24 February 2011

Where to Shop When You Can ‘t Shop at 200 Borders Stores Any More – or – Under-Super-Size Me, Please!

A while back I indulged in a quasi-gloat about the impending, now finalized, bankruptcy of Borders Books & Music, and the closing of 200 of their once super superstores.

Across the country, independent booksellers are racing to pick up the slack, to take the place of the superstore down the street that had threatened to send their bricks and their mortar into retail oblivion.

Relax, independent bookstores. You don’t have to do a thing. People who used to wander aimlessly into Borders, hypnotized by the smell of brewing coffee, will now wander into your stores.

At your typical Borders there are miles of aisles with no one in them. Books stacked any which way, not a worker in sight. No one to greet you, ask if you need assistance. No one to point the way to poetry.

It may surprise your Borders shopper that there is such an animal as a local, independently owned bookstore. When she stumbles in – well – freaky might describe it.

She is likely to be greeted by a smiling employee, often the owner herself, who offers assistance while remaining discreetly out of the way when she doesn’t want suggestions.

Eye contact is common in independent bookstores, which may also be disturbing to chain-store shoppers accustomed to roaming super-sized barns in uninterrupted fugue state. By the way, Dissociative or Psychogenic Fugue is a real disorder that causes temporary amnesia. It may have happened to you at Costco, for all I know.

You will not be fuguing in your independent bookstore. However, you may be tired from your long journey getting there, as Borders (and Barnes & Noble) have forced many local stores to close in recent years.

If you no longer know of an indie bookstore near you, direct your Googlelectric device to Indie Bound (unfortunate name) dot org. Insert zip code, and Indie Bound will return location and directions to reachable stores.

I did this just now for my own location, 95420, even though I know darn well where my local bookstores are located. Indie Bound returned the locations of 19 bookstores within 100 miles, ranging from Levin & Co. in Healdsburg and Treehorn in Santa Rosa, to the independents of Mendocino County: Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, Cheshire Books in Fort Bragg, the Book Juggler in Willits, Laughing Dog Books in Boonville, Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah and Four-Eyed Frog Books in Gualala.

Vroman’s in Los Angeles and Politics & Prose in Washington DC are among those exchanging virtually worthless Borders Rewards Cards for their own instore customer cards.

Roxanne Coady of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, asked her customers what she might do now that Borders is closing. She was astounded at the more than 200 responses she received.

Some people suggested things R.J. Julia, and most other independents, already do – shipping direct to customers, offering electronic books on portable flash drives, and so forth. Others asked for price discounting, always a troublesome issue for low-margin independents.

Ms Coady told a reporter at Bookselling This Week although she wants to make all of her customers happy, deep discounting isn't her business. "I've always felt we've got to stick to what we're good at, and it might mean that we're not everything to everybody. The question is, are there enough customers who want what we're good at?"

Other independents such as Copperfields stores and Bookshop Santa Cruz do discount a selection of new books. They and others plan to continue the discount policy and publicize it.

At Vroman’s in LA, more than 80 people already have turned in their Borders cards. They have discovered the joys of shopping locally where suggestions are available and everyone knows your name, but only if you want them to know it.



NOTES:

“Fugue state” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: A fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue (previously called Psychogenic Fugue) (DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders 300.13[1]), is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. After recovery from fugue, previous memories usually return intact, but there is complete amnesia for the fugue episode. Additionally, an episode is not characterized as a fugue if it can be related to the ingestion of psychotropic substances, to physical trauma, to a general medical condition, or to psychiatric conditions such as delirium, dementia, bipolar disorder or depression. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor (Dissociative Amnesia).

The Indie Bound (unfortunate name) independent bookstore finder...

Bookselling This Week on independent responses to Borders...

17 February 2011

Bogie

Thanks to author Stefan Kanfer for his new 255-page meditation “Tough Without A Gun, The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart.” This is non-fiction at its most interesting. I stayed up to 4 am today finishing the darn thing.

Kanfer, film critic and researcher, has written books on Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball, Marlon Brando and Yiddish theater. In his new work Kanfer has a triple subject: Humphrey Bogart the consummate actor, Humphrey Bogart the flawed and fascinating person, and Bogie the film legend who takes over when he’s on screen, still stands for a no-nonsense kind of American manhood, and refuses to fade away, long after others have been forgotten.

There already have been any number of good and useful books on Bogart, as Kanfer is the first to point out (and to borrow from). Bogart has “popped up in retro mysteries and pulp crime novels” and books by scholars, historians, fans and total strangers, all of whom were “unable to let go of (him).”

Why another book, and why now, more than 50 years since Bogie last appeared on screen? In the years since his death in 1957 “both the definition and the image of the male role had drastically changed... by the rules of history, Humphrey Bogart should have become obsolete, a faded image totally obscured by new faces and fresh interpretations of the male role.

“Instead, he became more prominent, looming larger as we moved away from his epoch,” Kanfer writes. “What he offered was more than a recreation of movies past, where men were men and women were unemployed. His masculinity was not swagger, but its opposite – a quiet, bitter recognition of reality...”

