Light On Dark Water

But Hope for the Bookstore?

I started to post this link in the comments to the previous post but decided it was worth a post of its own. I just ran across this while reading something else at The Atlantic (namely this extremely exciting bit of news) and I only had time to read half of it: The Bookstore Strikes Back, an account of someone starting a new and so far successful bookstore in Nashville. 

Update: The statement about the astonishing fact below is inoperative. In my haste on Friday I misread the piece and thought the store owner didn't know what "Parnassus" was.

That link takes you to the first of two pages, which is as far as I read (I'll have to wait till after work to read the rest). Somewhere on that page is a fact that astonished me. I'm curious to know whether it jumps out at anyone else.

Maclin Horton
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38 responses to “But Hope for the Bookstore?”

  1. Janet

    Well, I wish I had time to write something, but I don’t.
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. Anne-Marie

    The fact that struck me on page 1 is that girls went from Little House straight to Kristin Lavransdatter. That seems like a huge jump, unless you read the Little House books at a rate of about one every six months.

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  3. Marianne

    Was it the $300,000 needed to start the bookstore?
    Sounds like a lot to me, but then I’ve never been able to keep up with inflation.

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  4. Janet

    That you can’t buy an ebook at B&N and download it onto Kindle?
    AMDG

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  5. Janet

    Oh, funny. Your link takes us to page 2. I haven’t even read the page you are talking about. No wonder I can’t figure it out.
    AMDG

    Reply
  6. Mac

    *&^%^$!!! I thought I had checked that. In fact I know I did check that the link worked, but I guess I was in such a hurry that I didn’t notice it was the wrong page. So it’s fixed now. I was about to explain but I’ll give folks a bit longer. I’m not being coy, I genuinely want to know if it is as striking to anyone else as it was to me.

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  7. Mac

    And thanks for pointing out, btw.

    Reply
  8. Janet

    Well, that they read Kristin L. at all! Even if they did take a long time with Little House.
    Davis-Kidd, the bookstore that they talk about in the article was founded by two women, Karen Davis and Thelma Kidd. Then they opened another Davis-Kidd in Memphis. At the time, it was the biggest bookstore I’d ever seen. It’s moved twice and is probably twice the size of the original store, but still isn’t a quarter of the size of Borders. My daughter has been working there for about fifteen years, except for the year and half she took off when her daughter was born. Now she only works 15 hours a week.
    This Davis Kidd was also bought out by Joseph Beth and JB decided to close the store. Thank goodness someone decided to buy it. Unfortunately, they had to change the name, but I think most people still call it Davis Kidd.
    Anyway, the reason that it has survived is that it is just the kind of bookstore that is described in the article. The people who work there know what they are doing and they know their customers. It’s a real community bookstore.
    AMDG

    Reply
  9. Clare

    I was surprised that the closed bookstores had been profitable. My impression was that Borders in particular had been hemorrhaging money for a while now.
    Also, you can’t load a B&N ebook onto a Kindle in part because Amazon among all ebook retailers does not use the epub file format. Which is highly annoying for all concerned except Jeff Bezos.

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  10. Mac

    It is indeed surprising that they read Kristin at that age, also that the closed stores were profitable. But those are not the things that shocked me.
    Even a near-monopoly like Amazon can start losing if they try to hard to lock people in to their stuff. I resent Amazon yet find it irresistibly easy and inexpensive to patronize.

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  11. janet

    Seemingly no one else was struck.
    AMDG

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  12. Mac

    I deduce from my statistics that there is a significant number of people who read the blog during the week but not on weekends, so I guess I’ll give up.
    Now to make it a real anti-climax: I think I may have misread her. I thought she was saying that she didn’t recognize the word “Parnassus,” and I was amazed that someone so immersed in books and literature, a writer of “literary fiction,” would not know that. But re-reading it now it seems more like she’s saying that she thinks other people would have trouble with it. It isn’t 100% clear which she means, and maybe no one else read it the way I did. I did read it pretty hastily.

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  13. Anne-Marie

    I took her to mean it would be unfamiliar to too many potential customers. If I’d read it the way you did, not knowing “Parnassus” would have eclipsed reading KL.

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  14. Janet

    I think she was thinking other people wouldn’t know what it was.
    AMDG

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  15. Mac

    Yes, I think y’all are right. False alarm.
    I see from her Wikipedia bio that she went to Sarah Lawrence. If I had known that, I would have been even quicker to jump to my apparently erroneous conclusion. Many years ago I met someone who had graduated from there with an English lit degree and I was astonished at how little she knew. She had been allowed to pretty much make her own curriculum and had spent all her time studying the then-fashionable Bloomsbury group.

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  16. Marianne

    I didn’t read it that way, but the writer does come off as just a wee bit precious in some of her comments, like this one:
    “We have a Barnes & Noble that is a 20-minute drive out of town without traffic, a Books-A-Million on the western edge of the city, near a Costco, and also a Target. Do those count? Not to me, no, they don’t, and they don’t count to any other book-buying Nashvillians with whom I am acquainted.”
    So maybe you were sort of primed to read that she didn’t know from Parnassus.
    Or…maybe it was just an Emily Litella moment in the making for you. 😉

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  17. Mac

    Yes, I admit I was somewhat prejudiced against her by the time I got to the Parnassus bit.
    I’m afraid I had to look up Emily Litella. But yeah, I guess so. Never mind!

