Bookstores, Reading, Community

I opened up my emails this morning to find bad news I did not expect:  another one of my favorite independent bookstores is going out of business.  This is one of the bookstores I visit in a local, historic small town; frankly, I think it's one of the things that make the town worth visiting (besides their fine hotel and antique stores). 

We have been visiting that town, and so we stopped in this morning, though it made us sad.  One woman entering the store said, "Where am I going to buy my books?"  I said, "I think on the internet."  She said, "Sometimes, you have to go into a bookstore."

Apparently, not enough people agree with her.

I love bookstores (yarn stores, too, but that's possibly another post).  I did used to have this dream of opening a small bookstore, though I knew little or nothing about the business angle.  (Just to show you that the dream hasn't completely died, I recently thought a store called "A Good Yarn" would be a great idea for a shop that combined books and knitting supplies.) 

I do remember, however, a time before bookstores.  Our biggest department store had a book department, but the first bookstore I saw (a B. Dalton, I believe) was when I was in high school.  I was very intrigued.  A whole store of nothing but books.  It wasn't a big store, but it was a book store.  It was like a library, except you didn't have to bring the books back.

I went to the library as a kid.  I did not have a large personal library of children's books.  We bought a few books through the mail, but most of the books that I read I did not own.  One of my prized possessions was an edition of Little Men, given to me by a friend for a birthday.  I didn't really start accumulating books until I was in college.

So on a rational level, I understand that markets come and markets go.  When I was small, my dad had his own small business:  G&B Radio and TV.  He sold and repaired a lot of TVs.  He used to win sales contests, and he won prizes.  Then, fewer people bought TVs from small shops, and especially in that neighborhood.  Now I believe that a small TV Sales and Repair shop is a rare thing. 

But there's a part of me that thinks that this is about more than books, and more than markets.  It's about community.  It's about the value of real places where people gather, say hello, exchange goods, opinions, and actually know that they matter to one another.  And those places are not gone, I'm not being alarmist.  But somehow I feel that it needs to be said.

In an internet age, brick and mortar sometimes seems like a liability.  I mean that in a bottom line sort of way.  Amazon can sell more cheaply partly because they don't have brick and mortar stores.  But if you are a brick and mortar store, you also are a member of a particular community, and that is a value too.

In the community where I served for four years, there was a small grocery store.  Most people did their grocery shopping in the nearest city, thirty-five miles away.  But I remember one of my parish members who told me that she made a point of doing some of her shopping at the small store, even though they didn't have everything she needed, and even though the prices were higher.  Because, she said, having a grocery store in her community was a value to her.

So in the race to the bottom line, I still think it's a good question to ask:  where are the places that remind us that we are members of one another, that our destinies are intertwined, that we all do better when we all do better?