Can Small Town America Support Bookstores? An Owner’s Tale

Philip White
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Philip White signing copies of his book,
Our Supreme Task, at Well Read, March 2012

The commonly accepted narrative about bookstores is that they’re doomed. People simply won’t go to bricks-and-mortar spaces to buy hardbacks and softcovers when they can pull up a web browser, click or tap a couple of times, and boom! Either an e-book is on their screen or that supposedly archaic bundle of paper is on its way.

But while certain undeniable facts—the closing of Borders and the rise of Amazon as the alpha dog in the bookselling industry among them—prove this impression to be true-ish, there are other signs that cast doubt on it. Some of these are factual and some anecdotal. In the case of the latter, Half Price Books is always jam packed when I go into one of the four Kansas City locations to buy more books I probably don’t need. Also, I recently read The Atlantic’s feature on Ann Patchett, who is not only bankrolling a bookstore in Nashville but also got a spot on the Colbert Report because of it. (I’m not jealous, honest. OK, yeah I am.) Third, I have spoken in four independent bookstores in the past few months and at all but one of my other events (libraries, community groups, etc.) indies provided the books. 

The most recent of my bookstore talks was at Well Read in Fulton, Missouri, a two-story brick building on the very parade route that Winston Churchill took hours before he introduced the world to the terms “iron curtain” (he didn’t invent but popularized it) and “special relationship” in March 1946. Until last year, the store was somewhat disorganized, did little to no marketing and didn’t offer a space for reading or book events. All that has changed since Brian and Danielle Warren took over. I grabbed a few minutes with Brian to talk about book curating, the joy of sifting through boxes of old history books, and why two young, intelligent people took over a used bookshop in a small Midwestern town. 

Larry McMurtry on Books and Collecting

Randall Stephens

Like many historians, I have spent hours upon hours in well-stocked bookstores. It always helps if the shopkeeper is friendly and if the prices are good. It helps even more if he or she allows me to bring Beatrice, my border collie, into the store. (Two bookstore owners in Maine recently invited me and the dog into their shops!)

I usually look for strong religious studies, history, local interest, music, and literature sections. But it's enjoyable enough just to browse around the labyrinth of shelves, heaving with books, ready to topple at any moment.

Western novelist and book dealer Larry McMurtry well captures the subtle joys of book collecting and the ambiance of book stores in his rambling memoir Books (Simon and Schuster, 2008). (I gather it would make a good companion to another one of his autobiographical volumes, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.)

McMurtry describes some of the fussy, cantankerous, bizarre, brilliant characters he's met during his life in the trade. He makes the rumpled old codgers of the business sound like super heroes. That is a real feat in itself! He talks about his own interest--first editions, comics, literary fiction--and the big finds he has scored over the decades. As a bonus, the book combines two of my favorite things, the memoir and obsessive collecting.

Here's a typical passage, written in McMurtry's keen, to-the-point style. He makes me appreciate the tactile qualities of book collecting all over again:

One might pose this question: If you don't enjoy the physical work of handling books, why be an antiquarian book seller at all? There are certainly better ways to make money than selling secondhand books. The pleasure of a hands-on approach to book selling is both intellectual and tactile. The best bookmen rarely lose or exhaust their curiosity about editions) variants, points, bindings, provenance, cost codes, and the like. The things there are to know about a given book-particularly if it's a complicated book, with a complicated text-absorb the attention of the best dealers for a lifetime. And certainly a normal lifetime is not long enough to enable one to learn even half of what there is to know about antiquarian books in general.

As we've discussed on this blog in the past, there's a strong case to be made for the physicality of old books and paper print sources. I love the easy access of reading on my iPad, but it doesn't beat the book as far as I'm concerned. And I can't imagine any virtual replacement for the charming, creaking old book shop!

A Bibliovore’s Dilemma

Philip White

Hi, I’m Philip, and I have a problem. No, it’s not my raging caffeine addiction, but rather, an insatiable desire to buy any book of interest that I come across.

I often scorn so-called “shopaholics” who stock their walk-in closets with $200 t-shirts that I suspect are made in the same exploitative overseas factories as bargain bin items at supermarkets; and the techies who drool over the latest 60-inch flatscreen with its “600 Hz Subfield Motion” and “150,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio.” Come on, not even the manufacture knows what the heck such piffle means, much less how those features can justify a two-grand price tag.

And yet, I am starting to become cognizant of my glaring hypocrisy, an epiphany sparked by my recent purchase of two more four-shelf bookcases from a going-out-of-business Borders to supplement my fit-to-burst living room built-ins. I can’t go near my local used book store without popping in, promising myself (and/or my long-suffering wife, who finds her volumes and those of our children crammed into ever-dwindling shelf space) that I’ll just look at the clearance section and its bevy of $2 books that beg for a good home. Sometimes I think I subconsciously choose to run errands in the vicinity just so I can get my weekly “fix.”

And then there’s the web. Performing the physical act of handing over cash or swiping your credit/debit card at the bookstore makes the buying process more tangible, and, or so the theory goes, makes one consider the purchase more carefully. Online, this goes out the window—a few clicks and you’re done. If you’ve already saved your card details on the vendor’s website, it’s even quicker and easier, with even less time to self-question if that $148.15 that’s about to be taken out of your account/put on your next bill is exorbitant or reasonable.

