A Local Bookish Light in the Coming Darkness

Writing last week's post about Barnes and Noble and my love of bookstores reminded me it was time to poke the interwebs to see if any new bookstores have opened in my area. I do this every once in a while, usually with only the smallest glimmer of hope. I mean, I do read the local paper, and our city being a pretty small one, they do report pretty thoroughly on new businesses opening up. (Our paper is cutting edge, shut up.)

But lo! This time there was a hit for a store I hadn't heard about. I clicked some links, waiting to find out it was the kind of specialty shop I have no interest in: antique guns and old local maps and every book on military history ever written! ...Actually, that sounds kind of interesting, now I think on it, but it doesn't really fall in the same category as a general interest bookstore. 

But no! New and used books, the links said. Downtown, the directions said. I grumbled a little about the downtown part (one way streets, hassle-y parking), but I girded my endsheets and screwed up my French flaps and set out to find this newcomer. After getting "lost" (I knew where I was, just not where I was in relation to where I wanted to be) and navigating the narrowest parking garage in Virginia (probably), and walking in the wrong direction for half a block (I'm more of a country kind of a person, okay?), I found the bookstore!

Ya'll, this is the tiniest, most excellent bookstore I have ever seen. If this space was larger than my living room, I'll eat my blog. (Shh, I don't know how I would do that either. Shhh.) So their depth of stock was, like, not, but what a delight it was to browse their shelves. Classics, picture books, YA, thrillers, general fiction, sff, local authors, and general nonfiction all had their little sections of the store, and the books on offer were both highly desirable titles and in excellent shape. (I broke my book-buying ban, guys. I had to. Local store, must support. That I broke it about 2.5 times more thoroughly than was probably necessary is a fact we just won't linger over.) Only one person was staffing the store (I don't think there would have been room for anyone else), and we had the best chat about the books I'd selected, the store itself, and events they had coming up. 

After the not-great news coming out of B&N Land, this was such a nice little lift up. While this store wouldn't could replace a Barnes & Noble-shaped hole in my life, it goes a long way to making me a wee bit less verklempt about the apparently (?) impending (?) doom (?) of Barnes and Noble. I will be doing my level best to brave the wilds of downtown and use some of my monthly allowed book purchases to support them with my dollars. 

Ominous Changes Come to Barnes and Noble

If you are elbows-deep in books news like I am, you've almost certainly heard about the recent layoffs at Barnes and Noble and the subsequent speculation about what they mean for the future of the bookseller. The news doesn't seem to be bubbling up too far into the mainstream, however, so here's a quick summary of what's happened, a round-up of pieces about it, and a few of my thoughts about the situation for your very much perusing pleasure.

The Sitch:

Reports are that last Monday (12 February 2018), full-time Barnes and Noble employees across the country arrived at work to learn that they had been laid off. Reports differ about whether/how good severance packages offered were, and some laid-off employees have said that they were told they would be welcome to apply for part-time positions in a few weeks. Consensus seems to be that the lay offs came without warning. The first articles I read about the lay offs identified the jobs cut as lead cashiers, digital leads, and receiving managers. As more information came out, it sounds like B&N has fired all or nearly all of their full-time store employees nation-wide.

The Links:

*At Fortune, Barnes and Noble Is Laying Off Workers Amid Declining Sales

*At Publisher's Weekly, B&N to Save $40 Million Following New Layoffs

*On Tumblr, by a former employee, The Entirely Unnecessary Demise of Barnes & Noble

*From Book Riot, podcast episode 248, No Heroes, from 12:59 through 38:00

My Thoughts

Ouch, you guys. I don't see any way to look at this where it isn't bad news for book lovers. First, and most importantly, there's the human cost of the lay off. I know that lay offs aren't a new thing and that it's a reality for many, many people that they show up for work one day and find out there *is* no work. Knowing that doesn't make me feel any better about the several thousand people who just lost jobs that I valued them doing. Just, jeez.

Beyond that, my thoughts basically boil down into three main categories.

