by Ronald Rice
What I don’t love, what I find disorienting and a little flat, is the crushing sameness of the spaces between cities and towns. The highways of South Carolina look startlingly similar to the highways of Vermont. The outskirts of nearly every town look more or less the same. The same big-box stores, the same retailers’ names in the interchangeable malls, the same ten or twelve restaurants with the same logos shining out in the twilight.
I don’t mean to suggest that this flattening of the contemporary world is a uniquely American problem. Here and in other countries, the story’s always the same: We were lured to the outskirts of town by lower prices, but the low prices always came with hidden costs. The old downtown shops that we liked on principle but didn’t get around to visiting very often couldn’t compete anymore and went out of business. There are concrete reasons why this phenomenon has hurt communities, statistics concerning the greater amount of money that stays in a community when a purchase is made in a locally owned store versus a national chain, differences in contributions to local charities by locally owned versus non–locally owned businesses, a lowering of the tax base when wages in a community are driven down. But there’s another, less tangible loss. When every town has exactly the same small handful of businesses, it starts to look exactly like every other town. The things that make a given place uniquely itself, the things that made it different from all the other places on earth, begin gradually to erode.
“Amazon isn’t bad,” a bookseller of my acquaintance said on Twitter, two or three years back. “Monoculture is bad.”
2. I’d thought originally to write this as a pure celebration of independent bookstores and not mention Amazon at all, but when there’s an elephant in the room it seems only polite to introduce it.
Once we were lured to the edges of town by the big-box stores; now we’re lured to the Internet, and if we’re buying from a massive corporation, the effect is the same. The thing about Amazon is that it’s the opposite of independent bookstores. Independent bookstores tend to reflect the personalities and eccentricities of their owners, managers, and staff—some divide books carefully by genre; some shelve Arthur Conan Doyle in the same section as Ray Bradbury and Charles Dickens because it’s all literature, dammit; one that I know of makes a distinction between Fiction and Literature, and yes, there may possibly be a moment of fleeting doubt when one arrives in town to discover that one’s books have only made the fiction shelf. Some bookstores sell only crime fiction and sci-fi. Some have cats.
All are driven more by a love for books than by a love for money, because let’s face it, the margins are low, and most have display space set aside for staff picks, where the store’s booksellers get to feature the books they’ve personally fallen in love with. Get a few of these people in your corner, authors are told, and your book just might succeed, or if not this book then perhaps the next one you write or the one after that. Even if you’re published by a small press, even if you’re published by a large publisher who’s decided to devote all of the season’s marketing dollars to someone else, even if none of your books have sold especially well in the past.
There are no staff picks on Amazon, because there are no people on Amazon. That is, naturally there’s an enormous fulfillment staff to keep the boxes moving, and naturally there’s a corporate structure in place, but when was the last time you walked into Amazon and got into a conversation with a bookseller about this new book that you probably hadn’t heard of before but that the bookseller thought you might really like?
The closest Amazon can come to this experience is the “You might also like…” algorithm, which is useful to an extent but of course has the terrible weakness of only being able to suggest books that are in some way similar to the books in which you’ve already indicated an interest. You’re not picking up a book on a whim and then buying it because even though it’s not your usual thing, the cover caught your attention or a bookseller pressed it into your hands and there’s something about it that speaks to you. You’re being presented with a preselected menu of books that an algorithm has decided are somewhat similar to books you already like. If at least one of the reasons to read is to expand the mind, a point is being missed here.
But if Amazon has had a largely negative influence on the literary world for publishers and the writers who publish with them, the argument sometimes goes, it’s been a boon for readers, a source of cheap books that arrive on one’s doorstep the following morning. If it’s put scores of bookstores out of business, we’re told, it’s because Amazon has a better business model than those bookstores ever did.
These arguments tend to ignore a number of uncomfortable realities: Amazon derives a considerable competitive advantage from tax evasion, it undercuts the competition by selling books at a loss, and serious questions have arisen regarding the way it treats the employees in its fulfillment centers. These unpleasant details aside, I wholeheartedly reject the notion that a bookselling monopoly is in any way good for readers. I believe that a healthy and vibrant culture, literary or otherwise, depends on diversity. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest for writers or books to come to our attention from only one source.
