My Bookstore

Key Takeaways

Light-engagement read; no marginalia to synthesize. The 54 highlights below stand on their own as the source’s argument.

An anthology edited by Ronald Rice in which 84 writers each profile their favorite independent bookstore. Across the essays a single brief recurs: the indie bookstore as the anchor of a community — “the cultural soul of a large community,” what one contributor calls “what’s left of The Commons” — set against the frictionless convenience of Amazon and the Kindle. The physical book as a “material artifact… to be held and smelled” is defended repeatedly, alongside the argument that where you spend money is a civic act, not just a consumer one. Recommended to Kyle at Dog Eared Books (a fitting acquisition — a bookstore book bought at a bookstore).

Connections

• What I Found in a Thousand Towns — Dar Williams’ case that local gathering places knit a town together; the same “proximate space” argument the bookstore essays make, and both flag the big-box hollowing of Main Street.
• Our Towns — the Fallowses’ town-by-town survey; My Bookstore’s contributors echo their lament over “the crushing sameness of the spaces between cities and towns,” with the independent store as a marker of a place worth living in.
• How To Read a Book — Adler & Van Doren on reading as an active discipline; the counterpart to My Bookstore’s defense of the book as a physical object “to be held and smelled, containing language that can be touched, and underlined with an actual pencil.”

Highlights

“I can still remember the incomparable thrill of coming upon that elusive number eleven or seventeen in my favorite series, the one I’d been searching for for years, now magically there, where it hadn’t been the week before, filling me with wonder at the way the world worked, how you had to wait to the point of almost unbearable longing for the good stuff in life. (It would take five decades and the emergence of Amazon.com, with its point-and-click, to vanquish that primal wonder.)”

“We take every independent bookstore’s failure personally. Surely there’s something we might have done. We do not hate e-books purchased online — well, OK, some of us do — but we owe our careers, at least my generatoin of writers does, to the great independents, so many of them long gone now. Those that remain gamely continue to fight the good fight, even as customers increasingly use their stores as showrooms, their employees for their expertise, and their sales-tax dollars to fund their schools, but then go home and surrender to the online retailer’s chilly embrace. They point and click, and in this simple act, without meaning to, undermine the future of the next generation of writers and the one after that.”

“I wish that unpretentious coffee shop was still around, but — like so many things — it dissolved into a procession of dull establishments whose names no one could remember.”

“Customers loved it when staffers hand-selected books for them and explained why they thought the choice was a good fit.”

“This bookstore is the cultural soul of a large community. It’s the place to take writing classes, learn languages, attend conferences, participate in book clubs and speakers’ series, and, if you are a teenager, Twitter-talk (whatever that is). Elaine and Bill Petrocelli work with schools, community organizations, and restaurants, they do fund-raising for many causes, and they have a partnership with Dominican University so that students can receive credit for classes and conferences. Their clientele is so loyal that Amazon and the chains have not been able to put them out of business, and, let me tell you, they have tried.”

“In keeping with the owners’ concept of a bookshop as both a community center and a tabernacle of ideas, Politics & Prose had been among the first stores in Washington to sponsor author events, nurturing personal and, usually, amiable conversatoins between writers and readers.”

“Still, knock wood, P&P continues to thrive by dint of a smart, enthusiastic staff and fiercely loyal customers.”

“When I first moved to Rhinebeck it had a new age bookstore that also sold pendants and amulets, oil by the vial, and handmade instruments. Across the street was another bookstore that sold potboilers and Christian literature. They sat facing each other for a number of years until one became a real estate company and the other became a real estate company. If you wanted a book, you had to drive to another town.”

“A ‘text’ existing only on a screen and in the mind is not, to me, a book. To me, it is not enough that a book is thought realized in language; it must also be language further realized in print on paper pages bound between covers. It is a material artifact, a thing made not only to be seen but also to be held and smelled, containing language that can be touched, and underlined with an actual pencil.”

“A part of the life of each one is my memory of the bookstore where I brought it and of the bookseller who sold it to me.”

“A part of my economic life thus becomes a part of my social life. For that I need actual people in an actual place in the actual world.”

“The odd thing is, he won. He won, in this time of woe, in the age in which children seem mostly interested in playing games with their thumbs, when reading is a quaint notion from the dusty halls of antiquity, when public funding for libraries is being scraped to the white bone, Jake Reiss is winning, because he is making a dollar by making good books and authors available to people who love to read and love the people who make it a pleasure, and because, late in his own life, he fell in love with books himself.”

“I feel at home here, and I am honored that my books are on these shelves, but as I sat down to describe why I liked the place, I found myself not with a list of things it is but things that it is not. It does not have comfy chairs, or cozy reading areas, but nor do I have to try and think over the roar of construction of a double-chocolate frappacin…frabucin…oh, to hell with it. There are, as near I can tell, no charging stations or other portals for laptops, though I am sure there is a drop or two somewhere around. I am pretty sure there is no Wifi…Wyfy… you know what I mean. You do not bring laptop to Jake’s, though you can read a newspaper, standing up.”