First: What does this mean for Barnes and Noble?
Of the many things I am not, near the top of the list is a business person. I wouldn't have the first notion how to run the business of a bookstore, never mind a bookstore chain, but I think any time a company dumps near-as-makes-no-difference all of their full-time, experienced employees, that's bad news bears for the company. 

Specifically, the employees that B&N has fired are the most knowledgeable employees, the employees most likely to be able to help customers choose books or help them solve problems on their Nooks. The people who are gone are the people who knew the most about helping customers in a bookstore. You can train just about anybody to look up inventory, point someone in the right direction, and run a cash register. You need knowledgeable, experienced people to help you find the perfect read for your aunt Sally who likes to knit and read about murder. The people who would have been best situated to do that at B&N are the people they just fired. 

That being the case, I'm expecting B&N as we know it will not be around much longer. Either they are in a spiral into failure and will be gone entirely in the near future (in this scenario, I assume these lay offs are a last gasp, not something anyone thought was a good idea in terms of how to run a bookstore) or they are looking to reinvent their stores, making them into something more like the grocery store, maybe. "We have stuff, we can point you to the stuff, but don't ask me how best to do up a Sunday roast." 

Second: What does this mean for book selling in America?
I mean, again, this is not my bailiwick. I envision some scenarios, though.

Maybe B&N carries on much as it has and it turns out not that many people were using the experience of those employees after all. (I doubt it, though. I think this is one of the primary reasons people go to a bookstore rather than ordering online.)

Maybe B&N reinvents themselves into a leaner version of what they are now and they become a more robust competitor for Amazon. Depending on what that leaner version looked like, this might be all right. More competition is good. Keeping brick and mortar bookstores open is good. 

Maybe B&N goes out of business and that sparks a resurgence in independent bookstores, causing already existing ones to thrive and more to open. Thumbs up. I'm not holding my breath on this one, though, honestly. I'm trying to imagine being a prospective small business owner and saying, "The chain failed in this market so obviously I will do great!" and I'm having a hard time picturing it.

Maybe B&N fails and another existing chain jumps in to take over many of their stores. Eh? Better than a stick in the eye, I guess. Also, how enthused I was about this would depend a lot on which chain did the jumping in. 

Maybe B&N fails and Amazon has less competition and the brick and mortar bookstore becomes even rarer. *sigh* I fear this is the road we are on, and I'm not about it. I think Amazon has a place in a robust book-selling market, but the fewer other choices we have, the worse off we are, I'd say. Also, while I imagine a lot of Barnes and Nobles are located in neighborhoods that have other options for book-getting (libraries, Targets, easy delivery by UPS or USPS, etc), book deserts are a thing, and even if closing stores aren't in places that most need better access to books, losing 600+ stores nationwide certainly isn't going to help.

Third: What does this mean for me?
Obviously I'm not an impartial observer here. I'm hugely invested in there being a bookstore in, if not my neighborhood, then at least my town. In my town, B&N is the only store selling primarily books that are primarily new. (Target has books; we have a used bookstore; we have no independent.) Going to the bookstore is a major thread in the fabric of my life. I don't just like to read, I like to go to the bookstore. I like to browse the shelves, I like to look at what's new, I like to pick up a book and read a little of it before I buy it, check out the font, the feel of the object in my hand. I know I'm not alone in this, but I know I'm almost certainly not the average book buyer either. But it isn't just those of us who are into the objectiness of the books who will lose out if there aren't any bookstores to go into. Browsing, in the way one can do in a store, cannot be replicated online. Or at least it has not yet been done so. You can browse online, but it is not browsing, it is not the kind of discovery that I revel in when all the books are lines up before me in neat, real rows. Is that a romanticized view of the bookstore? Yes, definitely, a bit. But it is also true.

And While I'm Wishing, I'd Also Like a Pony

As a book lover and a bookstore lover, this is what I'd love to see Barnes and Noble do. There may be a floppity gillion business-y reasons why none of this would work, but it's what I'd like, in my dreamland bookshop of bliss:

*Give the books pride of place in the store. Don't make me walk through umpty-dump displays of stuff before I get to them. Especially get the Nook display away from the front door. I have no problem with ebooks or with a bookstore having an ereader and staff who can sell it to customers and help them use it or troubleshoot it. But let the bookstore be a bookstore, not an electronics store. Put the Nook counter off to the side somewhere easy to find. Don't make me walk around it to get to the physical books.

