In his essay, "Is Nothing Sacred?" novelist Salman Rushdie examines the importance of literature in society, laments the state of fiction (he penned it during the nuclear fallout from his own novel), and recalls his early relationship with books.
"I grew up kissing books and bread," he begins. An enchanting sentence that guaranteed my attention.
"In our house," Mr. Rushdie wrote, "whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall... a 'slice,' which was our word for a triangle of buttered leavened bread, the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was as careless and butter-fingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, I kissed a large number of 'slices' and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained, and still contain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that, too."
I read the essay while living in London, and felt great sympathy for Mr. Rushdie who was at the time living incognito. I marveled at his stubborn faith in literature that was giving him nothing but grief at that time. And I was consoled that there were other people living in England who grew up kissing books too. Though in my own family, we kissed only the books my father took seriously and that formed our reading list: philosophy, religion, science, and the writings of politicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, and dissidents around the world. We did not, I recall, kiss novels, which may explain why I felt compelled to write one later in life. My father's reading legacy must have left a mark on me, in any case, since politics, religion, colonialism, war, and imprisonment were narrative threads in my first novel.
Most of the independent American bookstores I frequent now are owned by people who grew up kissing books -- not literally as Mr. Rushdie and I did growing up, but figuratively at least. Like Jungian analysts who ask people they meet, "Did you dream?" I ask everyone I am interested in knowing better, including booksellers, "What are you reading?" With the exception of one owner who said she was diving into something about eating, praying and loving, I always found their reading tastes worth emulating.
In the last few days, as a whole assembly of men wearing suits -- analysts armed with the dullest of forensic tools -- analyze the death of Borders Books, it's become increasingly clear to me that none of them grew up kissing books or understand those who do. They blame book readers, digital books, Amazon, and the recession for the demise of the superstore chain when they should be blaming the executives of Borders.
Some things to bear in mind for companies attempting to fill the Borders-sized hole in the universe in the near future:
Book readers are rarefied, hothouse orchids. Comparing bookstores to Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Linen & Things shows that corporations and business analysts don't know their apostrophes from their elbows.
Book readers are educated and smart. Don't place rubbish and pulp near the door.
Book stores are politics-neutral zones. Placing tomes with screeching titles by partisan hacks and bloviators of every stripe set book buyers blood to boiling and make them want to run out the door.
Book lovers like minimalism. What is a book after all but a whole universe of ideas reduced to its essence? A footprint of a bookstore should be roughly 1/100th the size of an airplane hanger.
Bookstores are where you have conversations with people who are not in the room. Reading is an insular act best done in a tight, cozy environment. Stores as large as football stadiums discourage reading .
Women love fiction, ergo women love bookstores. So why did Borders consign fiction to the bowels or the nether regions of the stores?
If Starbucks can invest in comprehensive training to teach their baristas all about coffee and customer service, why didn't Borders? I once asked a Borders employee for the title Baghdad Burning. She asked me, her eyes glazed with a combination of boredom and stupidity, how Baghdad was spelled. This was during the height of the Iraq War.
Book lovers welcome recommendations for good books they haven't heard of from trusted gatekeepers. While I would give Oprah's picks a second look, I wouldn't care what faceless Borders staff, including the one who didn't know how to spell Baghdad, picked. So why plaster books on the shelves with "Borders Staff Pick" labels? Who are you?
Book lovers want to know what thoughtful public figures are reading. Would it have killed you, Borders, to post a list of President Obama's reading list, or Aleksandar Hemon's, or Fareed Zakaria's, or the summer reading lists of Pulitzer laureates or any smart public figures?
Author readings near the cafe. They have slit their wrists on the page to tell you about their difficult and tormented lives/loves/etc. The psychic damage to writers is multiplied when the soundtrack for their readings is the steaming hiss of the espresso machine and yelled customer orders for non-fat/soy/skinny et al.
The Art of Editing. All shoppers know that the reverence and demand for a displayed item is inversely proportional to the quantity on display. One pair of Christian Louboutins glinting like jewels on a rotating mirrored pedestal provokes desire. Burying the same pair on a rack with dozens of other styles, or in a row with dozens of the same style, creates ennui. Delayed gratification, walking out the door without buying, is easier when you see a dozen copies of a title on the shelf.
Special events and programming. Readers love book events as evidenced by the huge turnouts at book festivals like the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago or author-specific festivals around the country. Borders' efforts were listless at best.
Supply and Demand. Get publishers to realize that publishing 288,000+ titles a year makes no sense at all, when even the most motivated reader who is employed and can afford to buy books, can only read a book a week.
And what was with the red walls? They made you hungry, but not for books.
When I walk by the shuttered Borders on Michigan Avenue now, Chicago's Gold Coast feels like a desert to me. There are more shops than you can count to meet your every need for clothing the body, but not one to feed your soul in that stretch of Magnificent Mile. Referring to the "privileged arena" of literature in Is Nothing Sacred? Mr. Rushdie wrote, "Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down."
