The Hanover Collaboration

I went to Burlington yesterday and ended up at Border’s. This might not seem strange to some of you, but for an English major, I am shockly hesitant to read anything. Books represent a tremendous investment of time, and many are not very good. A bad movie will cost me 3 hours, tops, of my life. A bad book could sap weeks. I’ll read a few paragraphs, get bored, my mind will wander, I’ll start counting adjectives and think of all the ways my 12 year old cousin is a better writer than this jackass. Long story short, I don’t spend a lot of time in bookstores.

Especially after the advent of Amazon.com, bookstores had always seemed such a waste to me. To compete, most big-name book retailers added shit like coffee bars, free WiFi and alt-folk band performances; in effect they became places (like Berry Library) where people hung out when they wanted to look intellectual. So obviously, I avoided them. I’ll take Bud Light and South Park over wine and Dostoyevski any day of the week.

But something struck me differently at this Burlington Border’s. The wall colors were those warm, semitones you see in women’s section J. Crew. The computers, those extremely effective searching tools, had been hidden away behind decorative plants in corners and understairs, and the whole deal had nice, wooden accents and windows that drew your eye to them. I didn’t realize it immediately, but the whole place had become a McMansion; that undeniable badge of suburban affluence.

I guess, realizing that 70% of all fiction is bought by women, Border’s is now changing its style from psuedo-intellectual (which appeals to bookish little men who probably use the free WiFi to buy books they just sampled off of Amazon.com) to psuedo-affluent. A women touring Border’s yesterday would have found herself surrounded by the very interior she maintains at home (of course, this woman is a homemaker; career women have no time for idle reading.) To her right, homogeniously non-threatening new arrivals bearing little more than the title and author’s name on a thick, crisp, bleached white dust jacket. To her left, a stack of ‘classic reads’ wrenched from the 10th grade Honors English reading list for filling in space lest anyone visiting her home turn out to be the sort to judge her by her library.

As she walked forward, she would have been met by a slight aroma of coffee, while cookbooks, diet books and self-help books danced around her. Frittered away into corners and second floors were unfashionable and threatening things, like Fantasy and Sci-Fi novels, “literature,” graphic novels and GRE Study guides. And to her left, slightly hidden but easily found by the interested party, were those guilty little bodice rippers, with the only tall dark and hansome men within a 500 meter radius emblazoned upon their covers. Yes, Border’s had gone so far as to even hire staff that was exclusively non threatening. Short, high voiced men and slightly attractive women worked the counters, stacked the shelves and strolled the floor to explain to soccer moms the nuances between Prep and I am Charlotte Simmons.

It’s sad, really. Though dumbing yourself down to a market, rather than forcing that market to think a little harder, is almost unrivaled in terms of economic success, look at what it has done to America’s archetecture. People stroll through Back Bay these days and say “Holy crap, look at how nice this archetecture is.” Time was, every wealthy neighborhood in America looked like that. Don’t blame it on the flight to the suburbs, either; plenty of old homes in Westchester County sport spires, gargoyles, corinthian columns, daring art-deco touches and flat-roofed 70’s fausses-pas. Now-a-days, a prefab Lawyer-Doctor is daring if it sports a bay window.

What does this mean for books? Well, it means that the legions of writers out there who churn out easy-reading, straight to paperback pieces like so many dazzling packages of Tropical Fruit Skittles will continue to get rich, while academia will consolidate its death-grip on “serious literature,” poetry, and any thing else with syntax that you might have to read over twice. More and more nerds will turn away from chains to the internet and specialty shops like Northampton’s “The Space-Crime Continuum,” and Earl Gray will continue to be available at a minimal charge, so long as you do not sip it while browsing.