Elegy for Borders, or The Awfully Dramatic Evolution of Bookstores

The end of the Borders Bookstore chain has spurred me on to tell my history of bookstores. It’s one of my pet topics that to my skewed mind seems so important but when I tell people about it (perhaps slightly fanatically) something dislodges behind their eyes and they start drifting and the subject gets changed at the first break in my rant. Is what I’m saying too obvious to mention or too uninteresting to waste anybody’s time? You see, the way I see it, the world of books has just been through a roller coaster ride indicative of huge changes taking place throughout our culture unlike anything ever seen before. Now maybe that’s obvious, but let’s look at the awfully dramatic evolution of bookstores since I was a reader.

THE PRIMORDIAL TIMES

Growing up the situation was bleak. Aside from some few and far between privately owned bookstores, the only bookstores around were in shopping centers and malls. These things were pathetic. They were best seller oriented and their inventories were incredibly narrow. Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton were some of the chains. Locally though there was Encore Books which was bought by Rite Aid in 1981 and was spreading to dozens of stores. They were run like drug stores, but with books and carpeting. I got my first real job there in 1988 and within two years I became a young manager for the chain and quit by the time I was twenty-one  in 1991. These stores were pre-computer. The most complex technology they had was a barcode reader you could use on huge paper lists we got weekly, then you had to hold it up to the mouthpiece of the phone to transmit the data. Other ordering was done person to person on the phone. There was no inventory control. You never knew what was on the shelf or supposed to be on the shelf unless you walked back and looked. If you wanted anything not mainstream it had to be specially ordered. It would take a few days or weeks depending, that is if we could get it at all. We checked the three major book distributors on a microfiche machine with little sheets that were refreshed weekly though the mail. Compared to a similar business today this was the Stone Age. 

Then these small chains surviving happily in their local niches and mall corners felt the shaking, they heard the rumbling, as the dinosaurs came to town. Borders came from the north and brought with it a book buyer’s wet dream: computerized inventories, coffee bars, couches, and every book, newspaper and magazine you ever wanted to get your hands on. They weren’t messing around. These things were palatial. They had escalators, public bathrooms, and what seemed to be an easy dozen helpful employees waiting at customer service counters to help you. They had author readings and security guards and stuff for kids to play with in the kid’s section.  It was like an efficient and intelligent empire had come to rule us and we bookish denizens embraced them as saviors.

Soon following Borders like some kind of parasite or symbiont were the revamped Barnes and Nobles now flexing their own steroidal stores, now grown up and vying with big brother Borders. This competition was very self-conscious and one always got the impression that B & N was somehow shoddier, more corporate and relying on gimmicks. They would also bug you about joining some frequent reader club, getting some card for spurious discounts. But they managed well nonetheless in matching or even one upping Borders. No real problem: it seemed to have given us twice as many bookstores to choose from. And like Lowe’s versus Home Depot, who really cares which it is when you really need something.

But the Encores and their ilk saw the writing on the wall. I remember hearing how some of the Encore higher-ups came to the store I had worked at and they went over to the new Barnes & Nobel that had installed itself in the same shopping center predator-like, a large eater of small stores with nothing above it in the food chain. When the spies came back they were visibly shaken, knowing there was nothing they could do, there was no competing, they were finished. The stores hung on for a few years then they went away quickly one by one like the lights of a city vanishing during a blackout. Then rose the giants across all the land and we enter…

THE RENAISSANCE and GOLDEN AGE   1990-1997

As soon as the first Borders bookstore opened in Philadelphia we were making trips down there like a religious pilgrimage. It was a dream that a place could have so much. Whereas those puny chains wouldn’t have one book by, say, Wittgenstein, Borders had just about everything available, easily a couple of feet on the shelf. We drooled over the selection at the same time sickened over all we couldn’t afford.

And so for years these places became cultural fixtures, places anybody could go and look at books and they were generally tolerant about loitering and using the place as a library and hangout despite the fact that you had to step over people sprawled across the floor and the books became tattered from use. My praise of these places might sound ridiculous, but given the options there just weren’t, and aren’t, many places like it. Sure, Borders was overly hip, conscious of it, but it was like a cultural Amsterdam, a place that flourished through tolerance and liberality. It was as pleasant as retail could get. I’m sure somebody will argue this is at least part of what eventually did them in.

In 1996 I moved into the city and figured working at Borders on Walnut near 18^th Street would be the obvious best job I could have. I got the job but was shocked to find during my interview that they only paid $7 an hour. (I actually got paid a quarter extra for having been a bookstore manager years back.) The very nice woman interviewing me said I wasn’t the first to be shocked, but, she said, it is after all a retail job. What do you expect? She was right, but people who went there to work thought it was such a cool job to have that it surely would pay more. We weren’t just any workers. We knew about books, authors. We were smart! Welcome to the retail world, now punch the clock.