Follow Gail Vida Hamburg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/gailvidahamburg
I have plenty of anecdotes of my own about book shoppers: The child who wanted his mom to buy him a Goosebumps book only to be told, "No, you can watch that on TV!" Or my favorite: The parents who asked for recommendations to fill their son's custom-built bookshelf, but when asked about their son's interests to guide my recommendations, pulled out a color swatch and asked for books that might match it.
I was just pointing out that this ignorance existed on both sides of the register. The author's attitude towards the living employees in front of her was dismissive and condescending, as if somehow the idea that someone hosts a talk show makes her more qualified to recommend books than a living human being in the store (Incidentally, Oprah's Book Club weren't recommendations, as Oprah hadn't read them yet when they were chosen. At least I read the books before I suggested them to people.) "Who are you?" the author asks... Well, she could have asked for me. My name was right there on the recommendation shelf tag. :-P
By that time, Borders had expanded into music (and a Cafe). The new stores were huge. Nevertheless, the mission statement in my first employee handbook asserted Borders was not a chain, but a collection of bookstores reflecting the communities in which they were located. Among employees there was a culture of love for books (or music or coffee) and bookselling and love of talking to people about books.
Then a few years passed; a new employee handbook arrived in 1998. Quietly, without informing staff, the Borders mission statement was changed, omitting the references to local communities. I knew that was the end of my career at Borders. I began looking for other employment immediately. The company was no longer the cool place started by two brothers in Michigan. Shortly after I left, Borders began hiring top-level managers who knew lots about running multi-multimillion-dollar companies, but who knew nothing about books.
I feel sorry for my friends who stayed on, and especially so for the employees from Store1.
There was an added step of assigning a specific Borders only number to each title (called a BINC). So even the ISBN's already on books weren't good enough.
There were a few other esoteric reasons for the BINC stickers, but most of what they accomplished could have been done with a computer program without reinventing the wheel. Though I doubt the money saved by not printing those stickers would have save the company from the colossal short-sightedness of the leadership at Borders.
I worked in Crown Books way back when, which was notorious for poor treatment and worse pay of employees. I've worked in law firms that specialized in helping the underprivileged but treated their employees not just like garbage, but did so with a sort of crazed glee. I've worked in hotels that emphasize customer service and a friendly environment for guests yet abuse employees not only into utter misery it is almost impossible to keep forever to oneself, but abuse them enough to destroy the initiative needed to get done jobs that need constant creative adaptation to circumstances (and in the best and most patient of spirits). I've worked at places absolutely devoted to making sure anyone with potential leaves their employ and everyone who stays uncouples themselves from the workplace's success, eventually doing the bare minimum to not stick out and merely to survive.
Many businesses start off with the right idea at the right time in the right place, but eventually run out of the luck they might think has comparatively little part in their success. Others become so big they can continue failing almost forever.
I'm not sure that competition with Amazon was the prime cause for the downfall of Borders. Unless you were an incredibly voracious reader, the twice-weekly coupons and your 10% discount on top of that (if you were a Borders Rewards member) would have kept you in discounted reading material AND supported a local business, and you would have been able to see what you were buying. What brought down Borders was poor corporate management and, more likely than not, a large part of that was the greed factor. What small independent bookstores can offer is personal service and a comfortable book-browsing atmosphere. They'll never be able to compete when it comes to pricing or volume, but as Hamburg points out above it might be nice not to have to walk past a stack of books by Beck or Palin or Coulter in order to get to the good stuff, and that might well be compensation enough.
Even in the months prior to the bankruptcy going through, analysts pointed out that the CEO's and others in charge at Borders for the past decade had not come from the book industry. Schools don't hire administrators who do not have a backround in education; some industries really do need an understanding of the product not merely the ability to read a financial statement. If the CEO's knew the love of books and bookselling and the sharing of ideas was really like for employees, they would have figured out a way to survive. But what does a man with a golden parachute care about the employees working for nary a living wage when the plane goes down?
-Book readers are not necessary educated/smart. We had plenty of stupid customers.
-I hate hack-work , but the truth is, it brings people in. Serious readers come because it's a bookstore. Casual readers come for "famous" names. The second helps pay for serving the first.
-Personally, I love big bookstores because they're likely to have what I want.
-There are stupid bookstore employees: it's unavoidable. But career booksellers are "book-kissers". We certainly weren't there for the pay!
-Writing recommendations sells books. Because regulars do know the employees.
-Display is tricky. Multiple copies of books on display are easier to spot and save time stocking shelves. A recent book in a popular series sells multiple copies a day. We can't restock all day.
-Publishers publish what they think people read. U.S. population tops 300 million: publishing 288,000/year is one book per thousand people. I'll read more than one book a week, often simultaneously.
Borders was killed by upper management's inability to respect books, let stores make their own decisions, tackle new technology, or adjust to markets. All that would kill worthier businesses than a bookstore chain.
And we had plenty of dumb customers. Some of my favorite overheard lines were "What's a novella?" and "I'm looking for books on black magic...you know, the kind that harms people...do you have any books on the acapalopse?" One of my co-workers was asked for Gilgamesh. He typed into the search engine the phrase Gddmsh. Seriously.