Comments on: Column: Book Fare

By: Ken Josenhans

Ken Josenhans — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:08:29 +0000

Late note: East Lansing is also losing its large general bookstore in a former Jacobsen’s building. Barnes & Noble announced it will close its East Lansing location as the lease expires at the end of 2011. This will leave East Lansing with no general bookstore within the city limits and walking distance from campus, though two Shuler Books outlets are not too far by car in mall locations.

By: tom taylor

tom taylor — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:57:25 +0000

could it be that the student curriculum doesn’t foster, in ann arbor and some other places, the kind of literacy good bookstores promote and this despite a self-infatuation that would declare, “Oh, this must not be so!”? in san francisco we lost stacy’s(my wife’s favorite, formerly on market st, but you can’t go into a neighborhood in san francisco without encountering bookstores. the proprietor of bibliomania in downtown oakland says about ann arbor that it’s not much of a book town but he does praise tom nicely of leaves of grass. a lot of cities that the snooty would not visit have great bookstores now. i once drove to cleveland with davied kozubei, the former proprietor and part-owner of ann arbor’s david’s books. he told me that in london, his hometown, the booksellers told him that the largest bookstore in the english speaking world was mrs kay’s in cleveland. i thought he was kidding but when we got there the store was seven storeys!(unfortunately mrs kay died seven years ago and the store closed but their stock was bought by powell’s in portland, another great book town not living on it’s laurels! sncerely, tom taylor.

By: jcp2

jcp2 — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:28:28 +0000

We use old hotel key cards, old gift cards, show ticket stubs, etc. for our bookmarks. Each one is usually tied to a good memory.

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:55:53 +0000

The Mae Travels post was good and thought-provoking but I want to state that I have some book markers she doesn’t. Some are getting tattered because Amazon doesn’t give them away and neither does Nicola’s (in my experience).

By: Evian Geffen

Evian Geffen — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:59:07 +0000

It seems that Corn Dog (the fellow who took over from Wystan Stevens) will be the only bookseller left in the State Street Area. Two card tables on the sidewalk is a business plan that might just outlast Amazon.

By: Dan Romanchik

Dan Romanchik — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:56:36 +0000

I think the serendipity of a physical bookstore is overplayed. Amazon can be just as serendipitous, both through searching and when they list other books purchased by customers.

Having said that, there is a social aspect of buying books at a bookstore that cannot be duplicated online. Perhaps what we need is some kind of club or coffeehouse that encourages people to come and share the books and magazines they’ve been reading and the music that they’ve been listening to.

By: Barbara Carr

Barbara Carr — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:17:03 +0000

Thanks for the excellent article AND the thoughtful, interesting comments. This demonstrates why we need and love the Ann Arbor Chronicle.

By: Keith Orr

Keith Orr — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:22:53 +0000

Great article. Just to clarify about BookFests…The Kerrytown BookFest was started by the Kerrytown District Association with a lot of the work by the Hollander’s, and is now operated by a separate non-profit entity. The Ann Arbor BookFest was the one started by Karl. Both are great events, but are not directly about the retail side of bookselling, other than a general promotion of the culture of books.

If we did not own the building that houses Common Language, it would also have closed. We survive because:

a. There is a community that wants us to survive.
b. We have a landlord (ourselves) who does not want to kick us out.
c. We have started to treat the business somewhat like a non-profit. There is a donation door at the cash register, we hold fundraisers. Our dear friend Susan Horowitz of Between The Lines newspaper explains that there is the for-profit world, the non-profit world, and then there is the unprofitable world. We believe that bookstores (and newspapers) have a reason to survive above and beyond the market forces*…as non-profits do. How we reconcile these in the future will say a lot about how information is disseminated.

* All of those reasons for bookstore survival are another entry which I have written about extensively elsewhere.

By: Ken Josenhans

Ken Josenhans — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:39:56 +0000

William Harris’ comment contributed a piece of the puzzle which I didn’t have: the book and record stores spawned along State Street in the 1970s when rents were low, because the shopping malls at the edge of town had siphoned off the established retailers.

Perhaps any new bookstore or co-op in the area should be looking at Ypsilanti locations, for lower rents?

By: Steve Thorpe

Steve Thorpe — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:59:55 +0000

At the end of the day, it’s all about the money, as in revenues. I can play the lab rat role of a typical baby boomer book fiend. Flash back to 1985: I was spending a MINIMUM of $1000 a year on books, much of it at Borders in Ann Arbor. Not unheard of for my wife and I to drop more than $100 in one visit. I eventually amassed a personal library of about 10,000 books. Flash forward to the decade just ended: After moving into smaller quarters, all but 1200 of those books get donated to local libraries and schools. I still read a minimum of three books a week, but the breakdown goes like this: One third hardcovers from the excellent libraries of Huntington Woods and Royal Oak, one third EPUBS downloaded to my e-reader from those libraries and one third rereads from my personal library. Total book PURCHASES for 2011 less than $50. The combination of a crappy economy and my being less self-indulgent (aka “Baby Boomer Disease”) has been bad news for booksellers. At least when it comes to draining my wallet. If it’s any consolation, the music biz is in even worse shape.