TriQuarterly Blog

Hours of the Universe: The Bookstore CosmonautEvery moment, the world is growing smaller. There are no lands left unmapped, no peoples undiscovered, no businesses left un-yelped. When I do find a store with fewer than three Yelp! reviews, I find it endearing as a result. Cyber indifference is the last frontier.

When driving home from a wedding in Indiana Amish country, my girlfriend and I stopped in South Bend, home to Notre Dame University, to find a good bookstore and see The Word of Life mural, better known as “Touchdown Jesus” (her idea; she’s a keeper).  Not knowing where to turn for bookstores beyond the campus store, I turned to Yelp!. There were two or three stores in downtown South Bend that looked promising, but they were all closed on Sunday morning. The only store open to us that day, Pandora’s Books, boasted a single review, and let’s just say it was not most flattering Yelp! review I had ever read. But it was a voice in the wilderness.

Approaching Pandora’s by car, the lone reviewer’s complaints of an odd neighborhood seemed unfounded. Pandora’s is located in that strange place found in all college towns: the place where academics and real people try to live together in harmony. There were brick homes with ivy-colored walls on one side of the street, and houses with vinyl siding and satellite dishes in the front yards on the other, but there was more charm than oddity.

The foyer of Pandora’s was littered with Barnes and Noble boxes over-filled with un-marked manila envelopes. Upon entrance, we were met by a big, beautiful, barking golden retriever. We were the only customers, and the single Sunday morning employee calmed the dog’s barking quickly. He plays hide and seek with Shadow, he told us, who  barked at us because we had hidden poorly. He cheerfully inquired if we were looking for some particular title. When we told him that we were just browsing, he replied with an irony-free “Right on.” See what I mean? Endearing.

Pandora’s possessed an odor unlike any other I’d smelled in a bookstore. The closest I came to finding a match is the smell of the workshop at the nursery of a family friend. As a child, my sister and I would accompany our parents to find flowers on Saturday mornings. At the end of each trip, we would go into the office to pay. The office was a small, cinderblock building with small windows and no air conditioning. There were pesticides and fertilizers on the shelves, but the smell I recognized at Pandora’s came from the earthy smell of damp soil.  It’s the smell of new growth and discovery.  It is not the smell of a bookstore, but perhaps it should be.

Like the shelves at Morris Clint’s nursery, the bookcases at Pandora were made of cinder blocks and plywood planks. There were more used Bibles than I had ever seen gathered in one place - clearly the used book depot of a Roman Catholic university town. The theology section rivaled the literature section in both depth and breadth. The poetry section housed a copy of Modern Greek Poetry and a 20-year-old boom box blaring classic rock. We heard The Shondells’ version of “Mony, Mony,” and The Police’s “Spirits in a Material World.” Right on indeed.

Despite finding a neurology coloring book and a velvet, black light crucifix (which, in retrospect, was probably not for sale), I did not purchase anything from Pandora’s.  There was a name-your-own-price table, but most of the items on it were various takes on Rudy, which I already own on VHS. I would have liked to support Pandora’s, but by the end of my visit, I had the sense that it exists for reasons larger than my checking account.

Hours of the Universe: The Bookstore CosmonautIt’s a good feeling, knowing exactly what you want and exactly where to find it. It’s satisfying to know that you can walk into a store and ignore all of the things that some other sucker will get tricked into buying. For weeks, I’d been reading reviews of Chad Harbach’s first novel, The Art of Fielding, and I knew that I wanted it. Giddy with anticipation, I decided I wouldn’t take any chances on an independent bookseller’s quixotic taste for what promised to be an exciting read. This was a job for Barnes and Noble.

You may not know, but Barnes and Noble allows its customers to browse its shelves without even walking through its doors - pretty handy if you’re the sort of person who likes to avoid such rigors as driving, looking both ways to cross the street, or putting on pants. All that’s required of the customer is a visit to the B&N website, a search by title, author name or keyword, and a zip code. With that information, the B&N customer is given a list of stores within a preset radius and an option to reserve the book if it’s in stock or a big, red OUT OF STOCK notification if it is, in fact, out of stock. As fate would have it, my local B&N had sold all their copies of Mr. Harbach’s novel.