In her keynote address at the American Booksellers Association Seventh Annual Winter Institute, held in New Orleans in 2012, Ann Patchett discussed the tour for her first novel. She had two missions, her publisher told her: to sign stock and to make friends with booksellers. The point of the tour wasn’t the audience, which for most debut novelists is sparse to nonexistent. She was sent out on the road to meet the booksellers, and specifically, because bookstore owners and managers tend not to be there in the evenings, the girls—there are some guys, but they’re outnumbered—who work the cash register. The idea being, she said, that “if I made nice with these girls… after I left, [they] would read my book, and [they] would hand-sell my book.”
By the time of her breakout novel, Bel Canto, a foundation had been laid. Booksellers all over the country fell in love with the book. They knew who she was because she’d spent hours with them. Independent bookstores are personal. It’s clear to me when I read through this collection that things happen in independent bookstores that don’t happen in the other places where we buy books.
Every time an independent bookstore closes, the literary and cultural landscape becomes less diverse. I hope there will be a time when Amazon can coexist more easily with the bricks-and-mortar bookstores in this country. There’s an argument to be made that Amazon’s current business practices are no longer even in Amazon’s best interests, since every closed bookstore represents one fewer place that might potentially be persuaded to stock the titles from Amazon’s new publishing imprints. For the rest of us, a less diverse literary world means fewer people who read and recommend books for a living, fewer staff picks, fewer possibilities for new writers to be brought to our collective attention.
3. But this is no time for a requiem. This seems a perilous moment in publishing and in bookselling, and yet the American Booksellers Association reports that its membership has been slowly but steadily increasing. A December 2011 press release reported “more than 1,900” current members. Which is bleak in comparison to its membership numbers from the 1990s, but on the other hand, there were only 1,400 members in 2009. The ABA credits a growing Buy Local movement and exceptional entrepreneurship. The New York Times reports that Greenlight Bookstore, which opened in Brooklyn in 2009 and instantly became one of my favorite bookstores, reported sales of over $1 million in its first year.
I had the spectacular good fortune of visiting Shakespeare and Company in Paris last week. My French publisher had installed me in a nearby hotel for a week of interviews and receptions and photo sessions. On the second or third day there was a break in the schedule, and my husband and I set out to find the bookstore with the feeling that I imagine very religious people must feel when they leave their hotel, map in hand, in search of a nearby holy site.
Shakespeare and Company doesn’t disappoint. It�
��s a labyrinthine place with books crammed into every possible corner, narrow beds among the shelves upstairs, and a sink in a corner with a sliver of dried-out soap for the Tumbleweeds, the itinerant writers and readers who stay for a while in exchange for a couple of hours a day of work in the store. There are books that seem to have been on the shelves for decades. There are notes pinned to a wall, an old typewriter in an alcove. Movement is somewhat complicated by the crowds. There are too many people there, but on the other hand, they all love books.
A white banner over the door memorializes George Whitman, who opened the current iteration of Shakespeare and Company in 1951 and died last year at the age of 98. He considered himself the heir to Sylvia Beach, who opened the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919 and closed it permanently during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Whitman’s dates of birth and death are noted, above what might be his most famous quote: “The business of books is the business of life.”
Cynics will dismiss him as a hopeless romantic, among the last of his kind, but that quote has a ring of familiarity about it. It makes me think of the other booksellers I’ve met, my contemporaries in every way, who’ve welcomed me into their stores. They are intelligent, interesting, and dedicated to books. Theirs isn’t an easy business, but it’s still possible, and they’re still making it work.
I’ve heard too many times that the demise of bookstores is inevitable. I’ve lost count of the number of obnoxious Internet comments I’ve read along the lines of “Bookstores are dead, e-books are the way of the future, accept it.”
This raises a number of obvious points: Firstly, there’s no reason whatsoever why e-books and independent bookstores can’t coexist, and secondly, new bookstores open all the time and some of them are wildly successful. But finally: Accept it? Why should we? Why would we passively accept the idea of a less varied and more monocultural literary landscape, why should we accept the idea of losing the Shakespeare and Companies of this world? Or in this country, the McLean & Eakins, the Northshires, the Morris Book Shops, or their equally vibrant counterparts in other cities and towns? I don’t think we have to. I don’t think we should.
4. There’s a bookstore on my street in Brooklyn that’s been in operation for forty-one years. When I moved to the neighborhood a few years back, Community Bookstore had an air of neglect about it. I found it a little depressing and rarely went in. It has new co-owners now, Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein, and watching them revitalize the store has been an immense pleasure. I attended the store’s fortieth birthday party last year and understood how the previously neglected little shop had persisted for so long.