*Continue to sell coffee but reduce the cafe seating. Use some of the saved space to maintain a better depth of stock and to...

*Provide scattered clusters of comfortable seating throughout the store. You want people to browse and stay a while looking at your products. Give them somewhere to rest a moment and further consider their potential purchases. Allow customers to take their covered drinks into the stacks to seek out that comfortable seating. Now they are enjoying their coffee in eye-line of a book they might buy instead of segregated in a separate section of the store where they might not see another thing for sale other than the drink they are sipping.

*Provide an easy-to-access, customer-friendly in-store computerized method of checking the store's stock. Include a way within this system for customers to see where the book is in that store. If the employees can see that the book is supposed to be on an end-cap in Fiction, customers should be able to see that too.

*Bring back New Releases Shelving. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: shelving the new releases among all the stock instead of separating them out is a terrible idea. The fastest way to make me click a button on Amazon rather than coming to your store is to make browsing in your store hard. Shelving the new releases this way makes browsing in your store hard.

*Reduce the amount of stuff in the store that is not books. Fewer toys, fewer games, fewer puzzles, fewer gifts, less stationary. Not none. A nice selection of unique items in all of these lines seems like a perfect accompaniment to books. But streamline it. Make it take up less space.

*Increase depth of stock. Obviously some titles are never going to be worth keeping in stock because it is so unlikely that anyone will buy them. But do better. Expand the romance, mystery, and SFF sections. Consider splitting SFF into separate science fiction and fantasy sections. Make it a policy to keep the first book of any series you carry in stock at all times. Get in stock backlist titles by authors who have new books coming out. 

*For the love of all printed matter, get new releases on the shelves by opening time on Tuesday mornings. Nothing is worse than dropping by to pick up a new release you've been waiting for for months only to find that you don't have it yet.

*In short, be a bookstore above all else. I feel a little flippant here, I'll be honest, but I wonder if the answer to competing in the current bookish marketplace isn't trying to be a little bit of everything but being the one thing bookish people can't get online: a pleasant, quietish place to browse and discover and linger.


I don't actually want a pony don't nobody give me a pony.

Wanting to Want Fewer Books

I have never been terribly discerning about the books I buy. I have always spent my book budget on whatever looks interesting, gathering a collection of books I might like to read some day. In my early adulthood, this method worked reasonably well for me. My book budget was small, so my collection grew at a fairly slow rate, and I was in grad school for English, so it made a certain amount of sense to snag books I knew I would have to read whenever I came across them, especially if it was on the cheap. But as the money available to buy books has increased and the books I will have to read has decreased with my circumstances (pretty much to zero), this method has become unwieldy and almost absurd. I now buy far more books in a year than I could read in the same time. For me, the point of owning books has never been solely to be able to read them, so I spent a few years unperturbed by my wacky ratio of books bought to books read, figuring that if we had the money and the space and if it brought me joy to acquire so many books, where was the harm?

I still think pretty much along those lines, except that we don't really have the space any more (there are only so many places you can put bookshelves in a house, alas), and almost more importantly, I no longer think it brings me joy to acquire so many books. I still love (*love*) a good browse and splurge in the bookstore, but it's become a bit like the way I love French fries: fully and genuinely in the moment, but not so much in the long term. I will never be able to read everything that's ever been written, and having so many unread books in the house is starting to feel more like a sad reminder of that fact than an abundance of reading riches. 

