Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Over on Electrolite a raging discussion is going on (well, it's not "raging" so much as "active") about the merits of independent bookstores versus the "giants", the chain megaliths like Borders and Barnes&Noble.

My take on this is simple: I love both of the big chains, and I wouldn't much like life without them.

As is the case with so many things in life, how we view the Big Bookstore Chains arises from our experiences as readers. My formative years as a book buyer, which pretty much began when I was ten and started receiving an allowance with which I was more likely to buy books than toys, were spent living in a small town in western New York, in which there was a single bookstore -- a tiny independent in the local mall. We're talking a store the size of a small WaldenBooks, in a mall housing forty stores. (Both the mall and the bookstore are still there.) That was it. My reading search either started there or at the local library.

Now, as a family we weren't content to spend every day and every weekend in that town. I was blessed in that my parents loved going for long drives, so just about every week we would pile in the car and go to Buffalo, Rochester, or Erie, PA. At those cities we would go to the bigger malls -- places that had ritzier stores than we had at home, stores like JCPenney -- and I would shop for books at Waldens or B. Dalton. (Aside: I haven't seen a B. Dalton in years. Do they still exist?) Then my sister went to college, and then to grad school (in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, respectively), so I got to go to independent bookstores in both cities. I don't recall Pittsburgh so much, but Buffalo's major independent bookstore was Talking Leaves Books. (It still is, actually, and Talking Leaves is proof positive that independents can actually fluorish: not only is its original location doing just fine, but they actually opened a second store on Buffalo's trendy Elmwood Strip two years ago. Granted, none of Buffalo's three Big Chain locations is within five miles of either Talking Leaves location.) I enjoyed Talking Leaves, but the books they stocked -- literature, humanities, and the like -- didn't suit my reading interests, so I rarely ended up shopping there. As for genre bookstores, Buffalo did have a science-fiction bookstore, but I don't recall it having a very large inventory, as it was a small place and also dedicated to comics and fantasy role-playing paraphernalia. And in any event, at the time my reading interests in SF and fantasy were along the lines of Stephen R. Donaldson, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov (who was still alive and quite active then), Terry Brooks, and the like. In short, nothing that couldn't be found in a shopping mall Waldens. In terms of indepent stores with better selection than mall stores, I was more concerned with music at the time than books. I wanted a store where I could find four or five recordings of a symphony by Shostakovich or of an obscure opera by Verdi. This was the beginning of my flaming interest in classical music.

In terms of books, once I turned back toward literary interests, the Big Chains were beginning to show up. I was thrilled then, and I still am thrilled, that I can find a wonderfully diverse selection of reading material, and that I can find it without driving to the biggest cities. The Big Chains represented, for me, a step up, not a step down. Do I wish there were staff members who were more well-versed in SF and Fantasy? Sure. But I'm pretty well-versed on what's coming out, and I know that I've probably gone to one of the Big Chains looking for a specific title, and left with that specific title in my hands, around ninety percent of the time. I also love the diversity possible, when I can walk into a bookstore and walk out an hour later with a reissue of a Doc Smith space opera; a mass-market paperback of a Larry McMurtry Western; a horror novel by an author whose surname is not Andrews, King or Koontz; and a cookbook of recipes from Provence. (And that's just assuming that I don't wander into the music section.)

Are there troubling aspects to having so much of the book business concentrated in two large corporate entities? Sure. Am I happy with the magazine selection in the Big Chain locations in Syracuse? Not really. (Buffalo's stores were much better at carrying genre magazines; I could read them all, the months they came out. Here, Locus seems to run a month behind; while I can find Analog and Asimov's easily enough, I haven't seen a single issue of F&SF since I moved; ditto Weird Tales, Absolute Magnitude, Dreams of Decadence, et cetera.) But do I still love walking into a store that's bigger than any Gap store I've seen in any mall, and seeing that store filled with books? Damn straight.