All Unmourned and Unknown

Ah, the wonders of "new media." I wrote a piece the other night, in tribute to a neighborhood bookstore that is going out of business to make way for a bank. First bookstore to hire me when we moved to Seattle, just up the street from the store where I work now. Good neighbors. We still visit. Will be missed. The piece I wrote got picked up by the local newspaper blog-of-record, and brought me an unusual number of readers, and the bookstore where I used to work some additional attention. All to the good.

The editor who linked to my post is one of the last literary gents hereabouts with any real influence, an admirable critic and reviewer, and an amiable fellow altogether. I'm glad to claim his acquaintance. He's been very kind to my brief efforts here, a good customer at the bookstore where I work, and, in my experience at his periodic shindigs/salon for the local literati, librarians, and booksellers, etc., has proved himself an excellent host. A good man, is Paul Constant.

However, in his entirely too flattering introduction to my post, he said a couple of things at which I initially took some umbrage. (Always just there for the taking, I find, but that's as I am.) Before citing what I'd written as an exception, he bemoaned "the inevitable maudlin goodbyes to bookstores that are closing" and suggested that the more usual valedictories tend to "overstate the importance of the bookshop." That last statement particularly, if specific, seemed to me perhaps a bit insensitive, and if meant generally -- as in the importance of bookshops to civilization, literature, etc. -- then downright pugnacious.

Paul is a newspaperman. A rare thing, nowadays, perhaps even rarer than a real bookseller, and as much if not more to be mourned for their passing into history. In addition, he is a genuine force for good online, as a contributor and editor at The Slog. He regularly champions, in print and online, the independent bookstore, and is always quick to note any loss in the local scene. He is not shy of the barricades.

I ought to have kept all this in mind as I read, but I'm afraid I assumed a rather alarming subtext to his comments, perhaps not immediately discernible to a less tetchy reader. Mr. Constant has made no secret of his growing impatience with the enemies of new technology, and with the blinkered nostalgia and sentimentality that tends to loudly gasp and sigh and drown-out with the gnashing of teeth, among the print-reactionaries, any and all sensible discussion of books and the ways people now buy and read them. I myself could justly be accused of having contributed something, in my own small way, to thoughtless, gloomy din now surrounding this subject. An increasingly unstable livelihood would seem to have made alarmists of us all, in the bricks-and-mortar book business. Nervous, to put it nicely. However innocent he may have been of any such implication, I thought I heard a shushing in there somewhere.

Now I've had some time to consider, I really must apologize to Paul for reading so far into what he wrote. Hardly gracious of me, under the very appreciative circumstances. I now doubt that he meant any such thing. Rather, he was perhaps, quite rightly, I think, all too gently chiding all of us with some interest in books and bookshops who have made a habit of mourning, for failing so frequently to distinguish the casualties of economics, or in this case real estate, from the general trend to The End of Civilization As We Know It.

It seems, not a sparrow falls, but the faithful see signs and wonders predicting the end of days.

The trend, it's true, at least in so far as my own prospects of a sure and comfortable retirement are concerned, are not frankly what they might once have been. Likewise, I should think, for most booksellers not tethered to a headset and a keypad somewhere in the deep, dark bowels of Amazon, though even there, there must by now be a few unquiet nights. In traditional publishing, at magazines, and newspapers, among stationers -- if such is even still an occupation legal to list on a passport -- anywhere that people earn their daily bread, and digestive-correcting-daily-yogurt, as we tend to all be getting a little older, there is an uncertainty that has made Casandras of us all. I know I am lucky to still work where I do, and intend, should things go entirely to Hell, to pin my hopes to the university's football franchise and will willingly learn to fold tee shirts, if that's what it takes to see me through to my dotage. And if there were a way to shake the loose change from a Kindle or an iPad, believe me, I'm not be too proud to shimmy like my sister, Kate.

The longer I've pondered all this tonight though, the more I've come to share Paul's point of view when it comes to the general tenor of the common bookstore obituary. Even as our old enemy, Borders Books and Music, totters on, hour to hour, refusing even now to pitch into the plot we've been tending with such anticipation for years, we independents, new and used, still rush to the bedside of any fading peddler, however remote from ourselves and what we do, and chorus the "Lacrimosa," loud and long as we can. It's become about as noisy and insincere as the paid ululation at an Irish banker's wake.