Undaunted, I checked daily, hourly even. I imagine that I was more concerned with this B&N’s inventory than even its most diligent store manager. I was singular in my determination. Days the length of years passed. Finally, a truck carrying the book I yearned for arrived at the loading dock. I reserved my copy to be held at the counter for 48 hours and registered to be alerted by text message and email when the book had been placed safely behind the counter. 30 minutes, a nearly simultaneous ring, flash, and buzz later, my cell phone and computer screen confirmed that my copy of The Art of Fielding had been removed from the conspicuous "New in Hardcover" table - like a puppy pulled from the cage at the animal shelter - and set apart for me to take it home. 

After work, I strolled, brimming with confidence, to the bookstore. I met a friend in the street whose love of books and baseball drew her to the title, too, and I bragged of my imminent purchase.  I left her jealous and hummed the final bars of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as I strode up to the doors. I stepped around the "Nook" display at the store’s entrance and ignored the salesman who refused to see that I was indifferent to his digital wares. "I’m here for your dead trees and ink, good sir. You need not waste your breath on me." There it was on the "New Arrivals" table: white lettering on royal blue background. Simple, elegant, and nearly mine.

Not wishing to appear overzealous, I wandered the aisles of the store as if contemplating an additional purchase. Amidst works of fiction, I discovered a table marked “Thought provoking…” Still basking in the glow of my acquisition, I chuckled to myself as I picked up a copy of Ted, White, and Blue, Ted Nugent’s bestselling “Nugent Manifesto.” Thought provoking, indeed. "Enough," I said aloud as I  sauntered to the front of the store, startling the bookwormish undergraduate hunched over the "Local Authors" table. En route, I encountered the "Featured Authors" table, piled high with the work of Chelsea Handler, with whom I am only lately familiar. As I passed a "Beatles" table, I nearly gave into the urgent and hitherto latent desire for a Yellow Submarine lunchbox. Invited to approach the counter at last, I informed my summoner that he was caretaker to an item that I wished to purchase (at the discounted online price and the additional ten percent discount afforded B&N members).

Leaving the store, the magic dissipated. The book was mine now. I had employed little energy or ingenuity obtaining it. I knew precisely what I wanted and where to get it. A satisfying experience indeed, but a safe satisfaction that did not contain the romance and delight of discovering something unexpected. I’m sure I’ll read The Art of Fielding, and I’m sure I’ll find it at least as thought provoking as Ted, White, and Blue. But for now, it sits on my nightstand, waiting to shake the weight of "New Arrival" status.

This last week of September is Banned Books Week, an annual event in which libraries, bookstores, and news media celebrate freedom to read. According to the American Library Association:

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

I blogged previously about the most-challenged books of 2010. This week, banned or challenged authors speak out in the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog. Today’s essay is by children’s book author Susan Patron. She asks authors to consider their own possible contribution to banning, by self-censorship. She writes:

Do we writers confuse our job with that of teachers, religious leaders, parents? Their job is to set examples, establish limits and rules, teach good manners, pass along moral values, exercise sound judgment, and model appropriate behavior for children to imitate. The job of writers and other artists is to prod and poke, to provoke questions, to challenge assumptions, to lift that corner of the rug and give readers a look at what’s been swept underneath. Our job is to respect readers of any age, which means to be honest with them.

This year’s Banned Books Week features a Virtual Read-Out, in which anyone can upload or watch 2-minute videos of readers of all ages reading from banned or challenged books on a dedicated Youtube channel. The message is irrefutable: Read what you want, all you can, and write what you need to write.

A recent Harris Poll says that people who own e-readers buy more books, whether print or electronic. I don’t think the study compares the same consumers before and after buying e-readers, so it seems possible that the e-reading group are predisposed to more reading regardless of medium. The poll breaks down book-buying habits by genre and by age group and has some interesting data. I don’t think we need another survey to tell us that electronic media are here to stay and successful publishers will have to adapt and innovate.

Libraries have been lending e-readers and e-books for some time now, and with some controversy. I mentioned previously that HarperCollins is imposing limits on the number of times an e-book can be borrowed under one paid license. This week’s news is that the Kindle now provides a free platform for borrowing library books. Just go to your local library website, select the book, and direct it to your Amazon account, then download the book for a two-week loan. You can save your margin notes and highlights should you re-borrow or purchase the book in the future.

How much are you reading online? E-reader or tablet computer? Lately I’ve been getting used to the smaller screen on my smartphone and carrying just that. Well, and maybe also a glossy magazine or two. And a writing/sketching journal. And a selection of pens. And notecards. . . .