Bookstore Blues
With bookstores as with people, the narrower their sense of Now, the more tenuous they are.
On a lunch break the other day at my new place of work, I took a ride to the neighboring town to visit a bookstore I’d heard about for years but had never entered. It was a fine enough small shop; given the dearth of bookshops in suburban New York, any community would certainly be lucky to have it. I browsed for a bit before heading back to the office, bearing no new books but carrying a lurking sense of dissatisfaction, one that wasn’t unfamiliar; I’d felt it more often than I liked in the past few years, in too many of the bookstores I entered. I’d scan the display shelves of bestsellers and books of the moment, then turn to browse backlist sections of interest, only to discover no interest, because the stock was sparse, without depth, bereft of surprises — or, more exactly, devoid of reminders, echoes of those resonant curiosities readers always carry inside their heads, at the back of their minds, in the reservoir of reference and recommendation, intuition and erudition that feeds every browser’s hope: not that they will find a book, but that a book will find them.
Nothing was going to find me here. I knew it a few moments after I’d walked into the store on that lunchtime sortie, and the disappointment shadowed me the rest of the day, a dejection like that I’d felt in a dozen other well-ordered, earnestly — even imaginatively — run bookshops in the past few months. It struck me especially hard this time because I couldn’t shake the idea that the fault was mine. Was my own lack of imagination to blame? Had my decades of book hunting finally sunk me into a fatigue I couldn’t overcome? Was it because I was too old and settled in my expectations of what a good bookstore should be? Or — god help me — were books looking right past me, ignoring me with that same dismissive gaze the world starts to direct at us when we reach a certain age, assigning us a social invisibility we never quite admit to ourselves but can’t ever deny? Were even books now disregarding me, casually passing over my presence with no sign of recognition? No wonder I wanted to hurry out of that store.
“The book you need is right next to the one you are looking for,” Aby Warburg once said; no more.
Some days later, I read the following description, from the Times of London, of James Daunt’s first day on the job as the new leader of my erstwhile employer:
“Crazy… Irrational… Catatonic… Rubbish… Abysmal… Tired… No respect… A visual catastrophe… Jumble sale… Shoot-yourself-bad.” It’s 8am on James Daunt’s first day as the new chief executive of Barnes & Noble and he’s first on the floor of its four-storey, 60,000 sq ft flagship in Union Square in New York an hour before customers start arriving. He does not like what he sees. . . .
Daunt walks and talks with the air of a new maitre d’ making a fix-it list at a grand hotel fallen on hard times. “The missing range is terrifying. You want to go to a section and go, ‘Yep, everything that matters is here.’ It’s not.”
In light of my midlife (yes, I am being generous to myself) crisis in the bookstore earlier that week, I found this report not only amusing in the vehement accuracy of its bookselling diagnosis, but also comforting. If bookshelves in the wild really have, by and large, lost their luster for me, the despair I sometimes feel standing before them is surely the product of forces beyond my own aging attention and creeping sense of invisibility. After all, if a behemoth bookseller can’t summon the resources to maintain robust, engaging, bookish stores, how is it possible for small merchants to do so in the teeth of draconian retail economics and a ruthlessly unimaginative publishing industry? I know the answer all too well, and salute the faith of every missionary still putting books on shelves. It will be interesting to see how Daunt, whom I wish every success, confronts the fact that his biggest problem may not be the sclerotic operation he’s taken charge of, but the more salient fact that many of his publishing partners, in no small part responding to the utilitarian demands of Barnes & Noble and its ilk in the high-flying days of chain store expansion, have lost touch with the instincts demanded by the kind of bookselling Daunt seems to espouse, a condition more market-defining in the US than it is in the UK, where Daunt has so far successfully rejuvenated Waterstones.
This larger problem with the book business, planted by the chains and harvested and packaged by Amazon, is not so much a dumbing-down as a blinkered wising-up, another symptom of the shortsighted econosplaining of life that has had our culture in its thrall for several decades now. Reduce commerce to its transactional efficacy and redefine relevance in terms of click-tally or other measures of popularity and you get what you pay for: a book landscape dominated by the most cleverly promoted new releases, the current bestsellers, assorted fashionable literary treats, and a smattering of succès d’estimes. Gone are the deep stacks and dusty warrens where our readerly search for meaning might be mapped at whatever level of articulation was needed, eventually to be informed by other, overlapping maps further browsing might uncover in a week’s, month’s, or year’s time. Gone, in a palpable way, are the frames of reference a well-stocked bookstore metaphorically represents; what remains are disparate products, fighting for survival on one list or another, without any context beyond that provided by the in-the-moment newsfeed sensibility — epitome of a world which thinks it has nothing to learn — in which our fate is flickering away. “The book you need is right next to the one you are looking for,” Aby Warburg once said; no more.
“The narrower your sense of Now,” we read in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, “the more tenuous you are.” The words are spoken by a character named Kurt Mondaugen, and they explain a Law that, Pynchon tells us, will one day bear Mondaugen’s name: “Personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth,” with temporal bandwidth being “the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.” With bookstores as with people, the narrower their sense of Now, the more tenuous they are.