“But until I first set foot in Ketchum in 1985 I had never seen a bookstore so crucial to the well-being of a community as Chapter One. And our community itself knows that its ‘common resource,’ more than the store itself, is the store’s owner and manager, Cheryl Thomas, a spiritual icon for decades in our valley.”

“BookPeople is where browsing earned its golden spurs as American pastime. I often loiter in the store for hours, flipping through merchandise, scribbling down notes from a book I don’t want to buy. Never has one of the stores 125 employees reprimanded me. Loitering is part of the atmosphere. Clerks encourage me to graze both book-filled floors. Loitering is part of the flavor. Whenever I get blue, I take a drive to Lamar Boulevard, park my convertible, and seize the universe of knowledge in its shelves.”

“If elementary school libraries were half this fun, America’s literacy rate could be higher than those of Norway and Denmark.”

“What this avenue of American industry needs, then, is not so much someone interested in selling a few books, but rather someone interested in selling a few books (and maybe a few gift items from a carefully curated stock) as a means of saving civilization.”

“Among the many gifts he gave his children — and, by extension, my children — was this rule: If they ever found themselves together in a bookstore, he would buy them whatever they wanted. The rule, importantly, did not extend to toy stores or ice cream shops or pony stables. Just bookstores, just whatever they wanted. We’ve raised our children this way, and it is wonderful. It wears on the credit card, true, but children’s books tend to be less expensive, and the benefit of having your kids think there’s little difference between a bookstore and a public library — well, like our credit card company says: priceless.”

“People in a good bookstore use their feet differently: there is never a full step as we are reluctant to drift too fast past the anthologies of fiction, some familiar some new.”

“I love that the store sits between a toy shop and a liquor store. How great is that? It’s also on the same busy block as a bank, a dry cleaner, a health food shop, and a grocery store, which means that I walk by all the time. I can rarely resist the urge to stop in, even when I have no money to spend and no time to browse.”

“I knew that under its new ownership, my beloved bookstore would thrive rather than merely survive. And it has. It’s more vibrant than ever. There’s an elegant new logo — hand-drawn by A.C. Harkness, an incredibly gifted artist who works at the store — and a new awning. There are newly designed bookmarks, tote bags, and T-shirts. There are more books in stock, more events, and even more customers.”

“Something about the illicitness of slipping a light back on after everyone is asleep makes reading all the more pleasurable.”

“It’s booksellers like these — booksellers who read broadly and thoughtfully and have opinions they love to share — who help new literary voices find an audience. Without their support — hand-selling my novels and keeping them front of store — I might well be back practicing law. If they disappear, our choices as readers will narrow and our lives as well.”

“Statisticians may tell you that people cluster around jobs or transit or high-speed Internet, but some cluster around more important things. Like bookstores.”

“Books are things that you talk about. Things you need to talk about, because the more you talk about books, the more you understand the people you’re talking about books with. It’s as simple as that.”

“All of us, not just writers, are susceptible to our surroundings. There are plenty of places that make me feel tense, lonely, and glum — hospital waiting rooms, most fast-food restaurants, all malls, especially the Mall of America. And there are a handful of places that make me feel safe and relaxed, unguarded — like myself, but maybe more interesting, more optimistic, more open to possibility.”

“Nancy also has a rare capacity for attention. When she greets someone — in the store, or elsewhere — she comes to a physical and emotional pause. She takes you in. She wants to know how you are and what you’ve been reading.”

“There is no coffee bar. Before the last expansion, Nancy asked her customers if they wanted books or coffee. One hundred percent voted for more books.”

“Quail Ridge Books & Music, which Newsweek recently named on of the great bookstores in the country, has been phenomenally successful. Even in these hard economic times, the store is holding its own. But as the years pass, and the culture shifts, the book business and bookstores have become increasingly fragile. What if there was no Quail Ridge Books & Music? An unthinkable question, but I’ve heard many people ask it. If we did not have this magnificent bookstore, I and countless others would lose a refuge, and intellectual home. Since this particular store is so vital to our community, there’s a good chance it will continue for decades, in one form or another. But the possibility of an ending makes the existence of any living thing — and bookstores are live entities — more precious. So read, Reader, read. And buy books, from stores.”

“Sometimes there’s a reading downstairs, and it might include a short concert of blues music, a heated political argument, or cascades of delirious laughter. There are political meetings, book-group meetings, and the more informal meetings that make up the texture of daily life in a place worth living in. The work of the bookstore is, ultimately, to create that kind of space.”

“There is a lesson here. I think stores should be well organized and have self-contained sections where you can find your philosophy books, your nonfiction, your books about fast cars, on and on. But there is equal, and possibly greater, benefit, in having these sections closely intermingling, or even overlapping.”

