Borders, We Hardly Knew Ye

I didn't make it to the great Borders blowout this morning--we're 90  miles away and, sentimentalist though I may be, I simply felt no strong notion to join the party.  But I certainly remember my first outing.  I had actually never heard of Borders before I went to Philadelphia in the fall of 1993 for a visiting gig at Penn.  They found me an apartment right at Rittenhouse Square (pleasant and cheap).  The first evening, I strolled idly up Walnut Street; I knew vaguely that there was a worth-a-sidetrip used bookstore on Walnut at about 20th (I've forgotten the details and it doesn't seem to be there any longer).  But as I came around the corner at  18th and Walnut--whups, there it was, one giant store just suppurating books, surely the most fully stocked bookshop I'd seen outside of Charing Cross Road, excepting only Cody's in Berkeley.  And a chain at that.  I'm pretty sure I can remember my first purchase, although it doesn't seem to be in the house any more: a commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and I marvelled that you could find anything for such a niche audience in mainstream shop. Waldenbooks this was not.

But of course what attracted me even more was the coffee shop.  UB groupies will recognize that I am the ultimate public-space reader, and the idea of a coffee shop inside a bookstore--and just around the corner--meant I really didn't have to spend many evenings at home.  The only problem was that the place was so crowded:  all I could infer was that Philly must be painfully short of singles bars, at least for the lib-arts set, because you had to claw your way for a table at Borders just about any time of the day or the week.

I won't bore you with too many more details which are, in the end, not so much different from so many other readers'.   I probably logged my most Borders' time down at Davis, near campus, a favorite study hall for Asian technoid brain trust.  In New York, I enjoyed the privilege of the massive space at the base of the World Trade Center.  Two of my favorites were (are?) in and around DC--the one at 18th and L, and the one out by the Pentagon: both seemed to go heavy on the sort of wonkery you'd expect in those neighborhoods.  And once, back when the GPS was still a novelty, I asked my rental car to point me to a Borders near Cleveland; it pointed me to Raleigh, NC; I guess the device hadn't caught on yet.

Meanwhile, of course, I was getting sucked into the digital vortex.  And here's the thing: just as my first Borders presented itself a feast of almost unimaginable plenitude, compared to the online catalog it came to look shabby and cramped.  Some will say this was bad management, a company run by a bunch of suits who knew nothing of the book biz.  Maybe, I'm not sure-I've often suspected that loving books might be a hazard in the book biz; much better just to have a strong back  Still, over and over I found myself looking at the Borders wall and saying--um, gee, is that all?

I guess that is all, and I can't say I'm merrily indifferent.  Still, Palookaville has a selection of fine coffeeshops.  It also has one excellent used bookstore and meanwhile, would you like to see what I've just downloaded from Amazon to my Iphone?