Max forwarded me this article entitled "Two-Make that Three cheers for the Chain Bookstores!"and here is a particularly interesting part:
Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. "I am a reader," the interior litany goes, "therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers." With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.[...]
Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)...the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in.
I love a cozy bookstore as much as anyone, but if I really care about improving the reading habits of the general public, and the dissemination of knowledge as i so fervently claim to, doesn't this make sense?
2 comments:
It does make sense, but you hate to admit it. It's kinda like the struggle I have when the gen ed "cultural arts" class comes to orchestra and chamber concerts. They clap between all the movements and talk during the entire thing and run for the door when it's over. But if I really think that music can save the world, doesn't everybody have to be involved?
Balance balance balance. It is a tough call. Last night I went to hear the Georgia Guitar Quartet (just delightful by the by) in Park City. You'd think people who frequent the Deer Valley Music Festival wouldn't clap between movements or wouldn't fidget with their date's hair. But alas....
Remember that Mass in Latin kept the peasants beholden to the church. Once they understood what was being said all hell broke loose.
It always comes back balance and subsequently, you can find those little bookstores or other haunts we hold so dear.
I LOVE that you call your blog Brooke Erin The Librarian.
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