Bookstore missive

[grladams at teleport.com]

yeah!
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [employee.burnside] [employee.company] a writer writes about
Powell's
From:    "Dave Weich" <dave @ powells . com>
Date:    Wed, June 25, 2008 10:11 am
To:      "Company Wide Employee Distribution List"
<employee . company@ lists . powells . c om>
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Hey, if you didn't see yesterday's post by this week's guest blogger,
Mary Pols, it's worth a look. I've copied the text below if you prefer
that to the link.
http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=3439

Dave


Pricing Book Lust Versus Bookstore Love

Going on book tour means a lot of time dropping by the mega-chains to
sign stock, all of them a blur of sameness, cavernous spaces where books
seem almost like afterthoughts to the business of selling lattes,
magazines and movies we've already seen.

But I've also been to many independent stores, among them the legends
like Book Soup in Los Angeles and the sweet upstarts, like the charming
Queen Anne Books in Seattle. In these places, I explored rather than
searched, and felt myself growing almost physically rounder as I did so,
filling with possibilities for the mind.

Always, though, there were reminders of the realities of the business. I
spent more than an hour in the magnificent children's section at
Seattle's Elliott Bay Books, half listening to a grandmother reading
books to her granddaughter. Based on their clothing and the woman's cell
phone discussions of dinner reservations, they were far from a poor
family. But as they were leaving, the girl asked if they could buy one
of the books. "I'll get it somewhere else," the grandmother told her.
"Somewhere cheaper." She's the kind of shopper who came to mind a few
hours later when I heard that Cody's Books, one of the most important
independent bookstores in the Bay Area - where I live - was closing its
doors for good after 52 years in the business.

Visiting Powell's this morning was a welcome tonic, then. It's the
granddaddy and grandson of them all in a way: a place so thriving and
sprawling it seems it has to have a future. I joined throngs of happily
dazed shoppers who looked as if they were touring a Louvre where they
were allowed, for a small fee, to take home the art. While I browsed, I
thought about a quote from Dorothy Sayers that I'd picked up somewhere
in my travels, most likely at the sweetly pretentious hipster hotel
where I am staying in Portland, a block away from Powell's:

"Books are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we
grow out of 'em and leave them behind, as evidence of our earlier stages
of development."

Now, Lord Peter Wimsey was one of my first great crushes (Busman's
Holiday, when he and Harriet get married? Fabulous), so far be it for me
to disrespect Sayer. I know she's right about them representing the
earlier stages of our development. In bookstores I often visit books I
don't need as some people might visit old friends (which means I can
report that Powell's has a dazzling array of Arthur Ransome's Swallow
and Amazon series). But the leaving behind part, I'm not that good at.
Does having boxes of them in your garage rather than your apartment
count?

I looked for my own book, for its Tiffany blue cover, the one that I
imagine the clever marketing team at HarperCollins thought would say
'Let me be tasteful and winning on your bedside table!' (I hope it at
least bleats, 'Read me while you're at it.') I signed all the copies of
Accidentally on Purpose Powell's had and wished it well. And then I went
upstairs to see if I could find my dead father. If anyone had him, it
would be Powell's.

Edward Pols was a philosopher, a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine.
He wrote dense philosophical studies, toiling over them as if they'd
have an audience of millions, rather than the perhaps hundreds who would
actually be able to make heads or tails of them. (I cannot count myself
among those hundreds.)

Under the shelves of Plato, Powell's had his book Radical Realism,
published by Cornell University Press in 1992. Slim but daunting.
Although I have this book at home in California, I still picked it up in
Oregon and read the introduction, a recollection by my father of a
simple moment from college that set him off on a course of thought that
endured six decades later.

He was there on that page, a lobster shell still too big for me to crawl
out of, and I wiped furtive tears from my face. But I was thrilled to
know that he is at Powell's, waiting for someone. I understand what
Sayers was saying about us growing out of books as individuals. I just
hope her words will never be applied to us as a society. And I wish that
that woman at Elliott Bay had bought her granddaughter a damn book.
Wasn't the selection worth that extra $4 to her? The setting? The chair
she occupied for close to an hour? It is a privilege to be in a great
bookstore, either in print or in person.



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