Last call

[pbray]

Ran errands this morning then stopped by Waldenbooks at the mall, where I kidnapped the manager for lunch. (The staff later mocked me when I returned her, pointing out that a real kidnapper would have at least demanded a ransom.)

The store is literally a shell of its former self. Some fixtures have already been sold off and removed, and the empty back half of the store echoes. In the front, the remaining stock takes up only a fraction of the shelf space.

Tomorrow is the last day the store will be open. Over the next few days the staff will box up whatever scraps are left, and supervise the removal of the fixtures. And then that will be it.

I'll miss the store and getting to see my friends there. I'll miss their keen knowledge of books which made it a joy to shop there, even as their selection dwindled.

I find it hard to imagine a mall without a bookstore. Cicero said "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Surely the same holds true for a shopping center. When I moved here the mall had not one but two bookstores, and there were a host of thriving bookstores--both chains and independent--in the surrounding towns. Now, for new books, there are very few options. There's the Barnes & Noble in Vestal. For those with a literary bent, there's RiverRead in Binghamton. Fat Cat Books in Johnson City is still hanging on, though the mix of new books versus comics and gaming continues to inexorably tilt towards the non-book stock. And, of course, Wal-Mart, Target and the like will continue to carry the latest bestsellers, but they can't take the place of a bookstore.

Even in its heyday, Waldenbooks was a good store, rather than a great one. But it was what we had, and I don't see anything coming forward to take its place. Ultimately the mall, and our community, are poorer for its loss.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We lost our B. Dalton's -- the nice book lady there recognized me as an author. And the Borders is teetering . . .

And independents closing up, after 30 years in the business:

http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/135401.html

[blitheringpooks.livejournal.com]

I remember Waldenbooks and B.Dalton fondly. Borders and B&N swept over them, and now Amazon is sweeping over Borders and B&N.

I feel sadness for your mall. Yours held out longer than ours did.

[melissajm.livejournal.com]

The manager at our Waldenbooks used to greet me with "There's our local author!" I miss that store.

(Actually, she still does, but at another store farther away that I don't get to very often.)

[lagilman]

*sads* I envied you that store. Growing up in suburbia, the mall stores were a mixed bag -- Borders was the only place I could go to for a reliable selection of genre. We had no specialty bookstores, and the only indie was focused on kids (there was no separate 'YA' yet) and "good for you" books. Even then it was a bit of a wasteland.

These days, B&N is doing a damn good job filling the gap in the city -- if you want it, they've got it either in that store or another nearby. But I acknowledge that I live in a slightly non-standard locale.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

:(

I mourn every time a bookstore of my acquaintance closes. There's a Starbucks now where Albert Britnell -- Toronto's oldest bookstore, where I would have gone to work 14 years ago if my current employer hadn't offered me a job first -- used to be, and I still feel a little bit bitter every time I walk by it. Britnell's was among the first to fold, way back in the early days of big-box bookstores in Canada, but a lot of independents and smaller chains have followed it -- not to mention that Indigo ultimately ate Chapters, Chapters having first eaten Smoles (Coles + W.H. Smith -- one of them ate the other, but I can't remember which) and the WBB -- and now even the great McNally Robinson is teetering on the brink. At least Pages and BookCity and BakkaPhoenix seem to be holding out; Toronto is actually very well supplied with bookstores, as you would expect for a city of 3+ million people, but it's a lot less well supplied with variety in bookstores than it used to be, which is a shame.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

We've seen a host of bookstores close in our area the past decade or so. First the slow evaporation of the Waldenbooks, then the vaporization of B. Dalton and Brentano's as they pulled out of the area, and finally the culling of Border's. I guess if you want to call Media Play a bookstore -I don't, not really, anyway- their implosion didn't help things either.

What was depressing to me was that a new B&N moved into the busiest shopping area in town, and less than three years later they closed. The reason? The moved five miles north to be closer to the gated communities north of the I-275 loop, following JC Penney. Nevermind the fact that they did business -I never saw the place empty except for the beginnning of the day- they followed the demographics that told them would make them the most money.

Kind of like watching Borders systematically destroy their broad range in-house stock in favor of pimping a few best sellers. I keep expecting them to start selling video games, so they can mutate fulling into a newer version of Media Play.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

It's an evil time we live in, when bookstores are closing right and left. Laredo is a shocking wake-up, I think. At least the Binghamton area still has some.

Bookstores

[(Anonymous)]

I moved into an area with no bookstores in the immediate vicinity. As much as I love bookstores, I've discovered online buying out of necessity.

Now that a new bookstore has move into the area, I've discovered that I'm too lazy to go to the store. It's easier to buy online.