There is a world of difference between a bookshop and a bookstore. Here’s why Americans do bookselling better and why I still mourn the long-lost playground of Borders…
I’ve always preferred books from the USA. By this, I mean not only American literature but also American book design.
Maybe this is down to novelty, or a contrary streak, but I’ve often felt American editions have superior design compared to UK editions. I have an even stronger preference for American bookshops or, to be more specific for American bookstores: Barnes & Noble and especially, Borders.
When the latter company was opening its Oxford Street branch, bringing that uniquely American approach to bookselling to British shores, the chief executive summarised the appeal of a Borders bookstore perfectly: “It’s an adult playground.”
That describes the feeling I associated with Borders, whenever I was visiting the US, in the years before Amazon had decisively conquered the market.
Glorious, while it lasted
These stores were nothing like pokey UK bookshops. These were airy retail temples, where I could wander for an hour or more, riffle through the CD rack, buy a coffee and a cookie, and marvel at the sheer breadth of magazines and periodicals published in a single month.
Through rose-tinted glasses, Borders’ focus on physical merchandise – in the face of a digital tidal wave – can almost appear quixotic
Who bought all this stuff? Everything looked clean and smelled new.
Now my recollections are further enshrined in nostalgia for the lost mechanics of an older retail environment. Physical media by the foot, dot matrix printers rasping away in the registers and actual cash changing hands.
With those rose-tinted glasses in place, Borders’ mulish focus on physical plant and merchandise – in the face of a looming digital tidal wave – can almost appear quixotic.
Either way, I have to agree with the professor at The Wharton School who argued that the ideal of Borders as a literary Aladdin’s Cave was ‘a glorious thing, while it lasted’.
For the short period while I was studying in the US, the Borders bookstore I visited most frequently was a 20,000 sq ft haven in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. Tellingly, the retail space remained unoccupied more than a decade after its closure in 2011.
Apparently its conception wasn’t without controversy: construction of the $3.9M building required the partial razing of a century-old livery stable and a popular college bar. But, by the time I was in town, it was a regular destination for students, craft groups, and even book buyers. (Spoiler alert: this was right around the time Borders outsourced its online sales operation to Amazon.)
A matter of scale
The ambience of these stores is something that I’ve still never really experienced in the UK: a ‘social, multi-use space’ with mind-boggling inventory, multiple floors, large cafes, acres of floorspace, and the freedom to browse and read without feeling surveilled by irascible staff.
There are many, many lovingly curated bookshops in the UK, but this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The retail market is so different here that looking for a ‘medium-box,’ Borders-type experience in the UK would be like expecting 90,000 people to turn up for a sports match at a British university. There’s just a different scale across the Atlantic.
I have some experience in bookselling, having worked part-time at a couple of outlets for the bookchain Ottakar’s in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Ottakar’s had a cosier feel than its better-known competitor, Waterstones (into which the brand was eventually subsumed). The company’s flagship two-floor branch also captured some of the ‘third space’ feel of a homegrown Borders or Barnes & Noble.
There was a big inventory, a Caffe Nero, a large children’s zone, even escalators – foot traffic passed between bustling streets on the first floor and the ground floor, contributing to the feel of pseudo-social space.
Unfortunately, because it was also my place of employment, I could never quite enjoy it at the level of the consumer. As weekend worker, I usually experienced the shop while hungover, and even at the best of times, I had little patience with shelving books or enlightening confused customers.
In fact, when you take into account my frequent personal use of the generous staff discount, it’s clear that I made for a better customer than an employee.
Planks: for the memories
Of course, Borders’ flagship Oxford Street store, with its four floors and its on-site Starbucks, came close to simulating this ideal. When I visited it in the late 2000s, I enjoyed the familiar, if slightly inauthentic, taste of US retail gigantism. I even sought out a copy of Sports Illustrated to complete the experience. But the feel wasn’t quite the same with the prices in pounds and the weather dreary outside.
If I’d known Borders was about to disappear for good (Barnes & Noble hasn’t yet done the decent thing and opened a UK store) I might have visited more frequently.
In the intervening years since Borders went bankrupt, I’ve mainly had reason to recall it when ‘All of the Lights’ makes one of its repeated appearances on my playlists. ‘Public visitation / we met at Borders’ – Kanye West’s lyrics functioned as a kind of pop-cultural death mask, memorialising the brand just as it was perishing in the wake of the Great Recession.
Then again, if you really wanted to freeze Borders in the milieu of the late 2000s, then surely nothing can be more effective than playing the Lying Down game while the store is in the process of being dismantled around you.
