Bookstore Report

There's that story about the frog that doesn't know it's dying as the water in the pot inches up one degree at a time.

It's not just frogs. Lots of changes creep up little by little, until sometimes you look around and realize the environment has changed forever. That's been happening in the world of bookstores; and 2007 is finally the year when we can all look around and acknowledge that the mall bookstore is pretty much gone.

20 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for major shopping centers to have two bookstores. Doubleday, Brentano's, Scribner, Dalton, Waldenbooks and more dotted the retail landscape. Even into the late 1990s as B&N was continuing an aggresive downsize of their B. Dalton business, Borders was still proclaiming the utility of its Waldenbooks chain, which we were told was generating lots of cash to fund the superstore expansion.

Well, B. Dalton is almost non-existent now, down to under 100 stores entering the New Year from several hundred at its height. Two of the B. Daltons which I know to have closed during this past holiday season, in Philly's Galleria at Market East and Maryland's Montgomery Mall, were in two of the remaining two-store malls. Are there any of these left now? If you know of one, let me know because I'm curious if these may have been the last of the two-store malls.

And if you listened to the quarterly conference call from Borders in November... Well, the mall business that once generated cash is now losing it. The roll-out of a new inventory system has been a bug-filled and costly debacle. The conversion of Waldenbooks stores to Borders Express was throwing good money after bad. It's only the airport stores in the Borders mall business that are doing much. At least 15% of the Waldenbooks/Borders Express locations will be gone in a few months, maybe more, and maybe much more. From 2500 or 3000 mall stores, we'll soon be at around 500. With old-style malls continuing to lose traffic to newer lifestyle centers, many with a Borders or B&N superstore, and with same-store sales continuing to drift down at the mall stores that are left, when will the hemmorhaging stop?

It's hard to believe we'll ever be in a world without mall stores. The B. Dalton at Union Station in DC always seems prosperous, and Borders says they do have some very nice Waldenbooks in very nice malls that do very nice business, and they'll experiment with ways to boost performance by re-thinking the mall store concept for the first time in 20 or 30 years. But for many of us, if we're buying books in brick & mortar our only choice if we have any at all will be to buy them in a big box.

Is this a bad thing? Tom Doherty at Tor Books is among those to point out the loss of books as impulse buys. You can't just stumble across something on your way from the Sears wing to the Macy's wing at the local mall. You've got to make a special committed effort to pull into the superstore parking lot and walk in. I certainly know the bigger title selection at bigger bookstores doesn't seem to sell more books; the definition of successful backlist, the mass-market paperbacks of older books that ought benefit most from having bigger stores with bigger selections, seems to drift down each year.

And at the same time, some of those mall stores were just so small. What was Borders ever thinking to open itty-bitty shoebox Waldenbooks in the Mall at the Source or the Walt Whitman Mall in Long Island? Maybe it's self-defeating, but if those stores were to close I'd miss them every bit as little as I've missed the demise of the precious independent, way too many of which have never given any space or care or attention to the kinds of sf/fantasy books that I've been selling these past 20 years.

On a more personal note...

One of the drawbacks of being in the profession of publishing is that you really don't have time to read. I read lots of manuscripts by my clients and potential clients. Sometimes I get to read them three or five times as I and the editor guide them through the revision process. I don't have time to read many books for pleasure, which means I don't buy very many books at all.

So it hits harder than it might otherwise that the Barnes & Noble at 48th St. and 5th Avenue in Manhattan closed its doors on December 30, 2006, a victim of rising rents on this prime real estate in Rockefeller Center.

This was B&N #1003; 3 as in the company's third store, I'd guess after their textbook location and (now closed) sales annex at 5th and 18th. Dating back 30 years or more, dating back to before B&N consumed the much larger B. Dalton chain, before B&N started opening superstores, to a time when B&N was a chain of small mall-type stores of its own in NYC and the suburbs, with a few big sales annex locations like this. We went there a lot in my youth; it was full of bargains and very close to the theatre district. I went there with my high school librarian to buy books at bargain prices. It was the oldest surviving bookstore where I actually bought books. And now it's gone.

But it's more than that. Once upon a time 5th Avenue was full of bookstores. One block south of the B&N was the flagship Brentano's where I gently persuaded my father to buy me my first science fiction hardcover, Orson Scott Card's Songmaster. Across the street was the Scribner's flagship. Heading north you came across a small Doubleday with the sf section buried on the top floor accessible only by elevator. Across from that was the flagship B. Dalton location which had some of the highest orders in NYC for some of the earliest books I sold as an agent. A few blocks north, the flagship Doubleday at 57th St. that was open 'til midnight most nights. The area was so full of bookstore that the NY Is Book Country street fair started out on 5th Avenue between 47th and 57th Streets, where all the bookstores were. NY Is Book Country disappeared a few years ago, and now the last of the bookstores on that half mile has as well. A substitute B&N opened up at 46th St., but the bibliophile's miracle mile in NYC is gone forever and for good.

As if that weren't enough, this was also the bookstore where I met a guy named Steve Mancino.

So of course I was there on December 30 for the final minutes of B&N #1003. As with the final minutes of the Astor Plaza, it was kind of sad. They'd been prepping the store for closure for at least three or four months, the selection slowly dwindling, and over the last several weeks shelving gremlins snuck in at night and removed fixtures one by one. The shelves didn't look so empty with the fixtures gone, but the store looked empty. One of the staff members was able to do a cartwheel amidst the emptiness. The side aisle downstairs was filled with shelving carts, only this time they were all empty. Each was marked with the name of a publisher, and as the customers melted away the closing team could immediately begin sorting the books that were to be returned, this one onto the cart for Simon & Schuster, that one on to the Random House cart. With the depleted selection, around three dozen JABberwocky books were on the shelf to be returned to sender.

I wanted to buy something for Steve, and I wanted to buy something for myself. For old time's sake, it had to be a bargain book, because this was after all the old B&N Sales Annex. Alas the bargain books were the most depleted of all because those couldn't be returned to the publisher, and had been the only merchandise to be marked off, by 50%. I ended up finding one last copy of a 2003 B&N edition of a 2001 unabridged dictionary. A tattered cover. A bit out of date. But at $19.98 less 50%, it's hard to go wrong. And it's certainly something that will keep.

I didn't head to the cash register until they made the "it's 8:00, and this location of Barnes & Noble is now closed" announcement. And as I kind of wanted to be, I was the last customer. As I exited the doors they were saying "are we clear?" and indeed they were.

1-05-07