{"id":287016,"date":"2011-09-14T18:05:57","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T18:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/09\/14\/some-reasons-on-why-we-fight\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:16:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:16:59","slug":"some-reasons-on-why-we-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/09\/14\/some-reasons-on-why-we-fight\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Reasons on Why We Fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the New Yorker<\/em>’s Book Bench blog, Macy Halford has a post entitled “Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores?” The basis for her post is the petition to Save St. Mark’s Bookshop<\/a> that’s going round the Internets and is focused on the difficult the store is having paying market rent in the Lower East Side. <\/p>\n

This has always been a huge issue—especially in Manhattan—and has helped shutter the doors of many an awesome bookstore. (Lenox Hill, Coliseum, Books & Co., list goes on.) I’ve been reading a lot about the history of independent bookselling (I’m teaching the very informative and interesting Reluctant Capitalists<\/em> by Laura Miller<\/a> in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class this fall), and as a result could go on and on about this and related issues . . . But I’ll put that off for a rainy (or slighly less busy) day. <\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s part of Halford’s explanation for why indie bookstores are important to keep around:<\/p>\n

\n

I was explaining all this over e-mail to a colleague, who replied, \u201cI know bookstores are supposed to be good things, but we don\u2019t have video stores anymore, and maybe we need to get used to the new order instead of lamenting the old.\u201d This is what I\u2019d say to his point: it totally sucks that there are no more video stores. I spent long nights hanging out at Kim\u2019s in college, deliberating for hours over which random German film from the nineteen-seventies to take home with me. I actually watched stuff like that all the way through then, maybe since I\u2019d spent so much time and energy looking for it. I even miss Blockbuster: when I was a kid, the Friday-night trip to the video store to pick out a movie was the most exciting event of the week. How I watch a video now is: I browse on Netflix for a while, start watching something, get about five minutes in, wonder if I\u2019ve made the right decision, and start the process over. It\u2019s ridiculous, and yet I can\u2019t\u2026stop\u2026clicking\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

My point is that I wish we had been able to save the video store. I know the young citizens of the new order don\u2019t miss it, but kids don\u2019t miss anything: they\u2019re kids. And since we haven\u2019t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to. Going into bookstores to browse, to attend readings, to interact with the staff, to see the selection they\u2019ve curated\u2014all these things excite me and entice me to read. If my book-buying experience becomes simply me sitting alone on the couch click, click, clicking, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019ll become (I\u2019ll probably forget I\u2019m looking for books and jump over to Netflix).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Still, my colleague has a point: chaos and destruction are a part of life, and their consequences, impossible to foretell, are not always negative.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, and on the flip-side, economic, capitalist progress is a part of life, and the consequences of that haven’t always been positive. <\/p>\n

Putting aside the occasional frustrations indie bookstores present to me as a publisher of “difficult” books (based on 13 years of working at or with indie stores, I’ve come to believe that 98% of America consists of locations where readers “don’t buy your sort of books”), I’ve come to believe that good bookstores are one of the best things on the planet. It’s been a while since I lived in a town with a solid indie store, and man, do I miss it. Letting my book nerd flag fly here, but there’s something life-affirming about visiting a good bookstore and interacting with other people who really love books and talking about books. There aren’t a lot of places for that sort of interaction in our society (especially not in Rochester, NY—sorry), and it is a great counterweight to the pressure of working hard (and constantly) to make just enough money to be able to make it to the end . . . <\/p>\n

So, yeah. Indie bookstores are rad. And I too hope St. Mark’s survives. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, Macy Halford has a post entitled “Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores?” The basis for her post is the petition to Save St. Mark’s Bookshop that’s going round the Internets and is focused on the difficult the store is having paying market rent in the Lower […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[12586,2686,42556],"class_list":["post-287016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-future-of-bookselling","tag-new-yorker","tag-st-marks-bookshop"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343036,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287016\/revisions\/343036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}