The Vanishing (& More Haunted Than Ever) Bookshop

The Vanishing (& More Haunted Than Ever) Bookshop

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE Alaska—(Weekly Hubris)—5/16/11—We just lost our Borders bookstore. It finally closed its doors recently, after several really depressing weeks of clearance sales. The last time I went in there, about two weeks ago, it looked very much like a casualty of war or terrorism. The store was littered with bits of paper and trash, festooned with hastily-scribbled, handmade signs proclaiming ever diminishing, marked-off prices on the few remaining items. Books were crowded together in disarray on the few remaining shelves. Empty bookcases wore tags with the names of people who had recently purchased the cases themselves. It looked as if some great, indiscriminate wind had swept through the once elegant store, wreaking havoc in its wake. I bought nothing. There was nothing left to buy. It was like the bargain basement of the lowest tier of the basement.

I remember, of course, when that Borders store was new. New and exciting and gleaming with polish and shine.

Anchorage had resisted the arrival of Borders and Barnes & Noble to our city. At that time, in the mid-1990s, Anchorage had the book community pretty well covered. We, a city of 250,000 souls at the end of the world, had a surprising number of really fine, independently owned bookstores.

In fact, for a city of its size and its remoteness from the rest of the world, Anchorage was quite a literary town. Alaskans have always been readers, perhaps because of the long, cold winters. In winter, when the wind is howling at the windows and rattling the panes and shutters, when the snow is flying and the ice fog has closed in around us like a crystal prison, there is nothing more pleasant than a blazing fire (preferably in the fireplace) and a great book to sink into.

For some Alaskans, work is seasonal: winter is a time for long naps and longer, deeper plunges into books. So I suppose it would be no surprise, really, that Anchorage is a book town. Even the macho lumberjack types, the guys in their snow boots and heavy corduroy pants, the guys chopping firewood and shoveling snow and hauling a pair of snowshoes on their backs, often have a book in their back pockets. One rugged crab fisherman I know always has a small volume of poetry in his pocket. So, for Alaskans, the bookstore has always been a necessity.

When I first came to Alaska, in the 1960s, there was one bookstore in town. My wife and I, very young and adventurous, had just driven up the Alcan Highway, 2,000 miles of unpaved gravel and dirt road, heading North to Alaska, seeking our fortunes. After we crossed from the Yukon Territory into Alaska and had driven for many miles on that narrow, winding, unpaved wilderness road, we came at last to the spot where the road suddenly forked, giving us the first choice of paths in 2,000 miles. One road led to Anchorage; one to Fairbanks—the two largest cities in Alaska, though significantly smaller then than they are now.

“Shall we go to Anchorage or to Fairbanks?” we asked each other. We knew nothing about either, so I took out a coin and flipped it. Heads we would go to Anchorage; tails, Fairbanks. It came out heads. So I turned the steering wheel slightly to the left (always my favorite direction) and we followed the long and winding road to Alaska’s largest city.

Arriving that first day, a warm, dusty day in late June, we drove down Anchorage’s Fifth Avenue, still the main drag of downtown, and we saw a big yellow sign, with brown graphics of a little wooden cabin on stilts, which read: The Book Cache. At that time, I only vaguely knew the word “cache,” a true Alaskan word that everyone knows here. A cache is, just like that little picture on the sign, a small cabin-like structure of log, elevated on stilts, in which early Alaskan sourdoughs and trappers and hunters stored their fresh meat, their furs, and whatever else they wanted to protect from pesky and snooping wildlife. In a less local and more mainstream sense, a cacheis simply a place to store valuables and secrets. I certainly knew what a book cache would be.

“All right!” I shouted with glee to my wife. “There is a bookstore here! Let’s go check it out.”

She and I both knew that our future as potential residents of this town depended on my being able to find a satisfactory bookstore in the community.

The Book Cache more than lived up to my hopes and expectations. Though it was the only bookstore in Anchorage at that time, it was a great one. Spacious and roomy, it was filled with books and books and more books. There was even a stamp and coin cache huddled in one corner of the store. It had entire long walls of paperback books. It had shelves and tables of hardbacks. It had all the expected newspapers and magazines. And behind the counter were the first two Alaskans that I ever met, the memorable and amazing Susan Hall and Gracie Gatz.