When you write for a living, it’s much easier to answer such a question, whether it arrives before the shelf-straining purchase or later, when you get your next card statement, with a simple justification: “It’s for work.” This particular form of self-deception is at its most acute when you are working on a long feature story or, Lord have mercy, a book. People have asked me “Why don’t you just get books from the library?” I have done that, of course, frantically jotting down notes in time to beat the punitive daily late charges or, for longer passages, using the tech miracle that is Nuance Naturally Speaking to dictate until my voice box feels like it’s been invaded by a couple of enraged porcupines.

But when it comes to a book that you know (or tell yourself you know) that you’ll need large sections for at least one project or, heaven forbid, may actually make time to read for pleasure as well as for research purposes, how can one not plonk down some hard earned cash for it? Now that I’ve forced myself to become more organized, I make sure that book receipts (from brick-and-mortar bookstores) are scanned and e-mail confirmations saved (online retailers) in easily findable files so that come tax time I can list the books as expenses. Again, one more justification: “It’s a tax write off.”

So my questions are twofold: When is it time to draw a line between essential research tools and filler that I’ll use two lines from and never touch again?

Or, should I stop worrying, admit that I’m a fallen, shameless “shopaholic,” with no more self-restraint than the fashionista, gadgeteer, whatever-your-retail-vice-is crowd, and just enjoy my book-collecting “hobby”?

Think Borders Is Going Down the Tubes Because of e-Books? Not So Fast

Philip White

Today’s guest post comes from Philip White, a writer based in Kansas City. A Lion in the Heartland, his forthcoming book about Winston Churchill’s unlikely journey to Fulton, Missouri to deliver the “Iron Curtain” speech will be released by PublicAffairs in 2012.

So it’s now official–Borders, the real-life Fox Books (come on, admit that you’ve seen Tom Hanks hamming it up as a nationwide bookstore mogul in AOL vehicle You’ve Got Mail) has filed for bankruptcy.

Many a web-based postmortem is fingering electronic books, or e-books as the kids call ‘em, as the perpetrator. After all, supposed industry bellwether Amazon recently announced that e-books in its proprietary Kindle format are outselling paperbacks, though, as is the company’s wont, they conveniently neglect to mention how many of these e-books are free, and avoiding giving precise sales figures.

So are e-books to blame for the fall of this once-mighty purveyor of the printed word? Not to the extent that many are claiming.

Certainly, the sales of e-books are continuing to rise. Cheaper and better devices, the shameless self-promotion of the Kindle by Amazon on its homepage and atop many of its book listings and cross-platform, multi-device support in the booming smartphone and tablet markets are just some of the reasons. Not to mention that a new e-book costs significantly less than its paper-based counterpart, and is, in many cases, available at the same time or before the hardcopy release.

But, for all the hype surrounding the rise of the e-book, many other factors contributed to the downfall of Borders, and most of its brick-and-mortar rivals. For the record, I will not be analyzing the viability of the online Borders offering, which may yet survive the follies of its physical location.

First to consider is one of the primary drivers of any consumer purchase: price. The reason that I get a coupon from Borders via e-mail each week–anywhere from 25 to 40 percent off a single item–is that the store often sells its wares at full list price. This can be above $30 for a new history hardback, and pushing $20 for a softback. Yikes! Meanwhile, Amazon, much to publishers’ chagrin, deeply discounts most of its titles from the get go. No need to waste money on e-mail marketing and website customizations that promote special offers when your upfront prices are already the lowest (with some exceptions, like during the run up to Christmas). I have also, in my forgetful way, gone to my local Borders to make use of a coupon and, as Sod’s Law would have it, left the offending item on the kitchen counter. Many retail employees at other chains would help a poor, forgetful bibliophile out in such a situation by simply scanning a coupon from behind their particle-board checkout counter. A fine fellow at Half Price Books recently handed me back a 20 percent off coupon “In case you want to use it again later in the weekend.” Not so at Borders, at least in my experience. No, they’d rather belittle you and huff and puff for a few minutes before eventually yielding. Yay, customer service.

Then there’s the convenience factor, or, in the case of Borders and its ilk, the lack thereof. Option one: Drive 20 minutes across town to a big box store strip mall, and, once there, weave in and out of the parent-with-screaming-kids coming out of Old Navy and the scary looking, 2-by-4 wielding fellow who looks like he wants to hurt this puny bibliophile for slowing his exit from Home Depot. Then spend 15 to 20 minutes, if I’m lucky, looking for a book that may or may not be in stock. Calling ahead doesn’t help, and even if it did, it’s just one more step. If, praise the Lord, the book is on a promotional stand there is a brief moment of joy–3 for the price of 2!– followed by the horrendous realization that every other book on that neatly-stacked table, is, bar none, utter tripe. So, even if I reluctantly, begrudgingly make the decision to buy the book anyway, I have to wait in line for who knows how long. The reward? Dealing with the not-so-friendly, can’t-wait-to-get-home-after-another-crappy-shift “sales associate” who hosed me on the coupon the previous week. Repeat the parking lot debacle. Waste yet more time (and gas) on the drive home.

