It’s hard to overstate my sadness at the slow disappearance of bookstores, and my nostalgia for their old-school grandeur. Not too long ago, for example, they had at least three great bookstores on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica—Borders, Barnes & Noble and the eclectic Midnight Special. Eventually, like many others across the nation, they disappeared, swept up in the digital hurricane of Amazon, Kindle and iPads, not to mention Covid lockdowns that turned so many of us into accidental homebodies.
Imagine: A major promenade with global visitors and without one bookstore.
But it was more than the absence of books—in recent years, the promenade itself has lost much of its sparkle. Mixed in with glamor tenants like the Apple store and Urban Outfitters are a whole bunch of “for lease” signs. You can feel the fatigue, the wear and tear, the smaller crowds. Just as a hot new place has a buzz of success, these days the Third Street Promenade has more of a vibe of decline.
In many ways, these smaller crowds are a sign of our modern isolation, our tendency to socially distance in the seductive, hyper-convenient era of Zoom and Netflix.
Bookstores, for me, were always the very antidote to physical isolation. Browsing with fellow humans through endless aisles of books was like a sacred ritual of the civilized life. The world may be upside down, politics may drive us nuts, climate change may threaten our future, but in the warm embrace of a busy bookstore, everything was right with the world.
You can imagine my reaction, then, when I was strolling on the Promenade the other night and saw a grand opening sign for…yes, Barnes & Noble!
I felt like that guy in the movies who spends days in the desert and sees a water cascade in the distance but is not sure if it’s a mirage. How could this be? Just when digital living is peaking, an old-fashioned bookstore shows up?
It wasn’t a mirage. My friend and I immediately walked in and didn’t want to leave. OK, I won’t pretend it had the charm of an independent bookstore. The titles that greeted us are what you’d expect from a national chain– commercial titles with broad appeal. Very colorful, very glossy.
And absolutely magnificent.
Who cares if the books are commercial or classic? They’re books! Thousands and thousands of books you can pick up at any time, each book a world of its own. And the more you browse, the more interesting the books get, the more the selection and the sections grow. I even discovered a corner that sold vinyl records and turntables.
The employees themselves seemed excited. They must love books, too. Downstairs, near the magazine section, I saw an eager employee helping an old man who was looking for The Economist. (I also noticed he had picked up Noa Tishby’s new book on Israel.)
Of course, I know not to get too excited. I remember my astonishment a few years ago when I saw an Amazon— Amazon!— bookstore at the Westfield Mall in Century City. It was almost messianic. The party most responsible for killing bookstores repented and opened bookstores across the land.
The repentance, however, didn’t last. Amazon shut down all of its bookstores in March 2022.
So, as I sit here in Barnes & Noble writing this love letter to brick and mortar and paper, I know I must gird myself for the inevitable letdown.
But why think that far ahead?
I’m in a bookstore right now, and life is good.
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