Remembering why I love bookstores

July 25, 2008 in bookstore by Claire | No comments

I grew up loving libraries and bookstores.  I read way too much as a kid, hiding from broken friendships and unpopularity by hunching over a book at our kitchen table, turning the page corners red with pomegranate-stained fingers.  A trip to the library or a bookstore was bliss, wandering the stacks a lazy game with no goal except to leave with a fresh armful of books.

My life found direction because of a bookstore: I liked old-fashioned romances and, having read every Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte novel, one day shrugged and picked up a Barbara Cartland from a display.  I figured with her hundreds of titles, I’d be set for years.  My sister Alice saw what I was holding and tsk-tsked.  She took the book away, set it down, handed me Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  “This is better,” she said.  After that, I read every Virginia Woolf I could get my hands, an activity which made me even weirder, nerdier, dreamier.   

It also had a lot to do with why I wanted to become a writer.   I spent years imitating Woolf’s style in self-conscious, overwritten “stream of consciousness” pieces.  I couldn’t imagine a greater thrill than one day seeing a book with my name on it in “real” bookstores.

Decades later, I got to experience that very thing — and it made me absolutely miserable. Once I was published,  I’d walk into a huge chain bookstore and suddenly be aware of how many millions of other books were on the shelves and how I was competing with each and every one of them for readers’ money and reviewers’ good opinions.  Books I didn’t like were on the bestseller list whereas I’d have to search for mine in some dark corner of the upstairs fiction section — and often didn’t even find a copy there.   It stopped being fun to go to bookstores.

Problem was, I still liked to read.  This new phobia wasn’t going to get me something to put on my night table.  But stepping foot inside an enormous multi-level chain bookstore made me sick with envy and despair. 

I was saved by independent bookstores.  I had always loved them, but chain stores had become ubiquitous and I forgot sometimes to make the effort to seek out the smaller stores.  I started to and discovered that instead of overwhelming you with sheer numbers of indiscriminate books, smaller bookstores had handpicked treasures.  I could walk into one and think, “Wow, I want to read every one of these books,” and not, “There are too many books in the world already — why am I even bothering to add to the list?”

Best of all, if a small indy carried my book, I was delighted (“they like me!”) but if they didn’t, well, you can’t expect a small, independent bookstore to carry everything, right?  No big deal.  I was disappointed but not devastated.

I was already aware that we have to fight to keep independent bookstores alive, that we shouldn’t let the huge soulless chains win.  What I found out was that small, independent bookstores were more than just an alternative to something big and commercial, that they were ultimately the key to my “recovery,” that in them I would rediscover the joys of browsing and buying books.

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