Monday, October 24, 2011

The Elusive Borders Essay

I tried to do a second National Novel Writing Month tune-up exercise by going for 1700 words on the closing of Borders, but I only got to about 1200 words before I ran out of things to say—and yet here I am trying it again! It’s just another big corporation gone by the wayside, though in this case due at least as much to bad decisions the company made as to that whole recession thing people have been talking about; but it is just another big corporate chain, even if it was one that gave something to Indianapolis that no indie store has been able to do. There are still Barnes & Noble stores around town, but shopping there is not the same experience that it was at Borders.

I never bought much from the music or movies sections of Borders stores, even if they had something I wanted that I could not find at Best Buy*. The score to the film Revolutionary Road comes to mind. (Leaving aside the fact that the film was just a mediocre adaptation of a really fine Richard Yates novel, the Thomas Newman score was haunting and lovely.) I was not surprised that Best Buy did not have it in-store, and I was also not surprised that Borders did have it and that they were charging an arm and a leg for it (relatively speaking). It was something like $17.99 or $18.99 at Borders, and I actually had the CD in my hand at, I think, the downtown store, and was just about to grin and bear it and take it down to the checkout counter—when I decided that I would finally try the ol’ iTunes Music Store, where it was only $9.99. That’s still the only thing I’ve ever bought with iTunes (other than one song from the Vs. re-issue that just would not rip correctly off of the CD I bought at Luna), but it was totally worth it.

I don’t buy DVDs at all anymore, and that’s mostly because the movies I like enough to own are things that Amy would never want to watch with me. Other than the occasional collector’s edition, like those versions of the Lord of the Rings movies that came in a box with a collectible sculpture, or the collector’s edition of The Lion King (pre-3D re-release), I rely on Netflix and the library for any DVDs I want to watch. Borders charged an arm and a leg for DVDs, too, and are there even any indie video stores out there? I don’t know, and it doesn’t mean so much to me that I’m going to spend the time to find out.

Books, on the other hand, are tremendously important to me, and always have been. I was into books before I was into music and movies, and though I still love music and movies, my interest in them has cooled somewhat over the years. Mainstream music is hit and miss, and almost all mainstream movies are terrible. Literature is pretty healthy, even if printed material, as an aggregate medium, is in trouble. E-books were a spectacular failure the first time they turned up, because no one wanted to sit at their computer and read for very long; but this second iteration is hitting, due largely to the viability of portable devices like the Kindle and the iPad. That doesn’t mean that physical books (and the bricks and mortar establishments that trade in them) are dead, but it does mean that they have to change the way they do business.

They have to provide a means for reading e-books, which Barnes & Noble managed to do with their Nook e-reader. They developed the device themselves, married it to the Android platform, and launched it two years ago. Borders got into bed with Kobo, but didn’t launch the device until almost a year after the Nook came out. Borders was never any great shakes at the technology stuff anyway. While Barnes & Noble jumped solidly into online bookselling, Borders limped along at first on their own, then in partnership with Amazon, and then on their own again. And there was also the problem of the revolving door at the CEO position and changes in ownership.

But they got their stores right, at least. They installed bookshelves in the walls, which made the stores feel more like libraries than places of business. They still had racks and fixtures out on the open floor, but they made much better use of their wall space than Barnes & Noble, where things are packed in tight and the lighting is dim. It always seemed to me like their selection was better, too. That might just be my impression of the Indianapolis Borders stores versus the Indianapolis Barnes & Noble stores, but it always seemed like there were more copies of the books on the shelves at Borders—so that you had more to pick from, to make sure that you got a book that was in good shape.

Borders generally had a better selection of literary magazines, too, though I have only become very interested in journals in the last couple of years (and so can’t be sure that I am remembering this entirely correctly). I remember that the original Castleton store had a whole end rack in their magazine section that contained nothing but literary magazines, and that the River Crossing store had a respectable selection. They always had Film Comment and Poetry, both of which I have to actively seek out now when I want them. The Clearwater Crossing Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry Film Comment, and they only occasionally stock Poetry. I have to go to Greenwood or Carmel to get Film Comment now—which is pretty far out of the way to go just for a magazine.

I made my last visit to a Borders store on the Tuesday before they shuttered the Indianapolis stores for good, and that visit was to the south side store. Jackson was at school that day instead of at home with me (I think maybe because of Labor Day—was it that long ago?), so I had time to make my way down there before going into work; and it was nice to be able to make that store the last Borders store I visited. If I had not made time for that trip, the store at the Castleton Square Mall would have been the last one I ever visited, and that would have been sad, because that store sucked from the day it opened. The location was terrible (whoever designed the parking lot when they added those shops on the outside of the mall is an awful, awful human being), the lights were always turned up to 11, and it was the only Borders I can recall ever visiting that felt more like a place of business than it did a place to be at peace among books. By contrast, I used to stop at the south side store on my home from Amy’s, before we were married, when that store had just opened and stayed open relatively late. It was comforting and inviting, like the others of its kind in town.

And on that last visit, there were still lots of gems to be had, when the discounts were up to 70-90% off the original price. I first picked up an anthology of stories that had appeared in McSweeney’s, but wound up putting it down when I came to a novel called Elizabeth Street, which I had looked at before but never purchased. It’s a fictional account of true events in the history of the author’s family, and it is concerned with life in the Little Italy section of New York City; and at 80% off, I was all in. I also got a copy of the 2009 World Almanac, from the bargain section, at 70% off its $1.00 sticker price, which put it at a whopping thirty cents. A Modern Library trade paperback edition of Henry V was all of fifty-nine cents.

I got to all of the other stores in the area before they closed, too—even the one up in Carmel, where the happy coincidence of dinner with Amy and her parents let me stop on my way at the Carmel Borders to pick up Roberto Bolaño’s excellent 2666 at 40% off and whichever issue of A Public Space was current at the time at 50% off. Two last stops at Castleton netted me Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry and another Modern Library Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I. My last stop at River Crossing saw me walk away with two volumes of interviews from The Paris Review. I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude downtown, and also a beloved book from childhood, The Cay, for Jackson. The only store I didn’t get to before it closed that I would like to have done was the one in Bloomington; but it closed before Borders went into Chapter 11, and I didn’t even know that it was going out.

I spent a lot of time and money at Borders stores over the years. I don’t remember the first time I went to one, though it might have been the original Indianapolis location at 86th and Allisonville, when I was in search of Dan Quayle’s memoir in paperback for a class I was taking in college. I remember discovering “bargain books” for the first time at a Borders in Chicago when Amy and I went up there with a friend of hers to visit someone in a hospital. My mom was the one who got me started on Borders, because she used to get the books she gave us for birthdays and Christmas there when Matt and I were younger. She always stuck the bookmarks you got at checkout into the books, so I had Borders bookmarks going back to when I was in junior high or so. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Barnes & Noble bookmark; but maybe that’s what separates the good from the great.

* When I buy CDs now, I go to Luna. It took me awhile to get around to this decision, which is sort of surprising given how much I blather on about supporting the indie outift and eschewing the corporate chains. I used to chafe at the idea of spending several extra dollars per CD at Luna, but I finally made peace with the fact that since I only buy CDs rarely anymore, it doesn’t really hurt me to drop those few extra dollars. It’s voting with your dollars, and I fully acknowledge that it’s pathetic that it took me so long to get comfortable with spending that little bit of extra money.

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