The Ghost of a Big-Box Bookstore (Wandering Around Inside What Used To Be A Thriving Borders)

I had to take my teenage son to Pearl Vision the other day, to get a new pair of glasses and renew his contacts prescription. The Pearl he has been going to for ages is located in a less-than-prosperous mall about twenty minutes drive from our house. What I had forgotten was that this particular store was next to what had formerly been a thriving Borders. In fact, the last time we had visited that particular Borders, it was Christmas time, and the store was jammed with customers. There were long lines at the coffee bar and checkout counters, and the scent of cappuccino floated in the air.

Now, though, it was winter 2012, and we had heard that this Borders had long since closed. We were therefore surprised, as we approached the mall entrance through the sanded brown snow of mid-winter, to spy a large sign proclaiming, generically, BOOKSTORE!  Dan and I glanced at each other, and said, "Really? Bookstore?" We peered in through the windows, mother and son, squinting with anticipation against the glare of the tinted glass. "Huh," Dan said, after a moment. There did, indeed, appear to be books displayed for sale inside the store. "Amazing," he said. And so we decided to check it out once we were finished at Pearl. Dan and I have both been feeling a bit sad these days about the fate of bookstores, since we are both types who have always hung out a lot at bookstores, caressing the physical books, checking out the staff recommendations, reading magazines, and drinking coffee. We are both fans of big-box bookstore coffee bars, where we can sit and peruse our latest purchases, and talk about them. So once my son had been fitted for his new glasses, we wandered around the corner, and entered this unbranded "Bookstore."

The space had a very strange feel to it, walking in. A lot of the old Borders build-out had been removed and replaced with industrial metal shelving. There was a fair amount of this metal shelving arrayed around the floor, and there were actually quite a number of books, although not really enough to fill the enormous floor space that the old Borders had encompassed. And so the space echoed as you walked in. I don't think I had realized until that moment how completely over-built some of the old big-box bookstores had been, but of course in their hey-day they were also selling a lot of music CDs and videos, physical products that, like physical books, are rapidly being replaced in whole or in part by tablets and digital downloads.

I guess I had wanted physical books to be in a different category from videos or music, and to be a little more resistant to being replaced by the digital competition. And perhaps they are. I certainly still prefer to read a physical book. A lot of people do. And you want a real book, at least a paperback if not a hardcover, if you are giving a gift. I was therefore heartened to read last week on Twitter that Amazon may be making forays into bookstores through a distribution deal with a major publisher. But then, over the weekend, the New York Times ran a long essay by Julie Bosman speculating about whether Barnes and Noble, the last big-box bookstore standing, still had a future, and if so, what that would look like. Smaller stores, perhaps, and more non-book merchandise?

At any rate, on this particular day, walking through this reverberating space of the former Borders, it was hard even to remember how lively and vigorous big-box bookstores like this one had been not so long ago. In fact, that last Christmas that I'd shopped there--was it '09 or ''10?--I remember that, being short on time, I had bought nearly all of my Christmas gifts there: books, music, gift cards. How times had changed. And how rapidly they had changed. When these technological transformations hit, they hit hard don't they? Think of the carnage wrought by digitization upon photo developing, newspaper classifieds, pay phones, land lines, road maps, movie rental stores, even wearing wristwatches for goodness sake.

In addition to books on metal shelving, someone had set up a small stage in this new generic bookstore, surrounded by chairs for a modest audience. It looked like the new store had been doing some sort of readings, probably for children in the afternoon? Or perhaps readings for independently published authors? I couldn't tell, though I didn't see any Indie-looking books. Rather, the stage and its surrounding chairs had more the look of entertainment the mall was bringing in to try and drum up some foot traffic on the weekends. Malls are under their own sort of pressure these days, from online retailers, as more and more of our lives go digital, and about a third of the mall stores appeared to have closed since our last visit.

There was also something in the bookstore that looked like a coffee bar, though upon closer scrutiny the old Borders coffee bar had been replaced by soda machines. Yes, I'm sorry to report that the baristas had been shoved aside by soda machines selling power drinks. Oh dear.

Dan and I began strolling around to look at the actual physical books for sale. As I said, there were lots of them, but it was hard to find what you wanted because most of the shelves weren't labeled. The books appeared to be mostly remaindered books and mass market paperbacks, and I wondered if I was seeing books that had been purchased by this clearance bookstore when the old Borders store failed--Borders filed for bankruptcy just about a year ago. Or was I seeing publishers' warehouses being emptied out, with more and more publishers going to print-on-demand to supply physical books to customers? Again, I couldn't tell.

The books were dirt cheap, I had to give them that. A lot of the shelves were marked "2 for $5" or "buy one get one free." The selection, though, itself was quite sickening. Upon scrutiny, the books appeared to be mostly the sorts of things that the big publishers have been churning out to try and save themselves. A lot of celebrity memoirs. A lot of cookbooks. A lot of genre stuff. Toys and games. Not much for a lively mind in search of literary adventure. Not much of actual literary value for all that floor space. Where was the poetry? Where were the new plays? And, you know, I think that's part of the trouble. I think publishers for some years now have been underestimating their reading audience. But that, I suppose, is another conversation.

My son and I poked around for a time, and then we both said, simultaneously, "Ready to go?" We were both wearing the same tired, slightly homesick expressions on our faces. The whole experience had been quite disheartening, and I thought on the way home about why that was. It had been like wandering around inside a ghost, a shade, a shell. The dynamism that had once animated the big-box bookstore was utterly gone. Gone were the stacks of new hardcovers waiting to be Christmas gifts. Gone the smell of freshly made coffee and the hiss of the cappuccino machine. Gone the crowds. What remained were echoes, and a profound sense of things gone past.