Bookstore Illusions

by Rebecca Mead
from The New Yorker


Martin Amis, in his 1995 novel, “The Information,” delivered a memorable riff on the reading habits of transatlantic airplane travellers as divided by class. “In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War 1, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina,” he wrote. In business class, however, “they were reading outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers.” But even that is better than what was being consumed in first class, filled with snoozing plutocrats, where nobody was reading anything, “except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue.”



If Amis’s airplane taxonomy has been rendered obsolete by the development of the seat-back entertainment system—now travellers of all classes are watching “Skyfall,” while hoping it doesn’t—his analysis came to mind this morning, in the light of a story in the Times about the disappearance of bookstores from Manhattan. The paper reported that at last count there were a hundred and six Manhattan bookstores, down from a hundred and fifty in 2000. (If a hundred and six bookstores still sounds like more bookstores than there actually are in Manhattan, that’s because outlets like the Hudson News kiosks in Penn Station and Grand Central are included in the total.)



Every New Yorker of a couple of decades’ standing can cite her or his late, lamented local bookstore: for many years, mine was Spring Street Books, in Soho—until, in the nineties, it became a shoe store, a retail segment for which it seems there is an infinite need. In the Times, Esther Newberg, the literary agent, decried the transformation of Manhattan into “an outlet mall for rich people,” citing Fifth Avenue as her evidence. Manhattan—at least the hyper-affluent core of it—seems to have gone the way of Amis’s first-class cabin, becoming a place in which people who are too rich to read can stretch out and indulge themselves.



Thank goodness, then, for cattle class: the outer boroughs. As Emily Gould, the outer-borough novelist, tweeted this morning, “that bookstores article could just as easily be titled ‘independent bookstores thrive in Brooklyn and Jersey City.’ ” Word Bookstore, a successful independent in Greenpoint, is indeed opening a second store in Jersey City. Greenlight Bookstore, in Fort Greene—my current local—is such an exemplar of Brooklyn literary energy that entering its doors can feel like wandering into a Noah Baumbach movie, one centered around two young freelancers who meet at a reading group, their relationship sparked by an argument over whether next month’s choice should be Jonathan Lethem or Jennifer Egan.



But therein lies a problem, too. Those of us who cherish our local bookstores do so not simply because they are convenient—how great to be able to run out for milk and also pick up the new Karl Ove Knausgaard!—but also because we feel a duty to support them, because we believe in their mission. When books can be bought so cheaply online, or at one of the dwindling number of discount retailers, paying more to shop at a local bookstore feels virtuous, like buying locally sourced organic vegetables, or checking to see if a T-shirt is made in the U.S.A. It can be gratifying to the point of smugness to feel that one is being pluralistic, liberal, and humane; shopping at an independent bookstore may be one of the diminishing opportunities to experience that feeling in first-class New York City. Still, when I consider the vanished bookstores of Manhattan, I mourn not just their passing but the loss of a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like participating in a requiem.