The final chapters deal with Bogart’s afterlife – his lasting effect on our culture. Kanfer could not have offered a compelling summation without the extensive biography that precedes it.

Kanfer pinpoints April 19, 1957, as the real beginning of the modern Bogart myth. The Brattle Theater in Cambridge MA ran a revival of the fifteen-year-old film Casablanca. Harvard students dropped in during exams week, and returned night after night, “wearing trench coats and dangling cigarettes from their lower lips, singing ‘La Marseillaise,’ shouting lines of dialog on cue.”

Soon other art houses were running Bogart retrospectives. Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Dix Steele, Fred C. Dobbs and Billy Dannreuther lived again in films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Petrified Forest, High Sierra, The Big Sleep, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The African Queen and many more.

At Bogart’s funeral, actor, friend and director John Huston said “Himself, he never took too seriously – his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with amused cynicism. Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect.”

Truman Capote, screen writer on Beat the Devil, wrote a famous tribute to Bogart after the star’s death, and many others joined in. French existential writer Albert Camus sported a Bogart-style trench coat and created characters that could be considered Humphrey Bogart clones (and clones of Hemingway characters, too). Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless starred Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a car thief “whose gestures mimic the Bogart style” from cigarette to facial tics.

Restaurants and bars took on names and furnishings lifted from Humphrey Bogart movies. Woody Allen used the Bogart myth in his “wistful comedy” Play It Again, Sam. There were Broadway plays and off-Broadway plays, London revues, pop songs, even a Bogart Collection from Thomasville Furniture featuring the Trench Coast Chair and the (Barefoot) Contessa Banquette.

Bogart was cool before “cool” was invented, someone once said. Kanfer agrees: “Chances are he would have been pleased to be the essence of cool.”

“In an unguarded moment,” Kanfer says, “(Bogart) gave a terse and accurate self-appraisal: ‘I’m a professional. I’ve done pretty well, don’t you think? I’ve survived in a pretty rough business.’”

He was true to himself. He knew his lines, paid his debts, showed up on time and did good work. All of that, enduring fame, and long-lasting influence. It’s not a small thing, what Humphrey Bogart accomplished.


NOTES:

“Tough Without A Gun” by Stefan Kanfer. Knopf hard cover $26.95 with many illustrations. ISBN 9780307271006.

Knopf’s pages on Stefan Kanfer

Chicago Sun Times book review of “Tough Without A Gun”

LA Times review

10 February 2011

Thoughts from my pea brain...

Sometimes ideas come floating in from all sorts of places, bump up against each other and sometimes it all makes sense, and sometimes it’s just another set of oddities in this odd but rapidly changing world we inhabit.

In my pea brain “The Imperfectionists,” an excellent novel, is bumping up against The Espresso Book Machine mentioned here last week, and both are bumping around with an article in the Economist on 3-Dimensional printers.

“The Imperfectionists,” is a highly entertaining debut novel by Tom Rachman. Written as a group of connected short stories, it concerns a fictional English-language daily newspaper published in Rome by a motley group of correspondents – very much based on The International Herald Tribune still published daily in Paris. Rachman in fact served as an editor there.

“The Imperfectionists” brought back for me memories of my own brief career in journalism and public relations. I knew people very much like Rachman’s characters. He has it down: the strange moods and stranger relationships in a big city newsroom.

Last week I poked fun at the new Espresso Book Machine now churning out books-on-demand at the Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse in La Cañada.

This week I found out what an Espresso Book Machine actually is. An opinion piece in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly claims instant reprints of long-forgotten titles are making a number of people quite happy.

Jeffrey Mayersohn, proprietor of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA, says his Espresso Book Machine, nicknamed Paige M. Gutenborg, or “Paige” for short, helps readers “connect with the literature of the past... (and) enables what we believe to be an important part of the future of publishing and bookselling.”

He calls Paige “a literary time machine.” One local poet found and printed a biography of his ancestor. Another customer, a telegraphy enthusiast, printed a copy of “Anglo-American Telegraphic Code to Cheapen Telegraphy & to Furnish a Complete Cypher For Use in General Correspondence Including Business, Social, Political & Other Subjects of Correspondence” first published in 1891.

Harvard Book Store prints about 1,500 books every month on Paige. Self-published works by contemporary authors make up about 75% of the books printed.

Readers in the store choose to reprint physical books even though every one also is available for free as digital downloads through Google, Mayersohn points out.

“For many readers and for writers the allure of paper remains. Watching the joy on their faces leads one inevitably to the conclusion that we still cherish the experience of the printed word, preserved for eternity in the pages of a book.”

Then a report in the Economist speculates on the implications of “additive manufacturing” – 3-dimensional printers that create objects “by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam... one layer at a time.”

Calling it “Print Me a Stradivarius” may be an instrument too far. But the idea is not at all far-fetched and its implications are huge – for the price of what a laser printer once cost, inventors already can create prototypes of any idea — sell the object, then modify it based on feedback from users. You can run off a thousand gadgets from a machine in your home. No need to book a factory in China or commit to a traditional manufacturing process.

The implications of homemade manufacturing are profound. As the process gets even better and cheaper, anyone with a blueprint can create the object it represents.