I've been hovering for a few years on the realization that I will have to alter my book-buying habits (or somehow score a Beauty-and-the-Beast-level library--and the kind of house palace that could hold it), but a recent development has made me want to. We have a spare room in our basement (I think of it as the lumber room, but I think we're in the wrong century for that to be entirely apt), and we recently cleared it out (again--I swear stuff multiples down there). We ordered a few more bookshelves to put in the cleared out space and to relieve some of our upstairs bookcases of their double-shelved burdens. I spent much of this past weekend reorganizing the shelves in the sunroom (my "office," where my desk, my couch, and most of my books are--and where I spend most of my waking hours) and hauling some two hundred books downstairs. The sunroom shelves are so much more open now. Don't get me wrong--there's no free space, no room to set a nice vase of flowers or a treasured tchotchke or anything. Some of the shelves still have a small "extra" stack of books sitting in front of the row or resting across the line of books. But none of the shelves are fully double-shelved anymore, and the crevices between bookcases are no longer stuffed with the odd books that just had no where else to go. And I like it. I like being able to see everything that's there. I like the little slivers of empty space. I like the tidiness of it, the sense of abundance coupled with control. I like that the books do not seem to be completely taking over the room. I like it so much that I want to keep it that way. And the only way to do that is to be discerning about which books come into the house from now on. (And more ruthless about which ones leave. But that is a topic for another day.)

I hear tell of readers who only keep the books that have special meaning to them. I never saw the appeal in that before, but I'm getting to a place where I can just about imagine it. It sounds freeing. And terrifying. Something to contemplate... another time, perhaps.

The Well-Laid Plans of a Mood Reader

I talked last month about how being a mood reader sometimes gets in the way of my overall intentions for my reading. So in 2018 I'm starting my reading year with a plan! 

First I've identified the things that are important to me in my reading life:

Reading diversely

Supporting the library

Disrupting choice paralysis

Abandoning fewer books

In support of these things I value, I've laid out a few goals:

Read with intent.

I will always be a mood reader, and it will never work to try to force myself not to be. So I will still allow myself to choose a good deal of my reads by snatching up the thing that feels right for the moment. But I've set myself several goals of intent that should help me read more diversely: 

*Read at least ten books by authors of color

*Read at least ten books by LGBTQIA authors

*Read at least three poetry collections

*Read at least three books in translation

*Read at least four nonfiction books that are not memoirs

Read from my shelves.

I have so many books I haven't read. (So many.) And literally hundreds  of them are books I really, really want to read. Thing is, there will always be more books being published that I also really, really want to read. I will never get to read them all. So I'm aiming to ignore FOMO this year and concentrate on the books already in my possession. To that end, my goal is to:

*Read at least ten books I've been meaning to read (from my TBR)

For both of these first goals, I have made a list of possibilities from my own shelves to fit the goals. The lists are diverse in genre, so hopefully having something to turn to with lots of choices for lots of moods will help me choose a book to fill a goal based on my mood. (Geniuuuus.)

Buy Fewer Books

The best way to get myself to read the books I already have is to make that my only choice. However, I know from experience that  nothing short of true financial disaster or a complete denial of access to bookstores could keep me on a true book-buying-ban. So I'm shooting for a modified one:

*1-3 books purchased per month, the majority of which should not be impulse buys (that is, they should be books I know about, have read about, have been anticipating, maybe even that I've read a sample of online)

*1-2 books from Book of the Month club per month, with judicious use of the ability to skip months

*Purchase up to two sequels per month, provided that I am ready to read them  

*Whatever the distribution of books through allowances above, total number of books bought in any month from all sources may not exceed five

*Exceptions can be made for special occasions (e.g. a vacation which features a trip to a special bookstore) 

*Autobuys will not count, up to five autobuys for the year 

That works out to up to five books a month, or up to 60 books for the year (with the possibility of a handful of "extras"). That may not seem like much of a ban, but compared to recent years, it would be a massive improvement. Unfortunately, so far this modified ban is going... poorly. I gave myself permission to hold off on the ban until after I had spent some of my Christmas gift money. And, well, oops? Ban starts *now*. You! Yes, you. In the bathrobe reading this from behind a cup of tea an hour after you should have gone to bed. Hold me to it, okay? TY.

