Ode to a Bookstore Death

The recent implosion of the Borders bookstore chain has been a slow-motion collapse, a magnification of the fate that so many small bookstores have gone through in much the same way. The difference is that Borders was so much bigger; the causes and the outcome are mostly the same. People are reading less; those who are reading read more in digital form; competition and cost of inventory have made it difficult to compete; competition with other forms of media are taking up people's entertainment dollars and time. It's not good for the industry, particularly those who do not modify what they're doing to accommodate change. Borders failed to do so.

The booksellers at the Borders in Santa Rosa, California, wanted to get some things off their chest before they left. Here's the things they never told you: an ode to a bookstore death.

Image from here; full text can be found here.

Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller

I hate to admit that I like internet memes sometimes, but I thought this one needed to be shared: Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller:


More can be found here, or here.

The Vampire Reflection

For the classic vampire, a mirror could be a source of its downfall: a vampire has no reflection, so a mirror could betray a bloodsucker's hidden nature. As a society goes, professor Peter Logan says that society has used the vampire in literature to mirror its own fears, desires, and social norms. Logan says, "a vampire is a tool with multiple uses, and clearly one that continues to be meaningful in different ways to a new generation," whether it's a fear of paupers, foreign aristocracy, unbridled sexuality, or embodying the conflicted antihero. Twilight is the newest of the societal reflections being consumed whole-heartedly by a new generation of vampire afficianados. Logan points out that the newest entries into the vampire continuum are more directly focused on sexuality — from the TV show True Blood, which includes a lot of vampire sex, to Twilight's boy-meets-girl courtship, they cross a line, where formerly vampires, being dead, weren't consummators of their sexuality, using other ways to express eroticism.

But, are vampires really that big of a genre now, besides the clumsy goths that shop at Hot Topic? If my recent trip of B. Dalton at West Acres is any clue, vampire and vampire-related books compose around half of all books published recently. OK, an exaggeration, but there's some evidence:


The B Dalton Top Twenty Paperbacks wall includes five (that's ¼) novels of the Charlaine Harris "Southern Vampire Mysteries" series.

This table has the sign "Beach Reading" prominently above it -- it includes three vampire books, and one zombie book. When I think girlie beach reads, blood and gore are right up there, you know.

The Young Adult fiction section has some — my daughter bought one of these cartoon-cutout-cover vampire books. Wait — then I turn around, and see this wall of vampire:


No, seriously, it required that many arrows, and I actually think I'm actually short a few. Young adult fiction is filthy with probably quickly- and poorly-written vampire erotica lite. But, hey, you follow where the money goes, and if teen girls aren't spending it on cellphone bling or shoes or whatever, they're going to buy it on mildly lusty vampirotica. Oh, and just to toss in some more undead:


Yup, that's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in the Young Adult Fiction aisle. I thought it odd, but Barnes & Noble (who run B Dalton now) lists it in Young Adult as well. The living dead have never been so popular among tweens as it is now; how does that reflect on our society today?

Updates:

• "And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills." – Neil Gaiman, on the current crop of vampire antiheroes, and how vampires are at their saturation point in literature. Via.
• "The myth seems to be twittering promiscuously to serve all avenues of life, from cereal boxes to romantic fiction."– Guillermo Del Toro, on the vampire's ubiquity in modern fiction. Via the same place as the Gaiman link.

Father's Day Faux Pas

Happy Father's Day everyone! As a dad and a reader, I completely understand books as a way to reward Dad for another year as provider, car-repair-advisor, and master barbecuer (if you don't mind a little stereotyping). Better than another tie or humorous t-shirt anyway. A book I wouldn't recommend is, well, anything to do with Josef Fritzl, the psycho parent who kept his daughter in his basement for 24 years and enjoyed …"intimate"… time with her. That's just my recommendations, however — over in the U.K., however, retail giant Tesco apparently didn't have a problem with daughters buying The Crimes of Josef Fritzl for this Father's Day, until it was brought to their attention and an apology was drafted. From first-hand accounts over at Fark, the book was on a specific Father's Day display in the stores — much to the dismay of sharp-eyed shoppers, but what about those shelf-stockers who put the books out? This didn't happen just at Tesco, but also at W.H. Smith, a large bookselling chain in the U.K. I can understand big-box retailer drones not watching what they're tossing on the shelves, but I'd expect more from a retailer who prides themselves on being a leading example of the book retail industry.

