The Pleasures of a Good Bookstore

Lance Knobel of the excellent Davos Newbies (which I just discovered because I followed the little red light on Geoblog) tells of an exciting new bookstore opening near the British Museum in London by none other than the London Review of Books. I’m envious.

Here in Davis, though, we are lucky enough to have three independent bookstores alongside the UC Davis Bookstore: Avid Reader, Bogey’s Books, and Sweetbriar, the latter two dealing mostly in used books. Just up the road in Woodland there’s the Next Chapter. All this despite the inevitable appearance of Borders, for which I politely decline to provide a link. While Borders, which started out as a nice little independent in Ann Arbor, does understand the importance of making browsers feel comfortable and provides them with chairs and a coffee shop, it is now just too big for its boots.

I overcame my usual knee-jerk Borcott and went in last weekend, looking for a book on Photoshop and a DVD. On my previous three or four visits, I had gone in because no other bookstore in Davis had what I was looking for. On each occasion, I looked on the shelf, failed to find the book, waited at the information desk, and was told by a pleasant young salesperson (different each time) that according to the computer the book was in stock, but wasn’t it on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Each time there followed a sort of tortuous and progressively more frantic attempt by the saleseperson to locate the book—always to no avail.

This time, it was even worse. The DVD in question (Bull Durham, Extended Edition,) was indeed in stock, but it was in the back, and nobody currently in the store was authorized to open the box it was in. The pleasant young salesperson was unable to predict when such a box might be opened: it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks.

That’s it. No more Borders for me. Not for anything. I like to support Powells in Portland and browse in the Avid Reader, despite the suspect politics of its owner. I can probably wait till next Tuesday for the book I want. And on trips to Berkeley we immerse ourselves in Cody’s, Black Oak, and occasionally Diesel and Pegasus.