Option two: From my tablet or desktop, log onto any online bookseller’s site. Time elapsed: 1 second. Yep, the higher speed home broadband’s worth every cent. Search for the book. Buy with one click. E-mail confirmation received. E-mail with reading recommendations customized to my purchase history to follow. True, there is the wait for shipping, but that’s not the point–it takes far less time and is far less a hassle to buy online. And if I, the Luddite, ever bury my suspicions and embrace the e-book revolution, my text will be delivered in a minute or two. I could, of course, select borders.com as my online bookseller of choice. But that will (or should I say, would, for we speak of the deceased) do nothing to support a bloated, unsustainable network of characterless warehouses that happen to house books. (Note to corporate execs everywhere–adding in-store “cafés” that sell mediocre coffee at inflated prices does not a comfy shopper experience make.

“But what of the tactile, in-store browsing experience?” I here you ask. True, I do enjoy it. At local, independent stores (selling used or new books) or chains such as Half Price Books, where the proprietors and staff members know their Stephanie Meyer from their Ernest Hemingway. At Borders, there was always the same experience I get at every big box store. Employees who like the company health plan but despise every other aspect of their job, and have no idea who John Lukacs is, let alone where to find his latest book. Does that apply to each and every staffer? No, of course not, but when it’s the case with even 30 percent, that’s a problem, and the percentage is far greater than that. Indie bookstores also find ways to set themselves apart–the exemplary Rainy Day Books here in Kansas City has many author events each month, and bundles tickets with a hardback to add value. Borders? Not so much.

Finally, Borders, Barnes and Noble and their kind annoy the daylight out of publishers and authors because of their pay-for-play positioning model. Publishers have to cough up outrageous sums to get their latest titles on the most prominent, front-of-store displays and they’re rarely going to fork over that money for anyone other than their cash cow authors–Meyer, Rowling, Grisham et al. Something similar may be true in Amazon's New and Notable section, but not to the same mercenary degree, I’ll wager.

So, do I sympathize with the thousands of Borders employees who will likely be seeking new employment? Yes, of course. Do I have the same sympathy for their soon to be former employer? Not a smidge. Like Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Borders has been outfoxed by a nimble, visionary competitor, baffled by new technology and, fatally, unwilling to change because of the misplaced belief that its overestimated brand loyalty would save it. Does the fall of this behemoth mean printed books are dead, or that e-books are the only viable medium? That is, for now, overstatement on both counts.

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Boston's Best Bookstore

Randall Stephens

Coming to the 2011 AHA in Boston? Have a moment or two to spare? Check out the Brattle Book Shop, near the Downtown Crossing and Park Street T stops. The store is one of the oldest in the country and is brimming with books, old and new. Sections on 19th-century history, European studies, Asian history, New England history, religious history, African-American studies, ethnicity, political science, and on and on line what seem like miles of shelf space.

I’m particularly fond of the outdoor area, which contains thousands of books for as little as $1 to $5 each. (See the video I shot, embedded below.) That space is open all year round, only closing when it rains or snows. (After a long Boston walk with my border collie Beatrice, I’ll peruse titles until Bea begins to whimper out of sheer boredom.)

As Beatrice waits impatiently, I’ve been surprised by how many great history titles I’ve found outside. I’ve picked up books there by Allan Nevins, Oscar Handlin, Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, Patricia Bonomi, and many more. Also, I’ve been happy to track down unusual 19th-century travel accounts, memoirs, primary source collections, and all manner of biographies.

Brattle Book Shop is real must-see for history bibliophiles!

I asked Ken Gloss, proprietor, about his store and what a history professor, grad student, or history enthusiast might find there.

Randall Stephens: What makes the Brattle Book Shop unique? What would you say are some of its most distinctive features?

Kenneth Gloss: The Brattle Book Shop can be traced back to the 1820s and it’s been in my family since 1949. It is a Dickensian-style store. The outside stands hold about 2,000+ books at $1, $3, and $5. We have two floors of general used books, and a third floor with rare books, 1st editions, leather-bound volumes, manuscripts, etc.

We go to estates throughout New England almost every day. It is like being Jim Hawkins on Treasure Island finding great books and libraries and then bringing them back to the shop.

You never know what is new to the shop on

any given day.

Stephens: What sort of clientele do you serve? Does the Brattle Book Shop have a typical customer?

Gloss: We have every type of customer you can imagine. We’ve got street people who buy from our $1 tables, collectors who spend large sums on rare letters, manuscripts, rare editions, and the customer who just wants a hard-to-find volume. They are young, old, male, female, regular, one-time, compulsive, and interesting. We have one customer who comes in every day and calls in sick when he cannot get in.

Stephens: Many historians that I know keep an eye out for that gem of a book. What sorts of books at Brattle would catch the eye of a historian on the lookout for a bargain or a rarity?

Gloss: We buy and put out books each day. Many of those are by amateur historians, professors, and writers. So you never know what will be on the shelves. That is what keeps people coming. There are also many, many bargains.