The Daily Mail shows the book on the display, bearing the same "half price" sticker as the rest of the books on the promotional displays, so it wasn't a case of "oops, wrong book on the shelves." Special displays are often paid spots, akin to advertising, where a publisher ensures their big promotions are on the endcap or the table at the entryway where they're likely to get more attention. I dug around to see if Smith's was the one in charge of Tesco's book section, like the K-Mart/Waldenbooks arrangement, but everything I found called the two retailers competitors. Now, I'd hope Harper Collins would be smart enough not to specifically recommend this book for Father's Day, but I find it very suspicious that two different retailers, without shared corporate control, would place the same inappropriate book in the Father's Day display. Somebody — publisher, distributor, retailer — got in their head that they needed a recent, hot-button, True Crime title in their dad's display, because dad's like true crime books, you see, so what have we got? Aw, the book is even about a dad, that works great!

Amazon Distribution Center

For as huge and amazingly efficient as Amazon is, there's no robotic connection to getting your purchases into a box and shipped out. People in high-visibility vests walk the aisles, pulling books and putting them on carts — and how those employees are handled is the source of Amazon's efficiency, not some technological shoehorn.


via.

Warehouse Abandoned: Free Books

A used bookseller in the UK, apparently hit by hard times, walked off and left their warehouse unlocked and available to anybody who walked by. People, of course, took advantage of this opportunity, and began running off with books by the armload. It doesn't appear to be illegal - the books were abandoned by the bookseller, and the owner of the warehouse has invited anybody to help in the cleanup by removing the books for free. Millions of book-lovers around the world are lamenting: "why can't this happen somewhere near me!?"

Warehouse I Wish I Owned

When the Gotham Book mart closed, its inventory of rare and antiquiarian books were bought by their landlord and stored in a Connecticut warehouse— oh, how there are days I wish I could accidentally run across such a place in my travels and buy everything that I could carry. Those books have sat, waiting for action, for almost four years now, but something surprising has happened: purchased by the landlord as partial payment for lost rents for a tenth of their value, the Gotham's former inventory has just been donated to the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Lucky stiffs.

Fail: Bookstore Fun

I'm a fan of humorously-captioned photos (I'm an expert at making LOLCats), but it turns out that even a bookstore can fail entertainingly:

Costco's Book Buyers

A quasi-internal magazine for the Costco network of big-box retailers features their book-buying department†. It doesn't give many huge insights, other than verification that big publishers have the clout and the need to bend over backwards for a company like Costco. On the other hand, it's a nice revelation that the Costco book buyers still do it the old-fashioned way: reading galleys and placing individual orders.

† The magazine has a stupid interface; either figure out the navigation at the top, or download the PDF here.

Le Bal Des Ardents' Book Archway

Let's say you run a bookstore in a rather nondescript, uninspiring storefront on a sidestreet prone to graffiti. How do you make a memorable presentation, using what you have on hand? Use books.


The bookstore is Le Bal Des Ardents, specializing in alternative, fringe, art, and erotic works. You can stop by there if you happen to find yourself in Lyon, France.


More photos: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] — photo above, via.

Marxism Selling Well

In a move to make any economist's skull well up with blood and burst, the bookselling market shows that books by Karl Marx are selling well during this time of capitalistic collapse. Yes, a book by the communist writer, who advocated ownership of social collateral by the government so its profits can be shared by all, has fallen into the public domain and is being published by a private entity, who is seeing his profits grow due to book sales within a network of privately-run middlemen that ensure the book appears on the bookshelves of private businessowners, whose operations are being muted by the proliferance of big-box booksellers and online bookstores. If this trend continues, and more and more of American income is devoted to the purchase of Karl Marx' revolutionary tales of class inversion, we might just turn this economic downturn around.

