By Brian Joseph Davis
In this series I've focused more on idiosyncratic, neighbourhood joints, rather than mega used bookstores, like Powell's in Portland, or the ever-growing Toronto giant BMV. Of that category, there's probably no store as fabled as The Strand, at 12th and Broadway in New York. Even though I've never been fond of it (the Strand breaks my final, arbitrary rule: A good used bookstore shall not sell tote bags), the store's problems allow me to talk about publishing, and the relationship between new and used bookstores.
Don't get me wrong. The Strand is okay once you make it through to the back. Its searchable online catalogue actually works and I once found my holy grail of Vietnam War history books there. Yet, with tonnes of publisher overstock (and a nook filled with just coffee-table tchotchkes from Taschen), the Strand really feels more like Barnes and Noble on Boxing Day rather than the Library of Babel its fans make it out to be. These kinds of stores, built on overstock sales to tourists, exist because publishing is one of the most flawed businesses ever conceived.
If my favourite used bookstores have so far shared the quality of being gently melancholic, then going into the Strand or BMV always feels like attending a party that doesn't know it's really a wake.
Publishing is shrinking and, with any luck, restructuring in the coming years, and soon bookstores will shrink or diversify in tandem. Collectors will always be collectors, so small, smart stores will continue to thrive in the next few years. I'm sure in a decade all "bookstores" will be, essentially, used bookstores.
Information has found its perfect, paper-free, non-home on the Internet. As a writer, there's nothing greater than the Internet -- it is tool and text at once. As well, I'm no collector of expensive or rare books. I just like reading.
But as someone lucky enough to have once held the piping-hot first copy of his first book as it came off the Coach House binder, and as someone who once discovered forbidden knowledge for pennies at Clem's Book Exchange during a time when cable TV was a luxury, I have to allow myself a period of mourning for the past to go along with this giddiness for the future.
[Editor's note: This is the final instalment in a five-part series by Brian Joseph Davis on the best used bookstores on the continent. You can read Part I
here
, Part II
here
, Part III
here
, and Part IV here.]