They had borrowed the church across the street for an afternoon of readings. I wondered privately beforehand if the choice of venues wasn’t a little ambitious—it’s an enormous church, one of those massive grey-stone affairs that loom all over Brooklyn—but when I ventured in a few minutes before the afternoon of readings was scheduled to begin, the place was packed. There were hundreds of us, all here because we loved the store and loved the books and wanted to hear some readings. All of the readers were excellent, because if you’re Paul Auster or Jonathan Safran Foer or Siri Hustvedt then you’ve had a certain amount of practice in public speaking by this point, but I was especially struck by something Nicole Krauss said.
She had recently returned from a national tour for Great House, and she began telling us about conversations she’d had with a few people along the way who’d told her that they buy only e-books. When asked why, they told her it was because it was more convenient. She found this interesting, she said. When, she asked, did convenience become the most important thing?
I personally have no quarrel with e-books and believe they’ll continue to coexist with print, but there’s something in Krauss’s sentiment that resonates. I think it applies to the decision of how and where we buy our books.
There was a time when we—all of us, the general public—were referred to as citizens. At some point this shifted, and now we’re mostly called consumers. I have some real problems with this change, because while citizenship implies rights and responsibilities, to my mind consumerism mostly just implies shopping.
And yet shadows of the original word remain. The word consumer, I’ve come to realize, comes with its own intimations of responsibility, in that it reflects a very basic fact of life in a capitalist society, which is that we get to change the world we live in by means of where we spend our money. This concept is hardly new, but if it happens that you’re someone who enjoys having a bookstore in your town, I would argue that it’s never been more important.
—Emily St. John Mandel, 2012
Bookstores by Location
Alabama
The Alabama Booksmith, Birmingham
Page & Palette, Fairhope
Arizona
Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe
Arkansas
That Bookstore in Blytheville, Blytheville
California
Moe’s Books, Berkeley
The Capitola Book Café, Capitola
Book Passage, Corte Madera
Warwick’s, La Jolla
Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park
Books Inc., Palo Alto
Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena
The Booksmith, San Francisco
Green Apple Books, San Francisco
Chaucer’s Books, Santa Barbara
Bookshop, Santa Cruz
Canada
Munro’s Books, Victoria, BC
Type Books, Toronto, ON
Colorado
Explore Booksellers, Aspen
Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver
Maria’s Bookshop, Durango
Connecticut
R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison
Bank Square Books, Mystic
The Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington Depot
District of Columbia
Politics & Prose Bookstore
Florida
Books & Books, Coral Gables
The Muse Book Shop, DeLand
Writer’s Block Bookstore, Winter Park
Georgia
Charis Books & More, Atlanta
Eagle Eye Book Shop, Decatur
Idaho
Chapter One Bookstore, Ketchum
Illinois
Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville
The Book Stall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka
Iowa
Prairie Lights, Iowa City
Kansas
Rainy Day Books, Kansas City
Watermark Books and Café, Wichita
Kentucky
Carmichael’s Bookstore, Louisville
Louisiana
Octavia Books, New Orleans
Maine
Longfellow Books, Portland
Massachusetts
Brookline Booksmith, Brookline
Harvard Book Store, Cambridge
Porter Square Books, Cambridge
The Bookloft, Great Barrington
Mitchell’s Book Corner, Nantucket
Nantucket Bookworks, Nantucket
Broadside Bookshop, Northampton
The Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley
Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, Vineyard Haven
Michigan
Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor
Saturn Booksellers, Gaylord
McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey
Minnesota
Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Minneapolis
Micawber’s, St. Paul
Mississippi
Lemuria, Jackson
Square Books, Oxford
Missouri
Left Bank Books, St. Louis
New Hampshire
The Toadstool Bookshop, Peterborough
New Jersey
BookTowne, Manasquan
Watchung Booksellers, Montclair
New York
The Community Bookstore, Brooklyn
Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn
WORD, Brooklyn
&n
bsp; Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo
Oblong Books & Music, Millerton and Rhinebeck
McNally Jackson Books, New York
St. Mark’s Bookshop, New York
Strand Bookstore, New York
North Carolina
Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill
Park Road Books, Charlotte
The Regulator Bookshop, Durham
Purple Crow Books, Hillsborough
Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh
City Lights Bookstore, Sylva
Ohio
The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus
Oklahoma
Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City
Oregon
Powell’s City of Books, Portland
Pennsylvania
Chester County Book & Music Company, West Chester
Rhode Island
Island Books, Middletown
South Carolina
Fiction Addiction, Greenville
Tennessee
Parnassus Books, Nashville