Recently, author Ann Patchett opened a bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee. It used to be that opening a bookstore, even one that was financed by a well-respected author like Patchett, wouldn’t be news. But in an age when large bookstore chains like Borders are closing their doors, Patchett’s store, named Parnassus Books, is making headlines.
Patchett decided to open a bookstore in Nashville after discovering that the city itself didn’t have a bookstore other than several university stores. It’s shocking to me that a city as large as Nashville could be without a bookstore and it saddens me even though I myself have contributed to this scenario.
I haven’t been to a bookstore in months. These days I do all my shopping online either buying digital copies on my Kindle or physical copies off of amazon.com. It used to be only a few years ago that I would make a trip to Barnes and Noble three or four times a week. Even after I purchased a Kindle, I would still make that trip to B&N, bringing my Kindle with me.
Eventually my addiction to Barnes and Noble waned. I wish I could say that I miss it, but I don’t. Sometimes I get wistful for the days when I would peruse the shelves and find a book that I hadn’t been looking for but couldn’t live without.
Even though I have moved on from physical bookstores, it still distresses me that they are disappearing at an alarming rate. I worry especially about small towns who are thrilled to have a Walmart, but have no place to get lost in among thousands of books. Even libraries are having a hard time with funding these days.
I grew up in a small town. We had a library and one bookstore, a small used bookstore named First Edition. I still think that name’s priceless. About once a week, or once every two weeks, we would make the hour drive to the mall and visit the tiny bookstore there, Walden Books. And about once a year or every two years, we made the trip down I-95 to Florida, stopping at the same Little Professor that first night at the hotel.
Most of the books I owned as a kid were used books that I purchased or traded for at First Edition. School Book Fairs, much more than they are now, were precious things. Having so many new books right there at school—there is nothing better in all the world than new book smell.
The town library was a good size—it even had a second floor—but it was never large enough to get lost in. That was what I wanted as a child. I wanted a library or a bookstore that I could get lost in, that I could hide in, that I could find a nook to curl up in and read without worry of anyone bothering me.
It wasn’t until we moved to Ohio when I was sixteen that I got my first taste of the large chain bookstore that I could get lost in. And a few years after that, I would wind up working in one.
Now those stores are dying and I’m at a loss as to how to save them.
Though I love the convenience of having a Kindle, I worry about a world where we are beholden to technology. My books, my own written words, even my photographs do not exist as hard copies. They are stored on technology that goes obsolete every few years. Think about it. A few months ago, I wrote about seeing a Fore-Edge Bible that was around 400 years old. I personally own a Jules Verne book that was published and printed in the 19th century. We have books that are hundreds of years old, but I can’t even find a computer to play a floppy disk from ten years ago.
I worry that the death of the bookstore says something less about how we interact with the written word and says something more about how we interact with each other. Places like Barnes and Noble thrived, not just because of their large selection of books, but because they offered a place for the community to gather.
Years ago, people met in churches and community centers, at lodges and libraries. Then they migrated to bookstores. Both young and old gathering to play chess, to hold political debates, to finish math homework, to be tutored, to date, to write that first novel, to linger over a steaming cup of a coffee.
Where will people meet now?
I can only hope they would head back to church, but that is probably unlikely in the near future. I can only hope that people will not substitute real human interaction with Facebook, email or cellphones. Because we need human interaction. We need to meet with people face to face. The world is far too big and far too lonely to do it any other way.
And so I pray for Ann Patchett’s bookstore. And I continue to have my own dreams of returning to my hometown one day and opening up a bookstore there. I pray that people will continue to hunger for books. I pray that everyone will one day know what it feels like to hold an old book in your hand, run your fingers along the brittle pages and tremble with this knowledge: Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote in The Shadow of the Wind, “Every book … has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