“Double thanks, Eagle Harbor Book Company, for putting that few extra bucks I spend by not shopping online or at a box store right back into the community, for bringing your resources into our classrooms, for sponsoring local events, for championing local authors, for encouraging book clubs, for providing your community with a venue for discourse and discussion.”

“When you know a little, it is easy to assume you know a lot.”

“At Watchung Booksellers there’s a daily rhythm to the life of books. Kids are running around — a bookstore like this is where kids are first brought into the wider world of reading.”

“I’ve often wondered how a store that seems to have been made for browsing can make a profit.”

“And if my wife is sometimes dismayed by the quantity of those books, which she is, I tell her it could be worse. Rather than collecting books and spending the bulk of my free time reading them, I say, I could be buying motorcycles or exotic pets. This is usually justification enough, but it’s nice to add that those same books have been helping to make me the man that I am.”

“Maybe what bookstores are feeling now is not only a loss of market share, but also a loss of power or influence. Yet there are these old bookstores all over the world that we fetishize for their history and quirkiness — like Shakespeare & Co. but maybe people love the idea of these places more than they love shopping there. But what is required for that system to work is booksellers who know their books, who are willing to stock obscure things, and writers who are voraciously well-read, who are not just reading the most fashionable books. Maybe MFA culture really has imperiled that, because I still read what writers recommend, but it’s usually people in their program, or it’s people you read about in the New York Times. It’s very odd or rare that you read an author recommend really oddball things.”

“Of course, Barnes & Noble came and gobbled the indie stores up. Of course, Barnes & Noble then left a few years later, leaving Hoboken with just one used-books store, which wasn’t enough.”

“At a time when other businesses are shutting down and when more and more people are resorting to the solitary path of online ebook buying, these are stores that are all about enhancing the community and preserving the history and business of real typeface-on-paper works of art, while also looking ahead to the transitions of the future. There is a lot of proof that people still love real bookstores and real books and those who read them…People, books, conversations about books, readings from books.”

“No Kindle or Amazon or national chain will ever substitute for this place where everybody knows your name. We shop local. We are local. We’re proud to call ourselves regulars.”

“We often hear the term ‘bricks-and-mortar’ stores used as if such stores have been relegated to the dust-bin of history. Who needs an old-fashioned bookshop when it’s so easy to shop in cyberspace? The more our culture becomes disconnected by the age of ‘instant digital communication,’ the more we feel the loss of the personal, the human-contact experience. Many of us are beginning to realize what a great loss it would be not to have a place like Hickory Stick. The use of mobile reading devices has become a fact of modern life, and they certainly have their place. But we believe that the book as a tactile object with beautiful graphics, binding, color, and deckle-edged paper will be with us for some time to come. A bookstore…is also a thing of beauty to behold, with its intelligent, friendly staff and a wonderful display of inviting books of all kinds. The bricks-and-mortar bookstore continues to be an irreplaceable part of what makes life better for us all.”

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” (Anna Quindlen)

“In this age, when the future of bricks-and-mortar stores seems uncertain, this store illustrates precisely how the Internet fails. Never, while Googling someone or purchasing some obscure work, did I meet another writer or editor or learn about some new journal or anthology.”

“The indie bookstore is what’s left of The Commons. It’s the one place people can still come with journals in hand and not feel self-conscious. The one place where veterans and punk college students and extreme sports fanatics and broken-hearted writers all mingle under the same roof, unafraid to discuss ideas. What kind of country have we become that this is it? That this is what remains? No Amazonia of the Kindled tentacles can possibly take that place.”

“Here’s a universal truth: The really great places are often the ones that are a drag to get to, and they have been able to remain great places for exactly that reason. Try going to the Spear-O-Wigwam ranch in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming (rutted dirt road straight up) or Isle au Haut off the coast of Maine (you arrive on the mail boat.)”

“In a country where reading is less and less valued, City Lights is a literary oasis. Books are important here, and so are their readers. City Lights knows its customers, and that, to me, is what makes an independent bookstore great.”

“Which do you love more: books or bookstores? That’s something to contemplate these days, as the resources for both appear to be receding from us.”

“The fact that I can have a bookstore and pay the bills in a town of this size, despite Amazon and Kindle, is amazing! I think we read because we want to be connected — and that’s one service of the independent bookstore. People do love to make a personal connection with a book — and this is a place to connect.”

“I readily admit that I have outsized envy for those who live in quaint towns with a charming main street — the pizza place where you’re greeted by name, a bookstore whose owner holds behind the counter new releases she knows you’ll love, the coffeehouse where they start pouring your cup as you open the door.”

“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.”

“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.”

“‘Amazon isn’t bad,’ a bookseller of my acquaintance said on Twitter, two or three years back, ‘Monoculture is bad.’”

“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.”

“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.”