The truth is that not all bookstores deserve so many volunteers to unhitch the horses and pull the hearse. As a life-long customer and long-time bookseller, I can tell you that there are, or were anyway, as many or more bad bookstores as good. I've shopped in dozens, in cities far and wide, domestic and foreign, and I've worked in more than one. If no one remembers them now that so many are gone, that is just as it should be. Any public fuss made at the hour of their passing was wasted.

I will not name names, or speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose experience is roughly as mine will remember going into many a seedy, filthy little shop, run by illiterate junk-dealers, full of trash and frequented, as Orwell so perfectly put it in his "Bookshop Memories," by "decayed" persons "smelling of old breadcrusts." Anyone who has had to work in such holes, and for such questionable characters as Orwell's "McKechnie," from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, will admit to a shiver of traumatic recognition when first that novel was read. How these shady, rag-and-bone operations survive has always confused me. Disorganized, dirty, and cluttered with unclaimed stock, how is it their tenants pay the rent?

At the opposite end of the economy are all the fussy little parlor-shops of the snobbish antiquarian kind, where every customer off the common street is eyed disdainfully before being grudgingly admitted by a buzzer that unlocks the bolted dutch-door. When I lived in San Francisco, there was an anonymous commercial hive of these precious dealers; each with his little room, empty of all but a case of carefully soaped leather bindings, each with a tiny white paper-tag, the price so discreet as to be invisible, if no less shockingly inflated when at last deciphered. What trust-fund, or remittance-money, I've always wondered, finances these antisocial aesthetes in their sepulchral little whitenesses?

Fewer now will remember the first iteration of the blandly uniform company shops that once proliferated like mushrooms, from strip-mall to strip-mall across America, but I can still close my eyes and picture the deadly bright cheeriness that pervaded all such places; a matter of policy, devoid of any intent but moving merch come Mother's Day and Christmas. There was a time, in my rude youth, when I was dazzled just to see so many books in one place, but, having been just last year in a surviving example, the empty, antiseptic atmosphere, the underpaid, elderly lady left to run the place with no help but one bored teenager, the smell of desperation and forgetfulness, drove me from the place as from beggar's blanket display of discarded magazines. Too sad.

As to the listing retail giants who once were perfect imitations of the great bookstores, down to the deep stock of backlist fiction, leather armchairs and high shelves, that business model has long since been abandoned as unprofitable -- well before, in fact, the coming of the online merchants and the big box bulk retailers. The first branch of Borders Books and Music I was ever in was beautiful. No other word for it. For some time thereafter, every time I went into one of that company's "superstores," I made note of exactly the same definitive, three volumed edition of a standard life of Otto von Bismarck. One day, it was gone, from all of them, never to return. I would guess this happened not long after the original owners sold their company, or when it was sold again thereafter. Like their slightly healthier twin, Borders now is a just an overdecorated coffee shop, full of cheap children's remainders, loud music and brightly painted mugs, all with inspirational sayings suggestive of the superiority and sexiness of "girls" who read. Sad, really. Sadder still, the independents who would still imitate these now empty imitations with bland corporate signage, and shelves crowded with chotchkies where the books should be.

How many silly little specialty shops have I been in and passed out of speculating if, when next I pass that way, it will be a bagel-dog stand or a pet supply store? Some dear soul's dream of a Kinder Korner or Tea & Titles -- to just, I hope, make up a not too implausible sign above the belled door -- I never wish them ill, but I do wonder that the write-off for their husbands' taxes will prove worth the heartbreak.

I'll stop. Just one last word on the dozens if not hundreds of badly managed, poorly stocked, or overstocked, independents in unlikely and unprofitable places: down blind alleys, up deserted streets, tucked above dance-bars, marooned in remote woody cottages, or dockside at abandoned fun-fairs, and all, all with no better business plan than the way most of us would seem to be able to manage a mortgage. Best to look away.

And yet, for all the unmourned and unknown, there are great bookshops worth frequenting still, in every city at least worthy of the name that I've ever been in, and in many a town too. We still in the trade may be forgiven for making so much of the passing of such as these at least, I should think. I know Paul would agree.

Better of course, as doubtless Mr. Constant would insist, those of us still in the trade put away our hankies and work to keep the best of our bookshops open. He'll do his part. Best we do likewise.