Whipped Cream Difficulties

In general, I don’t like telling people “Go over to this other guy’s blog and read his stuff”, especially when that’s instead of actual content. In this specific case, however, it will help considerably with context if you read Andy Ihnatko’s blog post about the City Lights bookstore historical reenactment and the comments on that post.

Still with me? Good.

My first reaction to this post was, “Yeah, Andy! Stick it to those snobbish bastids!” My second reaction was great annoyance at some of the comments, especially the one about City Lights as a bookstore with a “strong curatorial voice”. My third reaction was, “Wait a minute, do some of these people have a point?” This post is an attempt to work through those reactions.

Stipulations:

1. The owner of a bookstore has the right to stock or not stock whatever he or she wishes.
2. The patron of a bookstore has the right to go someplace else if they’re not happy.
3. There are always limits of space, time, and money that determine what can and can’t be stocked.
4. Places that reflect some sort of individual personality are good. Chains are less than optimal.
5. However, we live in a less than optimal world. I spent a lot of my life without access to much more than chain bookstores, and I wasn’t living in remote areas. Given a choice between no bookstore at all and a chain, I’d take the chain.
6. We’re not talking here about used bookstores, where what’s in stock depends on what people bring in to sell.
7. Nor are we talking about speciality bookstores, such as the few remaining shops that specialize in SF or mystery books, or the chess bookstore in New York City. (I will note, though, that one of my favorite bookstores is the Gambler’s Book Shop in Las Vegas, which is a speciality store. And one of the reasons I like Gambler’s Book Shop is that they have a very ecumenical view of what constitutes a gambling related book. Another reason is that Howard Schwartz has always been incredibly kind and pleasant to me personally, but that’s off topic.)

So why is it annoying that City Lights doesn’t have any Wodehouse because “Paul doesn’t like Wodehouse”? One reason, perhaps, is the attitude expressed in the statement “Paul doesn’t like Wodehouse”. The other has to do with our expectations.

The first rule of a bookstore is (or should be) “Sell books”. A bookstore that can’t pay the electric bill or the rent is of no use to anyone. We have two words to describe those stores: “For Lease”.

When we walk into a store, we expect to be able to buy things. The store may be out of stock on some particular item, or there may be other factors that prevent us from making a purchase. But we don’t expect to walk into a seafood restaurant and be told they don’t have shrimp because “the owner doesn’t like shrimp”. Similarly, when we walk into a bookstore, they may not have any Wodehouse currently in stock, but we don’t expect to be told they don’t have any because “Paul doesn’t like Wodehouse”. I think there’s an implied agreement that if you stock books – general or specific – you’re going to make a best effort to stock as much as you can, likes and dislikes aside.

(As a side note, I avoided blogging about the Amazon/Macmillan issue because other people were doing it better than I was. But my major problem with Amazon’s behavior during that episode is much the same as “doesn’t like Wodehouse”. It is one thing when Amazon isn’t selling the book because it can’t get it. It is another thing entirely when Amazon stops selling books for political reasons. I hesitate to use the phrase “destroys trust” because you really shouldn’t trust large corporations like Amazon (unless there’s some sort of legally mandated fiducial relationship involved), but it seriously compromised my generally favorable feelings about Amazon. It will take a long time for Amazon to fix that, and right now I don’t see them even making an effort.)

“It’s not censorship when you can walk 10 or 12 blocks to the Borders in Union Square and find all the Wodehouse reprints you might want.” Absolutely right; if I want Wodehouse, I can walk over to Borders and get it, just like if I want Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, I can go over to HEB and get it instead of purchasing from Whole Foods. You know something else? I can get my Wodehouse from Amazon, too. And if I’m buying my Wodehouse from Amazon, there’s no reason why I’m not also buying A People’s Tragedy and The Arcades Project from Amazon at the same time, and saying “To heck with City Lights.”

“It’s a browser’s heaven, and its strong curatorial voice is a big part of that.” See, I’m not sure you can make that argument. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for the serendipity of browsing, and the ability to find things you didn’t know existed. But if what’s in stock depends on what Paul likes…what happens when Paul decides that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” reflects a view of art in the post-socialist world that he doesn’t agree with, and stops stocking Benjamin? Isn’t that sort of a breach of the implied agreement that exists between patron and owner? Paul’s attitude, to me, makes City Lights no better than Amazon; and at least Amazon has the entire Internet watching it. You may still encounter moments of serendipity browsing a “curated bookstore”, but you’ll always find yourself wondering “What else is there that the buyer – excuse me, ‘curator’ – hasn’t chosen to show me? Is there a better book on Dien Bien Phu than Hell in a Very Small Place? And if there is, how would I find out, when I can’t trust the curator to tell me?”

“You are actually highly unlikely to find pop culture detritus at City Lights.” That’s great, but we’re talking Wodehouse here, not detritus. I don’t think there’s a slippery slope; I think you can make a decision not to stock the bound collected Tweets of poorly-tattooed Asian Myspace dwarf slut Tila Tequila or the latest volume of quack medical advice from Dr. Jenny McCarthy without sliding all the way down to “Paul doesn’t like Wodehouse”.

But the person who wrote that comment says it like this is something to be proud of. “We don’t stock that vulgar popular crap!” My question is: why does it matter? The works of Misha Glenny are still the works of Misha Glenny; the words in the books and what’s good about Glenny’s writing don’t change because those books are being sold next to the autobiography of Lady Gaga or the works of Kropotkin. Why do you care what other people buy? What does it matter to you?

(Side note 1: If Lady Gaga keeps performing for a few more years, I think an interesting book could be written about her stage and costume designs, covering the process of implementation, who influenced her designs, historical precursors, concept sketches, designs that didn’t work out for whatever reason, etc.)

(Side note 2: If I owned a speciality bookstore, I’d probably still keep one or two copies of every book on the NYT bestseller list under the counter, even if it wasn’t within my speciality, just so I could make quick sales to the desperate and the people who can’t read signs.)

(Side note 2.5: I have a lot of plans for “If I ever ran a bookstore”. Of course, I will never run a bookstore because I don’t expect to ever have more money than I can spend in my entire life; that’s a necessary pre-condition to me being able to run a bookstore in the way I want to run a bookstore.)

(Side note 3: I am tempted to make an argument that bookstore owners have a moral duty not to sell volumes of quack medical advice. I haven’t fully fleshed out that argument yet, and I suspect I’ll end up arguing against that position once I think it through.)

The more I work through this, and the more thought I put into it, the more I come down on the side of Andy’s right, the people who are arguing against him are snobs, and City Lights isn’t a bookstore; call it a museum of Beat culture with a gift shop.

Help me out here, people. What am I missing? Where have I gone off the track?

(Subject line hattip: from Joel on Software. Joel was writing in a different context about a different subject, but that story about the Lost Boy Peter has stuck in my mind for a long time.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.