Here is my new Slate piece. Excerpt:
If you don’t like the superstores, it is easy enough to expand your
viewing horizons through other means. Just go to new sections of your
superstore (the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball
is very good, whether or not you like the topic). Stoop or
stretch to slightly uncomfortable levels. Use the stool. Peruse books
randomly. Look at other peoples’ discard piles. Spend more time in
public libraries, which offer many of the best features of indie
bookshops, including informed staff, diversity, and offbeat titles. Of
course, public libraries aren’t exactly atmospherically "cool." The
clientele is often young children, women over 40, and retired men. I
visit five public libraries on a regular basis, and each one makes me
feel old. But they deliver the goods.
The displays (shelves and tables both) in a bookstore do something slightly more subtle than just “expand[ing] your viewing horizons.” Yes, it would expand my horizons to read a very good book on gardening, but much of the time in a bookstore, I’m not looking for a truly random horizon expansion. Instead, I want a high-quality book that is as close as possible in n-dimensional book space to other books I have read and enjoyed. My favorite indies do that exceedingly well.
They’re not entirely unique in this. The superstores did it substantially better than the smaller-store chains they supplanted. With the small stores, it was just too easy to run through their entire stock of the particular topical subgenres I fancied. I’d go to the relevant section, and there really would be nothing that looked interesting. The superstores broke out of that trap just by having more books; with greater diversity, even fairly narrow browses would bring up something new but familiar enough to be intriguing. The truly good indies have the same effect with smaller stock just because the average quality of the items is astronomical.
This isn’t purely an artifact of much larger selection, though. It’s about making the selection browseable. The bad taste of many superstores hurts them here, in that gems are sometimes hidden in shelves full of rubble. Online sources are the same way; it’s just hard to visualize lots of books in a human-parseable way. Who’s doing this right? Good indies, libraries with good purchasers, and Amazon’s collaborative filtering. Those are the sources who work the fine line between new and familiar most effectively.
Oh, and also, good indies are pleasureable in a way that doesn’t depend on reflexive self-image. When the store is physically comfortable, the staff friendly and quirky, and so on, browsing is enjoyable. It becomes a pleasure in itself, almost as much fun as the later reading will be. Again, the superstores are a vast improvement over what came before, and are better than some indies, but still not as good as the best.
Tim G:
Might be McPhee and McPhee–A Sense of Where You Are is still in print.
Jim
One major component of the patrons of public libraries you forgot to mention, who make the atmosphere certainly more – uh – stimulating: hobos. I wonder where they’ll go when all libraries are online?
I wonder how the online venues have affected the total sales of used books. My guess is the market has expanded greatly. How has this affected the sales of new books?
You must live in New York or San Francisco to think like that. I live in Columbus Ohio. Before the arrival of Borders in the late 80s, there were no well stocked book stores in this city. Borders and Barnes and Noble have been a blessing.
bhauth: Should I have looked at the NYT bestsellers and read Harry Potter instead of Man Without Qualities? I think NOT.
The bestseller lists can steer you a lot more wrong than Harry Potter. Plenty of independent bookstore clerks will steer you right back to the Boy Who Lived. Where they — and collaborative filtering — shine is in their ability to help you figure out that Rowling and Musil are good picks within their very different niches. Similarly for geology and basketball — how else could I, an utter ignoramus where those subjects are concerned, hope to learn which popular book on them is “the best?”
You miss the paradox of choice: what we want in a bookstore, particularly when browsing, is a more limited selection, to make it easier to purchase something. Yes, B/N and Borders are better in all sorts of quantitative ways, as well as qualitative (in particular having a place to sit and read some in a book, which overcomes their weakness in having too many books!). But if I know exactly what I want, I go to the internet; if I go to a bookstore looking for “a book” then I want to go to a place that has maybe 3 or 4 books that I want to choose from, and I’ll actually buy one.
Again, the biggies overcome this (and have it both ways) by having things like a “staff picks” section. Your checker might not know Kafka, but if you walk in and say, “so, I’m looking for a good book,” she might point out to you something you’d never have thought of–the best book on gardening, for example!
Lastly, while in many ways I agree with your assessment of the virtues of different types of bookstores, I’d like to know what you think of Miller’s argument that books are in fact special in some way. In what ways should their status as carriers and formers of culture affect the ways in which we traffic in them?
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