I have a lot of fun little conversations with the kids where I work sometimes. Coming from a completely different generation, their insights into the information age are always funny to me. Kids today (God, I sound old saying that) have no perspective on what it was like to live before the common use of computers, cell phones or the internet.
I get to talk to kids sometimes about my books, and they are always interested to discover they have a writer in their midst. Yet in speaking to them, I find an unsettling fact. Not a single one has a good bookstore to go to.
With the dawning of the information age has come the growth of e-books, of finding everything instantly. This instant gratification is a good thing in some respects. I can in a moment's glance, find out what people have read, what they thought about a book, look through the book from the comfort of my home and then purchase it. The book will then come to my computer, or my door. It's quite extraordinary.
Yet despite this, I pine for a simpler time, a time when my hometown had more than a single bookstore in the big box known as Barnes and Noble. Small bookstores were plentiful here back in the day. We had four in San Luis Obispo. You could walk into the Earthling, the Novel Experience and you would always find quirky characters in the store as much as you would in the reading the material. I suppose for writers, bookstores are like a bar. You go in and it's the local watering hole, the solace, the oasis for creative ideas.
I can remember vividly walking in and seeing the owner of the Novel Experience on a regular basis. She was a woman larger than life, with dark purple tinted hair and flowing gowns and beads and bracelets on her arms. Her laugh was hearty and infectious, and she knew books as if they were lovers. She could, at a whim, recall any story, recommend things for any aged reader and have a discussion of plot and characters. It was a remarkable.
I grew up on a diet of Novel Experience. It is what helped to forge my strengths as a writer, my passion for books. The owner of the Novel Experience was my window to the world, along with the local library.
Unfortunately, the Big Boxes came and took that away. Small stores couldn't keep up with what their larger cousins could do and one by one each shuttered their doors. The Novel Experience put up a fantastic fight, but it was a losing one. Eventually, it shuttered its doors. Then, the Big Box stores met a similar fate, the mighty brought down by the internet in a matter if 5 years from the shuttering of the small stores. All that remains is a single Barnes and Noble. Big, and rather imposing, it doesn't have the personal charm that I would like.
Yet in some places, the bookstore remains. What was my surprise to travel to Iowa City, Iowa, for the famous Iowa Writers conference to find the town has no less than 5 - 7 small bookstores. The most famous, Prairie Lights, is a legend in the writing world. Walking in, I found the shelves of books, the coffee shop, the quirky characters. After so long, it was like coming home again.
The age of the bookstore may be alive and well in Iowa City, and perhaps smaller bookstores will flower from the corpses of big ones again. Perhaps then children will go to them once more, and seek the beauty of books anew.
