The Big Bookstore that Can't
The little engine could, and did. This big bookstore seems to be running out of steam and sliding backwards down the slope and toward a crash. I spent several hours in the store I'll call BN for brevity, yesterday. And the heck of it is, we hadn't planned to go to the bookstore in the first place.
We met up for lunch, family and friends, and after a good meal the conversation was rolling and it was moved to adjourn to someplace quieter and more conducive to chatting without raising our voices. None of us were familiar with the area, so we had to look for a bookstore. A little google later and we met up at the local BN. All of us being bibliophiles, there was some browsing as well, since we were there. And of course more drinks from the café so conveniently located with little tables we could cluster around. I say little, because the larger tables we could have put the whole group around were all occupied by a single person with laptops, drinks, and no signs of budging any time in the future. Still, we made it work.
At one point in the conversation my brother-in-law was telling me about a book I should get for my son, 101 Things Every Man Should Know, and he looked it up on his phone. "It says they have it here."
They may have. They may not. Their method of 'organizing' non-fiction books by topic was not clear, and as we wound our way through looking at signs trying to figure out what it would be filed under, I dryly commented that a Men's Books section would clearly not be welcome in this place. Nor were any staff in sight to be asked, even assuming they would have known where to look. There were, in the afternoon to early evening hours, three staff in the store. Two cashiers, and one rather harried assistant manager, who I did actually track down immediately after entering the store, to let him know that two of the three stalls in the ladies room lacked necessary paper. He said he'd tell someone about it. This didn't give me hope he could find the book... and after we found the section with the Dangerous Book for Boys and decided that if they'd had the book we sought, it would have been there, we returned to our table and I ordered the book from Amazon. This is why the bookstore is dying, point first.
Point second: selection, or lack thereof. I took the time since I was there anyway, to indulge in a little market research. I found the SFF sections, one for 'New and Popular', and the other all the rest. All of two ~12 foot long, chest high shelving units. There was a single Kratman title, three Correias, a handful of Drakes. I was looking for DJ Butler's Witchy Eye in paper, and found the store only had the sequel, Witchy Winter, in stock. There were quite a number of classics, some in very pretty covers, including a lot of Tolkein with titles I hadn't seen before, like the 'Atlas of Tolkein' which I assume is a work drawn from his actual books capitalizing on the recent movie-driven popularity. It was disappointing, and as you'll see from my photo of the 'New and Popular' section, kind of pathetic.
Not a lot of 'new' here at all, and of the new, very few authors I recognize. The one in the center with the pretty green is definitely YA chick lit.
I did wind up buying some books, though. Two were more for the kids - they prefer to read in paper. One was for me, but all of them were... classics. Books that I wanted fresh copies of, at a reasonable price, two of them being collections that mean I don't have to keep several books on the full shelves at home. I don't anticipate going to the BN again. Cincinnati is not a small city. There are - and I have shopped them - small Indie bookstores in the region. Generally speaking, they are cozy, clean, friendly, and have a nice selection of more regional interest books, like the book on mushroom identification I bought recently. And my local used bookstores are a delight, one I use as a reward for myself because it's all too easy to increase my tsudoku every visit I make there!