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  18. Janet

    I’m so glad. Now I don’t have to feel stupid for not getting it.
    AMDG

    Reply
  19. Grumpy

    I had the opposite reaction. I got it that she recognized Parnassus and realized that I myself would have to think very hard to recall its place in Greek mythology. I could use and understand the word ‘Parnassian’ but I haven’t heard anyone refer to Mount Parnassus for so long that I can barely recall the derivation. So I thought she was a very smart lady.

    Reply
  20. Mac

    Well, she may have gone and looked up the details before she wrote this piece. 🙂
    I couldn’t have explained it in detail, but I would recognize its general significance as a result of all the references to it in English poetry and criticism.
    I have to say I agree with the writer that it doesn’t seem an especially good name for a bookstore. Very old-fashioned, and definitely not cool. Actually it almost seems ironic with respect to the general state of literature these days.

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  21. janet

    I sure like it better than Independent People.
    AMDG

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  22. Grumpy

    I think it is a beautiful name in itself, and a great name for a bookshop because it already does what a bookshop should do – it makes people think and remember. I can’t imagine anyone not going in there to buy books because they don’t get the classical reference, but I can imagine people feeling good about going there because of the classical reference – it will make them feel mildly superior and educated.

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  23. Mac

    Maybe so. It is certainly better than Independent People. I would be hard put to think of a worse name than that. It makes me think “herd of independent minds.”

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  24. janet

    Oh, now I’m going to have to open a bookstore called “A Herd of Independent Mines.”
    AMDG

    Reply
  25. Mac

    I guess you meant “minds” but “mines” is an interesting twist.:-)

    Reply
  26. janet

    That’s funny because I toyed with “mines” for about five seconds, but I didn’t really mean to type it.
    I was also trying to figure out what I could do with “heard” but I was too tired to persist.
    AMDG

    Reply
  27. Anne-Marie

    I agree with Grumpy that “Parnassus” won’t be a turnoff even if it is opaque to many people. It’s a lovely-sounding and -looking word; it seems to mean something, and discovering its meaning could be a pleasant discovery for customers.
    Independent People, gaaack. The literary reference is obscure, and to anyone who doesn’t recognize the reference the name just looks appallingly self-congratulatory. Send them to the mines, say I.

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  28. Janet

    It just occurred to me to wonder if she thought “Independent People” would be a more accessible reference than “Parnassus.”
    AMDG

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  29. Grumpy

    Is Independent People a literary reference? 🙂

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  30. Janet

    She could have called it Sjálfstætt fólk.
    AMDG

    Reply
  31. Mac

    Oh yeah, I had already forgotten that “Independent People” is a literary reference (an Icelandic novel, Grumpy, presumably having as its native title that unpronounceable stuff that Janet posted). That, plus the fact that it’s an independent, as opposed to chain, bookstore, makes it actually a pretty good name from one point of view–clever, makes sense, says something about the place, etc. Unfortunately from another point of view it’s terrible.

    Reply
  32. Marianne

    I did a search on “parnassus” to see in what contexts it appears and found a Parnassus Book Service that’s been operating on Cape Cod since 1957.
    Interesting article about it here.

    Reply
  33. Marianne

    I wonder if there will be some confusion for people wanting to order books online from either store because the website addresses are so similar — the old Parnassus is parnassusbooks.com and the new one is parnassusbooks.net.

    Reply
  34. Mac

    Hard to imagine that there would not be confusion. I’m a little surprised that the new one went with the same name for their site. People are much more likely to go to a .com than a .net, so Cape Cod may have gotten some sales out of it. Though maybe there isn’t that much overlap…I guess if you’re going to run an online business you ought to register the .net and .org domains at the same time as you do the .com.

    Reply
  35. Rob G

    Christopher Morley wrote a couple novels, in the 20’s I think — The Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels — about bookselling. I think the latter is about a traveling bookstore (I’ve not read either, but see them mentioned from time to time by “bookish” writers.) That’s what popped into my mind when I read “Parnassus” w/r/t books. Haven’t read the first pages in full yet as my computer is doing something screwy with the link, so I haven’t had a chance to be struck by the astonishing fact…

    Reply
  36. Mac

    The astonishing fact was not a fact–I misread something in the piece (the post has been updated accordingly, so I guess you didn’t re-read it). So don’t expect to be struck, at least not by that.

    Reply
  37. Mac

    There used to be a bookstore here called The Haunted Bookshop, and I was slightly disappointed when I heard of the Morley book, figuring the name had not been original.
    Hmm…sure enough: you can find anything on the internet these days.

    Reply
  38. Janet

    She lived in Termite Hall. I think I might have to have that name for my house.
    AMDG

    Reply

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