I believe in bookstores in part because I believe in pluralism. So though I’m drawn to bookstores because of my nostalgia, there’s more to it than that. We need as many opportunities as possible to encounter books in the wild, offline, books we can pick up and be surprised by, books in spaces we can mill about and share with others. We need indie booksellers, but at this point, we need all the physical bookstores we can get.
#Choosy kids.com full
I’d leave with a book under my arm, pages full of perspectives I never would have encountered otherwise.īarnes & Noble may not have such a radical and diverse cache of books, but it does offer the possibility of discovery in a way that algorithms and screens simply cannot. These probably aren’t the books that Amazon would pick for me, which is precisely why I loved spending time in the small, stuffed aisles of this store. I’m a mom with a minivan, and I’m an Anglican priest. It’s the kind of place where I might come across a book on queer contributions to the labor movement or anarchist movements around the world. I used to live near a self-described “radical” bookstore in Austin. In brick-and-mortar stores we can quite literally bump into ideas we’d never otherwise find. Amazon’s algorithms market books to us, but they rarely lead us to those hidden treasures that, by serendipity, we happen upon in a bookstore. The Barnes & Noble resurgence is a victory, not only for us nostalgic ’90s kids but for readers in general. Harris wrote, “Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble.” And book sales in particular - as opposed to its other offerings, like gifts and games - are up a whopping 14 percent from before the pandemic started. In April, Elizabeth Harris reported for The Times that against all odds, Barnes & Noble’s sales are up. So now, 20 years late, I’d like to officially apologize to Barnes & Noble. Looking back, I didn’t know what an embarrassment of riches we had: so many brick-and-mortar bookstores that I could be choosy and arbitrarily snobby about them. The Barnes & Noble across town was the strait-laced store with collared shirts and matching name tags. But my co-workers had tattoos and wore ratty T-shirts.
Of course, we too worked for a corporate multinational chain. Even when I worked at Borders, as ridiculous as it sounds now, we thought of ourselves as the edgy bookstore in town. I championed the small, indie mom-and-pop store (and I still do!). It’s strange because at one point, I saw the big-box bookstore as the enemy. They represent not just an aesthetic preference but a way of being.Īnd this is why I find myself, to my surprise, cheering even for Barnes & Noble. My wise friend Greg said, “Bookstores are like the best parties: You may discover a new friend or join an unexpected conversation with a simple turn of your head.” And everyone agreed that they love the smell.īookstores, like libraries, are bastions of materiality, of physical spaces, of touchable, turnable pages. Friends described the feeling of discovery and exploration, the calming serenity of being surrounded by words and ideas. In a recent very informal and unscientific poll of my friends, I found that many of us love and miss physical bookstores. What were we supposed to do with a night out now? So when stores began closing down all over America, we were both bereaved. I fell for bookstores and for my husband at the same time. We’d sip our coffee and read each other interesting paragraphs from books we found. I’d find one I’d never heard of and scan the back cover. I’d pick up a title I’d heard about and sit in the aisle reading a chapter. We’d move slowly, meandering through the religion section, the memoirs, fiction, poetry, history. When my husband and I were dating, our go-to date was to get coffee and walk around bookstores together.
I came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Amazon was mostly known as a river in South America, phones were not smart and bookstores were everywhere. My adoration for bookstores is, without a doubt, partly nostalgic. Then there’s the big-box gleam of long, straight rows, bright and dustless, with a café and a kids section you can get lost in. There are the small indie stores, quaint, cozy and scrappy. There are the musty, quirky ones with haphazard piles and dusty rows, usually with both used and new books. Bookstores, like wines, have different notes, different flavors, each one distinct.
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