I liked working at Borders. You helped people find books, you shelved books, you ran the registers sometimes. It was not a hard job and you got to be surrounded by tons of books! I got to meet famous authors like James Ellroy and Joyce Carol Oates. There really wasn’t much to complain about—except for the pay of course. There were the usual retail moanings and groanings. This article captures much: the attitudes of people towards Borders employees (they’re “snobs”), but more so the cathartic “manifesto” pictured perfectly and succinctly sums up what all booksellers universally joke about in break rooms. I never felt people took this kind of customer stuff seriously though, it was just venting. But outside of that many of my coworkers found much to complain about. Everybody that worked there was a lower-middle to middle-middle classish guy or girl like me, usually white, usually thinking they were a bit cooler or smarter in a few ways than their co-worker. But we all were more or less the same and we had the same generally liberal politics and wry sense of humor and did the same things when not working. But at times you would think we were serfs in nineteenth century Russia. There was all sorts of politics going on, attempts at unionizing, constant attitudes about “Corporate”. The fact that we weren’t getting paid ten dollars an hour was somehow indicative of everything that’s wrong with capitalism and Western culture. These people actually thought they should be able to make a career out of their bookstore job. I can’t help but think of those days whenever I see something about the current Wall Street protests. Some of the online protesters are pathetic as if they just found out that jobs suck and low-paying retail jobs suck worse. Eventually instead of expecting some kind of revolution that would pay me a livable salary I quit when I found something offering better remuneration. It turned out I left just in time.

THE IRON AGE   1997-PRESENT

What of course ended the reign of the Big Bookstores was the internet. The storm clouds were gathering just before I left and as an added complication a fresh new humongous B & N arrogantly installed itself within a block’s distance. I came back to visit months later and those that were hanging on now looked like the Encore books bosses upon their return from scouting out the competition. Their haggardness was spoken of in term of resentments, the usual talk against the Man, the Corporation as if nothing but some fat cat’s contempt and malevolence for Borders employees was to blame. Really they knew their job was dying, that an era had passed and there would be, could be, no security in the future. No unionizing or ragging about Corporate was going to change the fact that the vocation they had invested their love and dedication in was moribund. Within a year a huge percentage of the staff, way over half, was “let go”. Hardly anybody else stayed around for their own funeral.

The next phase was downsizing. Back in the Golden Age the stores had been expanding, some of them having huge music sections. Their selection—especially of classical music—was impressive. But again the timing was bad. Not only were sites like Amazon growing, but so was the age of digital music, Napster, digital “sharing”. Suddenly Borders were consolidating and in many stores those huge music annexes were closed down, walled over and on the windows were signs seeking to lease that space. Another sign of the Iron Age was an increase in the non-book crap that goes by various corporate names like “sidelines”: games, mugs, stuff teenage girls or Christmas shoppers like to buy, a store within a store.

            Now, as you’ve heard, Borders has died and it feels like the grass has already grown over its grave and its memory has started the descent into a distant memory. If you go to www.borders.com its arch nemesis B & N springs up in victory. It hurts. It’s like reading about a genocide in your homeland, a new race living where your families had for generations. There are articles citing bad decisions by Borders, that it is their own stupid fault, that they could have survived (like B&N) but to me it doesn’t feel that way. I’m curious how well B & N will flourish or if they will come full circle and end up back in the mall between the cell phone store and the store that sells stuff for skateboard kids.

THE FUTURE

I have to confess I haven’t bought a new book in many years. In fact the only one I did buy was at one of those lame Borders express stores and that was only to use up a gift card I had before they closed forever. I’m just too poor for buying new books and I’m completely happy getting most books from the library. If I really want to own a book I’ll either keep an eye out for it at used book stores or order it used on Amazon. Given the option of cheaper books I too go elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean I don’t go into new bookstores and check out stuff and get a coffee.

The future? I suppose the book market could adjust to the electronic book and the internet and things could just level out with a certain number of cruddy B & N stores surviving. At least they have Starbucks in them. (I don’t have it in me to consider and deal herein with the dismal fate of used bookstores, those musty temples that have and continue to serve as sanctified wombs of my psyche.) The tendency is clearly to stay home and do things electronically. Social interactions are increasingly now online and so is book buying. Some day I might get a Kindle or whatever, but at this point I have no use for one. Clearly the online world is all part of the new human animal that’s forming. I am no hugely gregarious person and when I’m not at work I try to spend most of my time here in the basement before the computer. The outdoors? Over-rated. But I still think it’s good—or at least important—to once in a while get out and interact with other human beings. Who will go out in the future and where will they go? I hear the sound of aimless kids clonking skateboards on the steps of a shuttered Borders. That’s the future.

I do have recurring dreams of being back there at Encore books. Some of these dreams are classic anxiety dreams in which I am Joseph K trying to ring up a sale but keep hitting the wrong buttons. Or I’ve locked the store for the night but find a lingering customer I hadn’t noticed and now they won’t leave. Opposite of these dreams are the good ones in which something wonderful has happened in the world: there has been a Renaissance, people missed the Golden Age, they learned what they were missing and there is again a niche for the local bookstore, even if it is a chain. These new stores are on a smaller scale but have learned something about atmosphere from Borders. They are comfortable and play eclectic music. They have an area to easily accommodate author readings. They even have a coffee bar and behind the counter works an underpaid girl with emo glasses that will complain about you in the break room later. It is the perfect blend of the old Encore and Borders at its best. Nothing short of apocalypse could now cause such a return. That is only a dream and I look forward to the next one.