When I see a headline like “How to Save an Indie Bookstore”
I tend to drop everything and get excited.
In this case, the Washington Post article described an extraordinary
retreat convened by the new owner of Kepler’s legendary bookstore in Palo
Alto. Like dozens of great but troubled bookstores,
Kepler’s is thinking big about how to re-invent itself. But inviting eighty smart people from around
the country to spend three days brainstorming a future for the store has to be
the most ambitious and promising approach yet.
So why did the fruits of their deliberations- at least as
reported by the Post- seem so dispiriting?
Conducted by consultants wielding their usual tools- magic markers,
easel paper, and jargon (“confusion is functional!”)- the fourteen hours of
discussion brought forth eight “foundational principles” upon which a reborn,
successful independent bookstore can be built.
They are:
1. Be financially
sustainable.
2. Have a clearly defined mission.
3. Be dedicated to community outreach.
4. Serve as a gathering place for
creative events and social events.
5. Support life-long learning and
literary education.
6. Sell books in any form, on any
platform.
7. Maintain a virtual presence, with
technology fully integrated into the store.
8.
Provide a carefully curated selection of books
My initial reaction was that the order
seems backward. Surely a carefully
crafted selection of books is the most important ingredient in a quality
bookstore, not the end result. And
surely the end result of doing all the right things is financial sustainability,
not the starting point. If it were so
easy to “be financially sustainable” I suspect some of the very smart
booksellers who have gone dark in the past decade would have just tried
that.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into the
ordering of the principles. So let’s say that the list is actually random.
And let’s further stipulate that a job I love depends on people figuring
out an answer to the question of how to keep and grow independent
bookselling. I will even concede that
they are all good ideas.
But my question remains: Is this the best
we can do? A list of bland nostrums and
generalities that just about any book lover in the country could have generated
with a little thought?
It’s a profoundly tough problem and most
of the arguments for bookstores are of the cheerleading locavore variety- impassioned
pleas to patronize your local shop lest it disappear. (Here’s this week’s earnest example.) These are well-meaning and true, and perhaps
they are effective somewhere. But I don’t
think there are enough potential book buyers left to be convinced by this
argument who haven’t been already. A business
plan built on hoping customers stick with you out of guilt, or because they
just like the idea of a neighborhood
bookstore, is not enough.
Two words that don't appear on the
Kepler’s focus group list: authenticity and love. Every bookstore I relish is stamped by both,
and they aren’t things that can be imposed or conjured up.
An authentic bookstore is a cool
bookstore, regardless of its particular inventory slant or personality.
Back in the eighties, I used to do a lot
of camping trips. My boyfriend preferred
the wilderness, but if we were within fifty miles of a city I’d never been to I’d
usually persuade him to spend a couple hours there. Downtowns, an obvious starting point in an
unfamiliar city, had already lost their interest as department stores and shops
disappeared. So where exactly to invest
an afternoon was an urgent issue.
But I knew that if you could find the
cool, local, independent bookstore, you would probably also stumble upon a cool
and interesting neighborhood (meaning it had a pre-Starbucks coffee shop and stores
selling quirky gadgets.) I remember once looking up bookstores in the Cincinnati Yellow Pages, and guessing on the basis
of the ads that Drew’s would be the cool shop, and indeed it was a fantastic
store (alas, long gone) in a great neighborhood (Hyde Park.)
Being a “locus of cool” is definitely a
tangible social asset, but it would look ridiculous on a bookstore survival to-do
list. (Number one: “Be cool!”)
If I can say so without taking any credit for
it, the Harry W Schwartz Bookshop, where I learned bookselling, was about the
coolest spot in Milwaukee in the late eighties and early nineties. Interesting out-of-towners would regularly
drop by asking for recommendations on where to eat, where to hear music, which
neighborhoods to visit, how to spend a couple free hours. People moving to town would come in to ask us
where the cool place to look for an apartment would be. And visiting celebrities who had time to kill were
drawn to the bookshop. (There was
something really intimate about selling poetry books to three of the
Manhattan Transfer.)
Where do out of town hipsters go now
that so many major cities don’t have a general indie bookstore to help with
urban navigation? I guess the local
indie coffee shop has taken over that job, though baristas seem too busy to be
an avant-garde information desk. And there's google. And
perhaps my idealized authentically cool neighborhoods don’t even exist like
they used to anyway.
I don’t have a plan for reinvigorating
bookstores but I do know that the authentic ones have a better shot at keeping
my business. What’s authentic? You know it when you see it. But it probably didn't grow from a focus group check list.
Last week I was in Winnipeg, and as I
passed through Canada Customs I had the usual initial round of questions from a
dour, no-nonsense agent: What’s your
business in Canada? Are you bringing
anything in? What’s your relationship
with guns?
But when I told her that I was a book
rep and would be seeing McNally Robinson the next day, a surprise smile cracked
her bureaucratic mask and she gushed “I love
that store!”
Somehow, the survival of independent
bookselling depends on creating that moment, over and over and over.
