The Golden Age of Book-Buying

Borders became one of the hottest corporate chains of the 1990s because it didn’t do things by halves. Its bookstores were of an unheard-of size and sophistication. They stretched not just from coast to coast but around the world. Since it filed for US bankruptcy protection in mid-February, it has shown the same thoroughness in dismantling its empire that it did in building it. The Borders bookstore down the block from my Washington office, where I have browsed almost weekly for the past decade and a half, looks gutted, sacked. At least 200 of Borders’ 642 stores are to close. Those that remain will continue the chain’s drift away from books, and towards cat calendars and stationery. After four straight years of losses, Borders has liabilities of more than $1bn. It owes tens of millions each to publishers Penguin USA, Hachette and Simon & Schuster. Its stock, which peaked at $37 in June 1998, traded this week for 23 cents a share. Borders is set to shrink, merge or die.

The demise of Borders is not just the loss of a good place to browse. It is a comeuppance. When its outlets began popping up in shopping malls in the early 1990s, many observers warned that Borders was wiping out independent sellers. Others – myself included – argued that Borders’ virtues more than compensated for the losses. These were matters of scale. The average Borders at the time had 100,000 titles, and some had as many as 175,000. It carried academic titles, foreign language novels and more (and better chosen) poetry than most poetry bookshops. In almost every case where a Borders opened in a US city, it offered a larger selection than all the area’s existing bookshops combined. Borders was bringing world-class culture to second-tier cities. Residents of Albuquerque had access to books once rarely seen outside of New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We tend to romanticise independent bookstores and their solicitous proprietors. A small-town teenager buying The Grapes of Wrath might get to hear from the owner how it thrilled him when he first read it and learn of others in town who love Steinbeck. This is indeed great. A literary culture gets built that way. But impersonality has its place too. A teenager looking for an anthology of gay short stories or The Communist Manifesto might not be so eager to chat. And the impersonality Borders offered was not soulless. Founded at the University of Michigan in 1971, it kept the “flavour” of an independent bookstore. Its cashiers were knowledgeable, drawn, perhaps, from the inexhaustible ranks of unemployable graduate students. It was rumoured that Borders required them to pass a literary examination. ...