In those days, Susan was a wife and mother of six in her mid-40s; Gracie was unmarried, in her 50s, a loud, lusty Marjorie Main of a woman. Both were brilliant, charismatic, and so well read that they would shame a Nobel Prize panel of judges. Here, at the very end of the world, I had found my bit of paradise. Needless to say, I became a regular customer at The Book Cache. Susan and Gracie and the other staffers became my first friends in my new home. The coffee pot was always on. There was always a lively discussion about books or politics going on. It was a downtown gathering place, where sooner or later you managed to meet everyone in town.

In the years that followed, the owners of The Book Cache, Doris and Russ Riemann, branched out and opened other Book Cache stores in Anchorage. One went in at the first shopping mall in town, right next to the new Sears store. Soon, as more malls opened, more Book Caches popped up. There was, eventually, even one in Fairbanks (where my daughter Joanna worked while attending college at the University of Alaska) and in Maui, Hawaii.

And, in time, other book stores opened as well, all independent, all with their own special niche in the community. There was Cyrano’s, about which I have written before, which was a delightful and amazing combination bookstore, café, and theater. It served the Anchorage community as a venue for artists, dancers, actors, writers, chefs, puppeteers, mimes and clowns, and musicians from the classical to the folk. For many years, Cyrano’s was the happening place in Anchorage and everybody knew it.

When I retired from teaching in the 1990s, I got my first post-teaching job at Cyrano’s and became part of the world of the bookseller, an active member of that special place that had always welcomed me and comforted me—the bookstore.

Around the corner from Cyrano’s was, eventually, another independent bookstore, Cook Inlet Book Company. This store specialized in books about Alaska. The owner, the daughter of the owners of the Book Cache, was an expert on Alaskana (all things Alaskan) and catered to the increasing influx of tourists here, who seemed eager for books about this place. A whole store crammed full of books about Alaska seemed amazing to some.

“Im from Iowa!” one man announced in the store one day. “But we only have one book about Iowa in our bookstore.”

In those years, Anchorage also had a mystery bookstore, full of whodunits and suspense thrillers and all things concerning the genre of the mystery novel. We also had a science-fiction store, an entire little shop cluttered from shelf to shelf and table to table with speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, and hardcore sci fi.

There were a number of used book stores, large and small. The best known was Title Wave Used Books, which eventually became the largest bookstore in the state of Alaska.

Then, one day, it was announced that Borders was coming to town. Alaska’s first great corporation store. We had had, of course, a few Waldenbooks in the malls, as well as, briefly, a B. Dalton, but nothing of the size, ambition, and prestige of a Borders. Anchorage resisted at first. We had the book scene covered for our city. We loved our independent stores; we loved our friendly and knowledgeable booksellers. We didn’t need Corporate America. Let them go to Fairbanks or to Juneau, two cities which had fewer stores and could have benefitted from a big mega-bookstore.

But Borders came to Anchorage and opened up its big, beautiful store with its polished hardwood floors, its polished tall bookshelves with sliding ladders that gave it a kind of library chic, and it had more books than any of the local stores had been able to conjure up. And it had an espresso coffee bar and a café. And live musicians played there regularly. It was the beginning of the end, of course, for the local booksellers. Within six months, Barnes & Noble had also come to town, following in Borders’ wake, and offering even more opulent delights than Borders had. The little stores were doomed.

The sci-fi store and the mystery store were the first casualties. They bit the dust and closed their doors quickly and quietly. The others valiantly hung on for a while, but everyone knew their days were numbered. Cyrano’s, for all its uniqueness, its popularity, its warmth and famous joie de vivre was, for most, the saddest loss to the city. The bookstore and café could not compete with the big corporate boys. Now only the theater is left, Anchorage’s charming little black box playhouse with a stalwart heart, still producing gems, but without their bookstore companion.

Cook Inlet Books managed to stay afloat for a few years because of their central location in the midst of downtown’s tourist shops. With its niche of Alaskana, it managed to supply something that Borders and Barnes & Noble, with their headquarters in the Lower 48, knew little about. But eventually, even the Alaska sections were beefed up in the chain stores, and Cook Inlet, too, closed its doors.

Title Wave and a couple of other, smaller, used book stores managed to stay open, and function still. As sellers of used books, they are no threat to the chains and the chains are no threat to them. No, it is something far more insidious that now threatens even these stores. But I am jumping ahead. Keep reading.

