Goodbye to Borders
This morning's Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a sad headline: Borders, the nation's second largest bookstore, was liquidating, and its 10700 employees will be unemployed by the end of September.
I first became familiar with Borders in law school, when there were only two of them: the first Borders in Ann Arbor, and one other store in suburban Detroit. I had never seen a bookstore like that Borders in Ann Arbor, one filled with serious, even scholarly books, a place where browsing was encouraged and where customers could spend hours perusing the collection. It soon became one of my favorite places in Ann Arbor, a place I went to relax and to forget about the stress of law school.
One particular incident stands out. I was admiring Norman Davies' magisterial history of Poland, God's Playground, when a stranger came up and asked why I was looking at that book. Thinking he was an Ann Arbor crank, I rather brusquely asked why he cared. "Because I wrote it," came the reply. There followed an enjoyable conversation, in which I learned that Davies was in Ann Arbor for a lecture to a Polish-American group. The lecture, too, was enjoyable: a scathing speech on the perfidy of Soviet Communism.
Of course, the Borders bookstores that spread across America as a chain never matched the original Borders in Ann Arbor. And, in some communities, I fear that Borders did contribute to the demise of quality independent bookstores. But, in many other communities, those Borders bookstores brought a wide selection of books that simply had not been there before, and they did offer a place where people could come and browse and get lost in the world of books for a time. All good things, I think. And now, all gone.
I hope that other bookstores fare better than Borders did, because the experience of spending time in a good bookstore can never be replaced by the impersonal world of shopping for books online, just as the experience of holding a good book in your hands and of building a good library at home can never be replaced by a "Kindle." But I fear the grim reaper of cyberspace is just getting warmed up.
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Good riddance. They had become the Walmart of books, stocking a poor selection of 'safe' books and political tomes with a short shelf life while most anything interesting or even subversive to the liberal order was declared persona non grata. I'm surprised to read something like this from you, Mr Piatak. The liberal monopoly on media (books, periodicals, news) is crumbling, and I only see cause to celebrate. You wont catch me mourning when the Old Grey Lady heads into bankruptcy court.
By the way, regular old books are never going away. For instance, I have a large library of photo driven books that would never work in an electronic form. Im sure others can think of even more examples.
I understand Mr Maxwell's opinion, and I partly share it.
However, what bothers me is that these venerable institutions were taken over and perverted in the first place. There should be a New York Times that is a great paper, not what it is, and there should be a Borders that is what it originally was, and they both should still be going strong, along with those other small book stores. That is what I lament.
Cyber shopping and google books and the internet archive are useful and have their place, but good bookstores and great newspapers should not be lost. Well, the world is fallen anyway, and nothing lasts forever. I just wish I didn't have to see so much go to pot in one lifetime.
Borders demise is a terrible loss for book lovers. While it is undeniable that Borders (and Barnes & Noble even more so) are firmly in the liberal order, the loss of a large bookstore removes one more place where one can browse a large selection and discover titles you didn't know existed -something impossible online since you can't search for what you don't know.
While I'll admit you won't find "Camp of the Saints" stocked in Borders, you can find, like I have through the years, many valuable books on history, language, literature; if you want to buy a classic for yourself or give one as a gift to introduce someone to Dostoevsky, for instance, you could choose to go inexpensive or hardback. One of my recent finds in a Borders was "Shakespeare on Language" which is something that one will certainly not find now in any retail outlet selling new books. The ability to use Borders as a meeting place will also be gone; the cafes inside were wonderful for small meeting places notwithstanding the egregious prices (after all, those were the cash generators for both big bookstores) and suspect quality food.
While Borders might have pushed out smaller bookstores, in my experience the bookstores who went away were far more PC than Borders and reflected only the interests of the owner and perhaps a few cronies - and they had only a fraction of the books a Borders would stock. Yes, I'm always annoyed to see the infamous "gay and lesbian" section in a Borders (isn't that redundant, by the way?) but I have appreciated a wide selection of history and literature through the years, even if recently the ratio of serious books to pop culture has changed for the worse.
Borders collapse was far more a result of corporate mismanagement than the ebook; the decision to farm out the internet business to Amazon years ago was akin to handing an arsonist a fresh can of kerosene, while bad leases and overseas expansion saddled the firm with overwhelming debt.
I'm convinced most of the e-readers purchases are made by America's gadget-happy people, not serious readers, so once the thrill of newness wears off book sales will drop even more. All in all, not great news for me.
In the early years, Borders’ real estate was usually stand-alone or in a conservative plaza and eventually emerged near malls and movie theaters. Coupled with poor business decisions, they transformed into a coffee shop and pre-teen babysitting service more than a bookstore. Each time I visited the Borders in Cleveland’s Western burbs, I found myself surrounded by lewd pre-teens running throughout the store. Management never seemed to nip it in the bud, and that is when I started downloading to my Kindle (even though more times than not, I still prefer to hold the book in my hands). Electronic versions just aren't the same - - especially in viewing maps, charts, etc.
Not particularly fond of Barnes and Noble either.
Then too, Amazon doesn't have to charge sales tax, a wonderful gimme for a business that large. Or any size, really.
Our (struggling)local book store has a website that will allow the customer to download books onto (non-kindle) ereaders and provide a slice to brick and mortar business and help keep them open. It's not much, but in an age when patronizing local business has become more a civic duty than a commercial transaction, it's the least one can do. Assuming one has an ereader.
We had a wonderful, stand-alone Borders on the north side of Indianapolis. In those early days, the selection was amazingly rich. Staff members were encouraged to stock special interest shelves. They even maintained a particularly excellent "Sherlockian" section.
But as the chain expanded, buying decisions were taken out of the hands of the locals. The stock of the second store which opened in town never matched the depth of the first. The original store began reducing shelf space to make more room for videos and knickknacks.
For me, the writing was on the wall when I visited a third Borders that had opened, looking for a particular title, and was told "we don't have a biography section." This was uttered matter-of-factly, without the least hint of embarrassment. The lad seemed genuinely puzzled when I asked him to repeat what he had just told me.
I too am saddened to see Borders closing its doors. As a Michiganian by birth, I am well familiar with the flagship store in Ann Arbor that Mr. Piatak described. But as an observer of how the chain has been transformed, I am also familiar with the desperate attempts to stay relevant that Mr. Gagen describes. It is too bad because the stores, left to the local book enthusiast managers, could deliver a great deal of interesting and diverse reading. Their overhead may have been economically unsustainable, but credit must go to some of the original visionaries and some of the managers who provided wonderful and large book offerings. In Ann Arbor, at a time in my life when I was enthused about studying chess, I was pleasantly surprised to find an entire wall devoted to the game. I doubt I shall see anything like it in a bookstore ever again, let alone a chain.