In support of buying fewer books, I plan to:

*Use the library as a treat rather than the bookstore

I often treat myself to half an hour in the bookstore after a hard day or after accomplishing something that was a challenge. I won't completely deny myself this pleasure, but I'm planning on using the library for this purpose more. When I inevitably walk out of the library with a stack of books, I can take them back again no harm done instead of desperately trying to find shelf space for them and kicking myself for bringing even more reading choices into the house.

Choose Reads from Small Piles

I get paralyzed by too much choice super easily. I look at my bookshelves and find so many things I would like to read that suddenly I don't want to read any of them. Buying fewer books should help stem this problem for me, but I'm also implementing a new plan to choose my next reads from a small group. For example, if I'm in the mood for a romance, I will pick five romances from my shelf and choose from those alone. Or if I'm not in any particular kind of mood, I'll just grab five books at random from which to choose. Or choose from among the ten books I purchased most recently. Or choose any one book from any one shelf. Or make use of my LibraryThing catalogue where I have things extensively tagged. (Dataaaa).

If I can pull off all these individual goals, I think abandoning fewer books will just happen on its own, as I'm quite sure that is primarily a function of reading aimlesssly and choice paralysis.

So there it is. The Plan. May it survive longer than any of the other reading plans I have ever devised. *pets plan*

How about you? Do you have a reading plan for 2018?

Gratitude and Joy: Family and Friends and Christmas

Gratitude and Joy: Day 25

I am grateful for:

Friends and Family
I'm certainly not unique in having moved far away from my family or in finding it harder to make friends in my thirties than it was at any other time of my life. I've always been blessed with great friends and wonderful family, but being away from so many of the people I care for the most puts that in sharp relief. I'm grateful for every one of my friends, my family, and the husbeast. The older I get the more I think that making connections with other humans is the point of life. 


I feel joyful in the presence of:

Christmas
While I don't necessarily feel the religious joy of Christmas that devout Christians do, there is something about this time that does touch me, that does fill me with joy. Maybe it's a learned response, maybe it's some kind of collective memory of light festivals around the winter solstice, maybe it really is the good news. Whatever the reason, of Christmas "I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"*


*A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Stave I

Gratitude and Joy: Our Weather Guy and Giddy Scrooge

Gratitude and Joy: Day 24

I am grateful for:

Our Local Weather Guy
The gentleman who does weather commentary in our local paper is amazing. He knows his stuff and he explains it well, always making clear what's actually happening all up in the atmospheres and explaining what might develop and what's likely to develop. Our weather is pretty much 90% run of the mill, but the other 10% might kill you. I find his level-headed, intelligent commentary indispensable and frankly, instrumental in helping me keep perspective in a world where alarmist weather sells. 

I feel joy watching:

Scrooge Finding Joy in His Redemption
My favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol is the 1951 version staring Alastair Sim (which is called Scrooge). Sim's portrayal of Scrooge is stunningly perfect, and part of what makes it so good is his performance of the reformed Scrooge. The last seven or eight minutes of the movie is made up of one brilliant joyful scene after another. Here's one of my favorite sequences. This one is a close, close second. (The background music here is perfect.*) Neither of these is the famous Boxing Day morning scene, which you should watch too. It'll have popped up to the side if you clicked either of those links. Oh, just go watch the whole movie.

*"Barbara Allen," what is about how regret over being hardhearted toward your fellow humans can kill you. Scrooge takes a different path by choosing to fix it/himself before it's too late.

Gratitude and Joy: Choir and Es Ist ein Ros Entsprungen

Gratitude and Joy: Day 23

I am grateful for:

My Experiences in Choir
Those of you who have been following along with me here have probably gathered that I deeply cherish the time I spent in choirs when I was in school. In addition to simply loving that time and relishing the memories of that time, I will always be grateful for the way being a part of those choirs taught me that discipline and enjoyment can go hand in hand and the greater appreciation for music it gave me as well.


I feel joy listening to:

"Es Ist ein Ros Entsprungen"
"Es Ist ein Ros Entsprungen" ("Lo, How a Rose e'er Blooming") is another one of those Christmas songs that just stops me dead in my tracks. I feel connected to something greater and timeless when I hear it.