Now, of course, the great irony—or perhaps a kind of corporate karma—is that the corporate chain stores are now threatened as well. Borders has closed hundreds of its stores across the nation, with perhaps even more yet to go. The reason, they announced, was an inability to compete with technology: in short, the hideous new evil called the e-reader or the e-book.

I don’t have time or space here to go into my usual tirade about how much I hate, loathe, despise, and fear the e-reader. And how irritated I am whenever anyone, friend or foe, brags excitedly about their new Kindle or Nook. I HATE them for so many reasons it would make your head spin if I began to elaborate. But, of course, it does no good to do so. Those who love technology, who love gadgets, who love every new iPod or iPad or iPhone or iWhatever will never get it. And it is impossible, too, to convince them or explain to them. They have every argument covered. No matter what you say to them about preferring a real book to an electronic one, they have that argument covered. E-books, clearly, can do everything a real book can do and much more. Hell, you can even delete Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Dickens with a quick flick of your finger. They are gone forever —poof!—into the thin but increasingly crowded air of cyberspace.

But this is not a column about e-books. (That may come later.) This is a column about bookstores. But the e-book must be mentioned here because it is the e-book that is single-handedly bringing about the final, degrading, and utter destruction of the bookstore. And the makers of e-books seem to think that that is just dandy.

(I HATE them! Did I mention that?)

Our one remaining bookstore in Anchorage which sells new books is Barnes & Noble. And even they have altered their appearance and atmosphere to an alarming degree. Now, when I walk into Barnes & Noble, the first thing that I see is not a great display of the new and noteworthy latest books. No, I see a grotesque display touting the virtues and values of the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s answer to the Kindle. It is a display of plastic boxes, rectangular or square in shape, all as appealing as a display of tissue boxes in a drug store. And there are also screens which show you facsimiles of pages and all the joys of virtuosity instead of reality. I sometimes get physically ill when I walk into the store and my nausea rarely lets up until I am well past the Nook display and into the shelves of books. And, of course, standing among the Nooks are young men in suits and ties, ready to sing the praises of gadgetry and technology (and Nookiness) to every twittering and tweeting soul who enters the store.

It is their job to convince you that you cannot live in the fast lane without this gadget. This will be your new library. You can sweep all those books off the shelves in your home and just put your Nook there—your lonely, isolated piece of plastic, metal, silicon, and a battery. Wahoo! Think of all that free space you will have without all those books cluttering up your house, space where you can put instead your . . . um . . . your potted plants? More gadgets? How fascinating it will be to come into your living room and gaze with interest at your square plastic boxes recharging their batteries on what used to be a bookshelf.

Of course, the great visionaries of the day may or may not have envisioned what all this really means, that this is the end of bookstores and libraries, the end of curiosity, the end of the kind of pleasure that can only be derived from browsing among volumes of dusty, heavy, gilt-edged, illustrated books, laden with notes from previous readers, handled lovingly for sometimes centuries.

(Did I mention that I HATE this Brave New World?)

But, alas, I am, as my grandfather used to say (and as I have quoted many times here at Weekly Hubris) just pissing in the wind. I am 67 years old so, even though I am right, no one is really going to care. If I am lucky, I have only about 20 more years and then I will, as Shakespeare says, shuffle off this mortal coil, taking my archaic values with me, leaving the world to the twittering and tweeting crowd who can come up with all kinds of new gadgets but can’t think with any more depth than a flat line.

The real sadness for me is the demise of the bookstore.

I will be OK in terms of books. I have in my home right now more books than I could possibly read or re-read in my entire lifetime. Barring devastating fire or flood, I will not be without enough books to comfort me. But bookstores and libraries have given me so much more than just books. They are worlds within themselves that are unmatched in any other establishment.

Bookstores, for me and for other bookish types, are like neighborhood bars. They offer sustenance, warmth, like-minded companionship, excitement, and a refuge from the rest of the world that just doesn’t get it. I can go into a bookstore in any city in the world and feel right at home there immediately. Bookstores cater to and welcome with open arms certain like-minded people. They are homes away from home. There are friends there, old friends, recognizable and comforting, no matter what lurks outside their doors. Even if the books therein are not written in English, there is still a universal bookstore atmosphere that is instantly recognizable.

