In last week’s column I registered the losing streak of the bricks-and-mortar bookstore. I noted that people who say they just love old books and the feel of them in their hands seldom actually buy them, that such pronouncements are kisses of death for a bookseller in a bookshop. I marked the loss of independent bookshops due to Covid-19 and how that affects communities. Bookstore-closings stress libraries in terms of labor, budget and shelf-space. Parents struggle to find healthy, cheap G-rated entertainment for themselves and their families. Children who deserve safe spaces in and between school, home, work and playground are stranded.
Several new books depict the detriment to us in detail. Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking Press) highlights that bookshops were once highly valued gathering places, repositories of community goodwill that were the wellsprings that nourished writers, readers, parents and librarians. James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, too (yes, that James Patterson), penned The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians. Their interlocutors asserted that bookshops level the playing field and counter the movement across America to ban books. James Patterson makes so much money that he put up $500,000 to birth a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, that wedded the American Booksellers Association to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation and that gave $500 bonuses to bookshop owners and employees.
Additional factors are killing independent bookshops. One is our dumbing down. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was Richard Hofstadter’s sweeping takedown of hostile attitudes of Americans to ideas. Think of the marked upsurge of book-bans across America and the nonsense spread about C.R.T. (Critical Race Theory). Now run that through Hofstadter’s gloriously appropriate summary of McCarthyism: an era characterized by the “atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility.” Our resulting ignorance is useful to felonious presidential candidates, to mortgage lenders, to religious crusaders, to scam artists, to conspiracy theorists and to self-help gurus. A second is the rise and fall of mall-based bookselling chain-stores. B. Dalton opened in 1966 and had bookstores in 43 states by 1980. Waldenbooks began to rent books in the 1930s and to sell them in 1962; by the 1980s they had over 730 outlets. Then superstores supersized further by the addition and sale of non-book sidelights such as CDs, DVDs, puzzles, coffee-mugs, bumper-stickers and other kitsch. Borders Books and Barnes & Noble opened in 1971. Book-of-the-month clubs, Oprah’s Book Club, books-on-tape, the Kindle--the “independent bookstore” became a thing by its negation.
Then came Amazon, in 1995, selling only books but so quickly becoming such a juggernaut that book sales are now a small fraction of their overall sales but yet constitute roughly half of all book sales in America. With a net worth near three trillion dollars but an abysmal record as a bookseller, Amazon kills the spirit for bibliopoles, and they messed up what was a perfectly good on-line selling venue: abebooks.com. Thirty million titles. At least as many mistakes of edition, bibliography, publication date, condition, collation and pagination. A fella oughta write a letter.
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