A Knightly Book-Lover

Christopher Morley, On Visiting Bookshops:

"It is a curious thing that so many people only go into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book. Do they never drop in for a little innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some knightly souls who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf—why not ride up, fling her across your charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly, you book-lovers! "

(Via.)

Book Love At First Sight

Christopher Morley, On Visiting Bookshops:

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the book-lover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too. He sees an enthusiastic review—very likely in The New Republic—and says, with great scorn, “I read the book three months ago.” There are even some perversions of passion by which a book-lover loses much of his affection for his pet if he sees it too highly commended by some rival critic. "

(Via.)

All The Books In The World

Visiting "All The Books In The World," a dusty, book-stuffed storefront, can be a remarkable experience:


This is a translation of a Croatian short comic about a magical bookstore that has a copy of every book in the world. Except one, of course. The purchase is far less about the book's contents, and more about what the book means to the reader -- which is the truth about most bookstore purchases to begin with. (via)

The Dust Test

When looking for a partner and lover, there's some things to look for -- Erika Nanes, in particular, needs a guy who can appreciate the used book store. The Dust Test is devised to check if somebody has an affinity for the old bookstores; if one isn't into the old, dusty books and digging through boxes, it's a good sign they won't last long as a partner. It's telling in the kind of activity used-book-shopping is: it's enjoyable as a couple. Sporting things don't require both to participate (especially if seen as a 'guy thing'), organized groups aren't always couples events, but shopping for books is better when you can go, "hey, come look what I found!", much like love for antiquing the wifey and I share.

"The Dust Test" is part of a series at Pop Matters called "Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book" -- the whole series is a good read if you're a fan of old books and used bookstores.

(the mug can be found at the LA Library Foundation's website)

Old Books Wanted: 1939

This ad was from the 10 November 1939 issue of Radio Guide, although American Book Mart was a regular advertiser and this particular ad ran quite a bit. Big money was promised for relatively common books; the prices, no doubt, were for pristine first editions, but the promise of selling your books to a dealer for real money during that tenuous Post-Depression-Pre-WWII time period was probably an intriguing offer. Since there's no good indicator of what the price is for, there's one point I find very interesting: "Tamerlane & Other Poems" from Edgar Allen Poe was first printed in 1827, and would fetch $5,000 (an enormous amount of money for the time), about the same "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Venus & Adonis" -- both of which were first printed hundreds of years before Poe. "Tamerlane" was originally published in a very small run, and few people believed it existed when Poe printed his second edition; first verified copies of the small book were not discovered until fifty years later. For all Poe's popularity and such rarity, $5,000 was a bargain for American Book Mart -- there are only 12 copies in the world today.

While the list is almost identical to any English professor's "greatest hits" list, the McGuffey's Primer is an interesting inclusion. It's also a relatively recent book, for the 1930s, and as a schoolbook it was published in enormous numbers, remaining in print (and in educational use) for years. Even today, McGuffey's schoolbooks are considered somewhat-useful in education. American Book Mart is probably looking for a first edition, about a hundred years' old at the time, and were willing to pay top dollar for it. They must know something I don't -- but it's going to make me look closer at primers when I'm out shopping for books.

The ad offers people the opportunity to get a copy of ABM's full catalog, for fifteen cents, before they start shipping off their books and expecting a bale of dollar bills to arrive in the mail. From what I can tell, it was quite a book on its own, hardcover and over a hundred pages -- and, whaddayaknow? Antiquarian booksellers today are offering old American Book Mart catalogs for sale as well.

In Hot Pursuit of Book Thieves

I have not much to say about this, except to recommend you read it: Paul Constant writes about working in a book store and dealing with shoplifters. People shoplift from a book store? Barnes & Noble has those security gates for a reason, you know.

Short and Free Books Bring New Readers

Since I'm a small-time publisher, this topic is of interest to me: how do people learn about new books? When I say 'new,' I mean new to the reader, not just recently-street-dated books. When I think back to some of my more favorite books, they came from a small number of sources:

• Browsing a bookstore;
• Recommended in school;
• Recommended by friends.