As a lonely bookish kid, an only child, I found out early that libraries and bookstores were my friends. Librarians and booksellers were kind to the child who loved books. They guided my reading in ways that many teachers (though they were good, too) were unable to do.

My first book store was a little shop near the boardwalk in Virginia Beach, Virginia, many years ago when my grandparents lived in that resort town. Then it was a much smaller place than it is now. I was ten or eleven and got a dollar a week for my allowance. Every Saturday, with my dollar burning a hole in my pocket, I would walk along the Atlantic Ocean, past the carnival rides, the bumper cars and ferris wheels and loop-de-loops, past the cotton candy and salt-water taffy venders, past the bronzed and oiled sunbathers and the bronzed and oiled and muscular bodybuilders and the clown selling balloons, until I crossed the boardwalk and onto the first street, where my bookstore was waiting.

There, for 99 cents I would buy a Hardy Boys book. They were indeed only 99 cents in those days: hardbacks with slipcover jackets with their exciting color picture on the front. I would take my penny change home and put it in a jar, where I knew that, when I had saved 99 pennies, I would be able to get a bonus Hardy Boys. In time, my little bookshelf on the headboard of my bed would be lined with volume after volume of the Hardy Boys, my first literary passion. And by then the booksellers had gotten to know me.

One Saturday, when I had perhaps run through all the Hardy Boy volumes in stock, one young man, probably no more than 21 years of age, passed me a copy of Treasure Island. I went home, read it, transfixed for days, and was hooked. After that, as I walked along the beach, I saw pirates everywhere, and pieces of eight and doubloons and parrots and storm-tossed beaches with treasure buried beneath lonely palm trees. To this day, I still adore that book, and reread it often. Its magic never fades. Nor do the fabulous N.C. Wyeth illustrations.

I cannot imagine—don’t even want to try!—reading Treasure Island for the first time on a Kindle. Or a Nook.

One thing I don’t remember, but should, is how I paid for that copy of Treasure Island. I know it cost more than the dollar I had in my pocket. In those days, it may have even been as wildly exorbitant as $2.95. I suspect that the young sales clerk and book lover cut me a deal. As a bookseller, I too have done the same thing many times. Nothing is more exciting than finding the perfect book for some eager child, knowing that it may change his or her life.

 

But perhaps there is hope. A new book has just come across my desk, recently published by the wonderful Pushcart Press, called Book Love. Edited by James Charlton and Bill Henderson, whom I don’t know, but whom I already love passionately, it is a little compendium of quotes by writers and book lovers about books and book stores and it is unabashedly and thrillingly anti-e-book. Opening to the first page, I read this:

“Book Love is a love letter from hundreds of writers and readers and their friends to the printed and bound book. We hear the book is in trouble. The e-reader is taking over like an invasive weed or a mutant carp.”

From that soul-mating beginning, Book Love goes on to fill its pages with wonderful gems from wonderful minds. Here are just a few examples:

“Some folks think that e-books will kill the hardcover, but I think the mass market is more at risk—it’s a short jump from disposable to virtual.” (Daniel Goldin)

“A book is like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than the book.” (Richard Howarth)

“Hundreds and thousands of people flock to book festivals . . . they cherish the book. And they believe this is an artifact they want in their lives.” (John B. Thompson)

“The [digital] present is more frightening than any imaginative future I might dream up. If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, he’d have a nervous breakdown.” (William Gibson)

“People go into book publishing and bookselling because they want to be involved with words and books. They don’t want to make money. Those technology people are in love with games, in love with computers, and in love with making money. They have no problem talking about units.” (Michael Lynton)

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” (Neil Gaiman)

“The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.” (Andrew Ross)

Well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Pick up this little gem of a book called Book Love (Pushcart Press, 2011). You may, like me, find it comforting.

By the way, to any critical types who may read this: the irony is not lost on me that my column is a digital one, coming to you via your computer or iPad or whatever, Dude. But I am not such a Luddite that I would rather chip my column out on stone or have it published in a scroll. I know where my readers are and where they will look for people like me to read. So here I am in cyberspace. I am immensely fond of my fellow writers on this “-zine,” and suspect that they are all kindred souls. We write online because that is where someone who likes us put us. If indeed Weekly Hubris came out in a hard-copy, newspaper or magazine format, with real pages to turn, I would be ecstatic to see my column there as well.