reprint said that a) it was actually book X deceptively retitled and b) it wasn't his best work and was really only for completists.
Things like that are enough to restore your faith in human nature. Plus, of course, they're building up a stock of trust and gratitude which can later be redeemed for valuable prizes.
I'll miss OCH. I can still remember being a student, wandering through their doors one day, sick with a cold, and Shelob let me pick her up and I snuggled down in a chair with her as Tom told me things I'd need to know while reading Sayers and how to judge the age of a book by the smell of its paper, and just being utterly content. I remember watching Jan's jaw drop as Jon Singer and I reunited before she could introduce us. Discussions with Deb. Discussions with Daves Nee and Goldfarb. (Almost) everything I learned about fandom I learned at OCH (the rest was found at Fourth Street and Comic-Con :-). And while it's been over a decade since I browsed OCH's shelves, they left a legacy with me.
I don't work in a bookstore. But I just attended a Laurie King signing at Mysterious Galaxy last week, and handsold two Connie Willis novels to the woman next to me in line, who said "Oh, I don't read science fiction." Tom, just wanted to let you know that the effect of what you guys made can linger for a good long while.
For those of you in Berkeley, (to paraphrase Helene Hanff) if you should happen to pass OCH, kiss it for me. I owe it so much.
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