So, how much of this is influenced by a publisher's advertising and review copies? The first one is probably the only one -- as near as I can tell, recommendation by authorities and acquaintances are the two primary ways everyone I know reads. While reading a review may have been handy, I can't think of a book I've bought based solely on a review. The 'browsing' one has gained a huge foothold in online stores like Amazon: you don't have to rely on what can fit into a cramped storefront or Borders' bottom line. Since online stores hold a heck of a lot more than retail, there's more opportunities to find something new.

So, how does a book improve its chances of being recommended? Neil Gaiman says free copies is a huge influencer -- the low risk to the reader lets them be more adventurous in what they read. If a couple people who got a free copy recommend a couple new readers, in theory the marketer has improved their customer base. A lot of publishers sell their remaindered books to discount chains, but we keep them here and send them out as review copies and, from time to time, do a mass donation to libraries around the country. While this reduces our bottom-line profit, one copy in a library has a chance of passing through dozens of hands -- or it might be sold at a FOL sale for four bits to someone who might not have otherwise bought it even for $2 at a discount store. Might those copies end up on eBay? Yeah, probably; but, again, if they're that valuable, our sales are better. If not, some eBayer is going to buy it for a buck plus shipping, again reducing their risk in the chance of reading something crappy. Big publishers, the tightest of publishers, probably spend a buck to print a hardcover with a dustjacket; do they give them away for free? Not a chance. Small publishers like us spend a couple bucks per TPB , but everything we've seen is that you get better exposure by giving away $500 in free copies than a dinky, two-color advertisement in the back of a magazine for $500. (by the way, if you're wondering how to get a free copy from a publisher, your best best is to ask -- you might have to claim to be a reviewer, but to avoid being called a liar make sure to write a review at Amazon or your blog when you're done).

That possible risk for readers is also a driving force behind the increase in shorter books. Although, from looking at the reasoning evidenced in the NPR story, the problem isn't that books are getting smaller, but that publishers have been driving for big-bucks with huge books. Go look at a paperback from the eighties or earlier: they're in relatively large print on small pages, printed all the way out to the edge of the paper, and they still can only hit 200 pages. And they used to release darn near everything in paperback form: novels, biographies, business advice, joke books. In an attempt to increase revenues from books, publishers started spending more money on acquiring writers who produce larger books that they can charge more for. And they did away with the small-format paperback, charging twice as much for the same content in a slightly larger shape. Readers, in return,balk at the time and money to devote to reading a $19.99, 550-page book when they would gladly have spent $4.99 on a 250-page book for an afternoon of reading fun. So, to improve flagging revenue, publishers give larger advances to proven writers, and get the writers to produce more and more....to which readers responds, "too long, too expensive." I'd say this is a balancing out of that cycle -- readers want to be entertained, and you can't be entertained if you're afraid of how you're going to afford it.

The Town Cleaners Bookstore

Keith Phipps wrote a little post about the used book store he once frequented in Chicago. You can kinda see the bookstore's real name on a green sign hanging in the window, but the big sign above the door read 'town cleaners'. Really, I like the unofficial name: it ties a business to the neighborhood's history. Newer developments often do this as a way to hide the huge change made on the landscape -- the spot where Toys R Us and Office Depot in Fargo sits is called "Rabanus Plaza" -- because on that corner once sat a little farm house, occupied by the Rabanus family. Now, cozy and homey that corner ain't, all coated with pavement and dominated by an abandoned Krispy Creme franchise. This bookstore, however, at least gives people a way to identify where the bookstore is: "Remember where the town cleaners was? It's there." A bookstore deserves to be a part of the neighborhood; someday it might be remembered as, "remember that bookstore in the town cleaners building? That's where the sushi buffet is now."

Bookseller Tickets

Back in the day, independent booksellers would put little gummed labels inside the cover to identify their shoppe as the origin. Hang Fire Books has graciously included examples in their blog, along with instructions on how to remove them (and other gummed accoutrements added to books after publishing). While I haven't seen a lot of these, myself, I've seen similar labels on old 78rpm record albums -- I'll bet the two practices are related.