So we have print newspapers thriving alongside Internet-only publications. Bookstores not only selling books but printing them on request. Inventors producing desktop toothbrushes and junkyards able to manufacture spare parts for any car.

The possibilities are fantastic. The world is changing. Sparks are flying.


NOTES:

Espresso Book Machine brochure

The Economist on 3-D printing

Jeffrey Mayersohn’s opinion piece “Hit ‘Print’”

Here is the location of every Espresso Book Machine in the United States of America (it may be out of date by the time you read this)

New Orleans Public Library; University of Michigan Shapiro Library Building; Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT; The BYU Bookstore, Harvard Book Store; The University of Arizona Bookstores; University of Missouri Bookstore, University of Utah; Village Books, Bellingham, WA; Boxcar & Caboose Bookshop and Café, Saint Johnsbury, VT; Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA; Schuler Books and Music, Inc. Grand Rapids, MI; University Book Store, Inc. - University of Washington; Grace Mellman Community Library, Temecula, CA; North Dakota State University Bookstore, Fargo, ND; University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library; North Carolina State Bookstores Raleigh, NC; The University Co-Op, Austin, TX; Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse La Cañada Flintridge, CA; McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York City, NY.

03 February 2011

The Espresso Book Machine

“Good news: Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., is opening on Monday in its new, larger location in ‘a modern custom literary emporium’ that has replaced ‘a drab former gas station,’ according to La Cañada Online.” – from the newsletter Shelf Awareness.

Come on down and visit us here in our new literary emporium! We have everything you could want in an independent bookstore and much more – gas pumps, espresso pumps, books any way you like them, a full range of shopping experiences. We’ve just installed a meat and produce area and in the next few weeks we’ll also have a 40 amp dedicated charging station. Charge up all your electronic devices plus a Toyota Leaf or Chevy Volt.

Or as we like to say, charge in, charge up and charge your groceries at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse!

The Shelf Awareness article continues: “The store is increasing its inventory and is offering a dedicated readings and special-events area independent from the din of the store's coffee and pastry counter. It will also have an Espresso Book Machine.”

While you’re here take in one of our author readings. We now feature performing authors around the clock, seven days a week. There’s one of our writers in the produce section, watering the broccoli and restocking lemons. Check our website for the full author appearance schedule.

Walk through our store and on the main stage you might discover a local author reading from a work in progress. Nearby on one of our satellite stages a famous author dances tango or practices the piano. On party weekends more adventurous and in-shape writers have been spotted on the stripper’s pole presenting quite a “literary show.” Must show valid ID and be 21 to enter that part of the store, however.

As Shelf Awareness notes it’s often noisy at The Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse. So many people having so much fun! Clusters of young people are chatting online with Facebook friends. Others order shoes from Zappos.com or shout voice commands into Bluetooth earpieces. Some customers browse the old-fashioned physical book displays, then make use of our high speed wireless connection to order books or ebooks from Amazon. They return to us for the coffee and the conversation and to order even more books from Amazon. It’s like an 18th century coffee house in here!

Enjoy our “explosive” Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse atmosphere. When you mix Italian espresso fumes with the odd gasoline leak, something as simple as one malfunctioning IPad can set off the whole thing. Hello, Flintridge Volunteer Fire Department. You know our address!

About our new Espresso Book Machine. Order your book cappuccino style, with foam on top, or plain espresso: no jacket, no color, black ink on black paper. Here’s how it works: Plug an appropriate electronic device into our EBM, insert major credit card, download reading material. Be careful to choose e-book, not double mocha.

Shelf Awareness continues: “...the new building, costing at least $1 million, took much longer than anticipated to construct. New utility lines had to be installed. Soil contaminated by the gas station needed to be replaced. And the store had to install an elevator to allow disabled customers to enter the store from its below-ground parking area.”

Some of that construction continues. We provide shovels and bags to hold contaminated dirt. You fill bags and drag them out to your car. We provide an easy-to-follow IPhone app that shows the closest EPA-approved dirt depository and where to find emergency espresso. For every three bags you drop off we’ll provide one free cup of coffee. Save your dump receipts.

From Shelf Awareness: “The Wanniers also had to contend with a runaway truck that plowed into and wrecked their store nearly two years ago.”

You will soon discover we don’t encourage sitting on the street side of our store. Much of the shattered glass is gone now, but you’ll still see truck tire tracks on the faces of owners Peter and Lenora Wannier. They’ve pretty much recovered from their injuries but Peter now restocks the Espresso Book Machine with a severe limp.

Wondering what else could go wrong at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse? Well, two weeks ago it was discovered that under the old gas station was a previously undiscovered spur of the San Andreas fault, so it won’t be long before the entire bookstore falls into a crevasse.

Hey, watch out for that guy with the tray of hot coffees. He’s not paying attention and he’s going to trip over your chair leg and spill a lapful of scalding double lattes on your I Heart Books t-shirt. Get up now, while you can.


NOTES:

The Shelf Awareness article

Shelf Awareness home page

Flintridge Bookstore ...my apologies for poking fun... I do wish them all the best of success...