Big-Box Bookstores Don’t Have to Die

You could say I have a sentimental attachment to the chain bookstore. Growing up in an intellectually impoverished American suburb, I spent much of my free time in now-defunct locations of Borders and Barnes & Noble. I read garbage, mostly: popular history magazines, Star Trek novelizations, art tomes whose pages I scoured only for frank depictions of naked women. But I had an intuitive sense that all those “wordy” books sleeping on the shelves, whose spines I raced my finger along while traveling between the café and the restrooms, would some day be the building blocks of a real, adult mind, the cathedral-like dimensions of which I could almost picture emerging through the haze of my juvenile enthusiasms. Inside Barnes & Noble, the figures of great literature literally looked down on me. A large wallpapered mural assembled them all in some grand ahistorical café. It was through that mural that I had my first encounters with the brooding fop Oscar Wilde and the fabulously bearded Anthony Trollope. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2015-12-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #barnes noble #naked women #building blocks

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[ Literrary Hub | 2022-12-21 09:53:25 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-12-21 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-12-19 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-12-15 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ CBC | 2022-12-13 09:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Los Angeles Times | 2022-12-11 13:00:46 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-12-11 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2022-12-06 02:05:02 UTC ]
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Build a Perfect Bookstore and We’ll Recommend a Book for You

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[ Book Riot | 2022-12-01 11:32:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-11-29 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-11-22 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-11-16 05:00:00 UTC ]
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