December 20, 2007
Alexandra Heifetz on independent bookstores
One definition of good criticism is that it reveals ideas that upon their disclosure seem to be self-evident. Such is the case with a review-essay by Alexandra Heifetz, managing editor of n+1, in that magazine’s winter 2008 issue. Discussing independent bookstores, Heifetz asserts:
Book Sense, a program launched by the American Booksellers Association in 2000, is probably the best-known of the cross-independent promotional tools mentioned in Reluctant Capitalists; it is certainly the most durable and dynamic. Paying-member bookstores get a website provided by the Booksense.com network. They are able to accept Book Sense gift certificates, which means that someone who votes “indie” can help a far-away friend make a purchase at the far-away friend’s local shop. In member stores, there are tables, shelves, or racks at the front displaying some of each month’s twenty Book Sense Picks, books which are also blurbed by participating independent booksellers in a free monthly newsletter and featured on the central website. The program has allowed the smallest new bookstores to open with an appearance of old-style handselling whether or not they have the inclination (or staff) to pick their favorites from the shelves. Major, established independents mix the Book Sense picks in with clerks’ favorites. Some tiny places let the Book Sense books stand alone.
What is strange about these “political” practices is that they may actually neutralize the uniqueness and independence of independents. Book Sense bookstores fight the good fight; but if you go to enough of the affiliates nationwide, you begin to see that the Book Sense aspect of them (except where it is downplayed, hidden, or mixed in with local choices) also creates a certain national homogeneity of taste, just the way the bigger corporations try to do. It pursues economic localism rather than the encouragement of a local or decentralized taste in books.
This seems to me true based upon my experiences in independent bookstores in Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and elsewhere. It is why I prefer Bookman’s Alley (in Evanston), the now-shuttered shop on Newbury Street (in Boston), Three Lives and Westsider (in New York), Family (in Los Angeles), and Ten Editions (in Toronto)—note that several of these stores do not have websites—to the somewhat larger, brighter, fresh-faced indies in each city. Heifetz nails something essential about this homogeneity with a later characterization of Book Sense taste: “The aggregate personality of Book Sense likes unsurprising, slightly literary novels and memoirs with a ‘universal’ hook, and thrillers and sci-fi with better than average prose. It skews in its choices toward titles from the big conglomerate New York publishers, while devoting significant room to occasional independent publishers.”