The sad evolution of a major bookstore chain
From outside the store in the Northridge mall, there was no sign on Thursday night that the Borders chain is shutting down.
Window displays still offered “Borders Rewards.” And through the glass doors I saw a giant placard touting the chain’s “new Kobo eReader, Touch Edition.” It’s just like reading a real book, it promised.
Inside, real books were everywhere. But the cafe at the back of the store was dark, walled off by a phalanx of magazine racks; empty save for a pair of employees yanking menu boards from the wall and filling trash barrels.
Kobo had come too late to the party, after Borders had already lost its footing in the evolving book-selling market.
Liquidation sales begin this weekend. By September, every store will be shuttered.
But on Thursday, the news that the chain had gone under caught some customers by surprise.
“What happened to my bookstore?” Anne Gavotto wondered when she stopped by to shop with her daughter. The roped-off sections and disarray made her hope the store was remodeling. She was shocked when a clerk told her that Borders was disappearing instead.
She’d followed news of the chain’s plunging fortunes but imagined that it would be salvaged or sold. “I figured what our family alone spends on books ought to keep it going,” she joked.
But years of red ink, plunging stock prices and desperate efforts to find a buyer ended abruptly last week when the bankrupt bookseller announced that its 399 stores will be closed. That will leave Barnes & Noble as the only major nationwide chain in what once was a thriving retail market.
The change was barely perceptible on my visit Thursday to my neighborhood Borders. The bookshelves seemed a bit disordered, the background music a little loud and a collection of books that had been “Buy One, Get One 50% Off” were stripped of last week’s discount tags.
Picking through that display made me smile and reminded me why brick-and-mortar stores matter: on the table of paperbacks, Glenn Beck’s political screed “Original Argument: The Federalists’ Case for the Constitution” sat alongside “My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands,” Chelsea Handler’s raunchy memoir.
I know it seems dumb to feel sentimental about a failing national bookstore chain; one that was the ogre not too long ago when it helped squash independent shops that had served as community touchstones.
Those intimate stores with their hand-picked books couldn’t compete with the larger selection and lower prices offered by bulk-buying chains. Now the chains are getting their comeuppance, unseated by cheaper online retailers and electronic readers that let you download a book for the price of a latte.
It’s ironic that Borders got its start as one of those little community shops, selling used books 40 years ago in a Michigan college town. Critics say it faltered, in part, because management moved too slowly to adapt to the reigning digital age.
I suppose you could say the same about me.
I understand the attraction of Nooks and Kindles, of clicking through book excerpts online and tapping pages on touch screen iPads.
But nothing beats holding a book in my hands; skimming it, smelling it, flipping the pages, hearing the author’s voice in my head. It’s that process of discovery, not the product, that makes partners among loyal book lovers and buyers.
I can’t help but fear that the failure of a giant outlet like Borders signals the end of a precious era -- when satisfying literary lust was both a private pleasure and public endeavor.
That’s why there was something comforting last week about finding like-minded souls in the store, wandering the aisles with loss in their eyes.
Like Gavotto, a Northridge mother of five -- the oldest 21, the youngest 9 -- whose children “grew up in this store. Borders was their favorite hangout.” It wasn’t just the buying of books that mattered, but the browsing, the reading, the choosing, she told me.
That night, she and her daughter had 13 books between them, including a collection of Roald Dahl classics. “Ella Enchanted” and “Because of Winn Dixie” were 9-year-old Guiliana’s choices.
“Books. That’s what we always gave our friends for gifts,” Gavotto said. “It’s the one thing my kids could always ask for and know that I would never say ‘no.’ ”
As I walked the rows of the children’s section, I was ambushed by memories:
Lounging with my girls on the floor in the aisles, surrounded by books as they tried to decide. I can track their growing through titles: from “The Runaway Bunny” to Dr. Seuss; Berenstain Bears to Ramona Quimby to anything by Judy Blume.
I remember how proud my daughters felt when they learned to read well enough to choose from the stacks labeled “Independent Reader.” It wasn’t quite like getting a driver’s license, but a milestone toward independence nonetheless. They were free to explore new worlds on their own, without mom reading over their shoulders.
Now I pass books back and forth with those same three girls, who have red Borders Rewards tags dangling from the key chains in their cars.
Not everyone I encountered was feeling wistful about losing Borders. Some people were simply hunting for bargains, like the woman who brushed past me, disappointed and empty-handed. “I never come here,” she said. “I thought there’d be sales.”
For others, shopping at Borders has been less a transaction than a social outlet. “We don’t really buy books here,” a young mother named Rina said, while her husband pushed their 2-year-old in a stroller.
They buy magazines sometimes. They come on Tuesdays for the toddler story program. They hang out at the cafe when it’s over. “That’s one thing we’ll really miss. The coffee,” she told me. That’s a clue, I suppose, to Borders’ failure. It’s also what Amazon can’t take over.
I can’t say I’ll never join the e-reader crowd, or care what online tracking tells me I might like to buy. But I’m tallying the loss to a neighborhood that will soon have no bookstores -- a neighborhood that not too long ago had two bookstores in the mall and a Barnes & Noble down the block.
I appreciate the benefits technology offers, but can you read a Kindle in the tub or take a Nook on a float in the pool with you?
I don’t mind thumbing through a dictionary when I find a word that I don’t get. When I’m reading a book I own, I fold the corners of pages to mark my spot; I scribble in the margins when I have a thought and I stick post-it notes on passages that I don’t want to forget.
I like moving through my house and seeing the evidence of who I’ve been and what ideas I’ve wondered about stacked on shelves and tables around me.
And I love the anticipation I feel right now, winding down to this column’s end. Because there’s a book I picked out at Borders on Thursday, waiting upstairs on the nightstand for me.
