Legal Commentary

A long time ago, I was fortunate to work part time for about a year at a used and rare bookstore called McIntyre and Moore Booksellers (they were on Mt. Auburn Street back then, not way off in Porter Square).  Present circumstances excepted, it was the best job I ever had.  I learned a little bit about how to judge a book's value as well as how to repair beautiful but injured old books.  I also discovered things that I know I would never would have come across -- a first edition of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," an early edition of George Santayana's "The Genteel Tradition at Bay," and even -- for the first time -- a used copy of Harold Berman's "Law and Revolution," as well as lots and lots of other odds and ends.  The beauty of the store was its physical orientation to books -- books needed to be touched, felt, fixed, glued, stacked, flipped through.  The must of their oldness and used-ness had to be smelled, their collected dustiness inhaled.  Part of the fun was to see and touch again the discolorations and brown spots that were the marks of prior readers, or to see a 100 year old inscription, and then another one about 50 years later, on a 200 year old volume.  Some rare bookstores have the air of a holy shrine; you enter and can almost hear the Gregorian chant.  Those can be great too, but my store was more earthily tactile, though some of its books could be quite valuable.

When I worked there, the shadowy fear was always that the giant chains -- Borders, Barnes & Noble, and the like -- would choke the life out of these little stores.  It was at least in part because of the market pressure of these big mega-stores that my own store opted to relocate.  But with the news of Borders's bankruptcy (B&N isn't doing all that well either), I can only imagine that stores like mine -- most of which have managed to survive just fine -- are feeling some...schadenfreude isn't exactly right, but I bet they're feeling a little pride.

The received wisdom is that on-line giant Amazon has made the physical mega-stores obsolete.  You can obtain much more from Amazon than you can from Borders, and it's easier to do so.  Yes, Borders allows you to browse through books, which you can't do the same way on Amazon, and that means you have to have a better idea of what you're looking for on Amazon.  But why hasn't the same market force which crushed Borders dampened the fortunes of the used and rare bookstore?  After all, you can get as good or better deals on Amazon as you can at any of these stores.  The selection of course is infinitely better.  As for rare or extremely valuable books, stores like mine might still have an advantage, but not enough people can afford to buy these books to keep the little stores afloat.  Is it the inherent physical pleasure of books that explains why the little stores -- much smaller operations than Borders and the like -- continue to survive and even prosper?  What is it that accounts for the endurance of the used and rare bookstore?