want to spend a substack post thinking out loud about my experiences with bookstores. I’ve already established before that libraries were a substantial, formative part of my childhood. What I didn’t mention in that post was how I would continue to go to the library as a teenager – particularly, I’d go to the Esplanade library in Singapore, which specialized in music and arts, and I’d particularly pick up loads of magazines – GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, etc. I considered it a vital part of my cultural education. I remember reading some really moving stories about real events that were happening in the world. I also remember reading every advice column I could find – I was a particularly big fan of Jimmy the Bartender and Nicole Beland from Men’s Health. I also When I was 20 and broke, I bought loads of books from Singapore’s National Library Book Sale – an annual sale of books that were no longer available for loan. I’d drag my army duffel bag to the convention hall and fill it up with dozens and dozens of books for $2 each. Some of the best books I’ve read were books I’d acquired this way, including Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion and Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell.
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There isn’t really any good bookstore in my neighborhood. The main one I believe is a Popular, which is a chain of stores that tends to have lots of office supplies, assessment books for students, stationery, that sort of thing. The actual selection of books is fairly sparse, mainly just popular (ha ha) bestsellers, “airport books”. There are several decent to good bookstores in Singapore, one of the biggest is Kinokuniya in Orchard Road and I love spending time in it. I’ve also really enjoyed browsing some more niche secondhand bookstores and such.
I’d like to write something like a “theory of bookstores”. A little googling leads me to a 2019 article, “who’s really killing Singapore’s bookstores?” – the consensus seems to be that people are actually reading more, but they buy most of their books online, and increasing rents are making it harder for small bookstores to survive. And there’s some murkiness around copyright issues and complexities around sales taxes. Being a bookseller is a really bad way to make money, so practically everyone who sells books does it as a labor of love.
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In 2011 Nicole Strauss wrote The End of Bookstores…
” To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. Within that frame, she can decide what she likes and doesn’t like, what is for her and not for her. She can browse, selecting this offering and rejecting that, and in this way she can begin to assemble a program of taste and self.”
I relate to that, and I know Ray Bradbury did too. We are library-educated.
“if we wish to be changed, to be challenged and undone, then we need a means of placing ourselves in the path of an accident”
“There are many reasons for the decline of bookstores. Blame the business model of superstores, blame Amazon, blame the shrinking of leisure time, blame a digital age that offers so many bright, quick things, which have crippled our ability for sustained concentration. You can even blame writers, if you want, because you think they no longer produce anything vital to the culture or worth reading. Whatever the case, it is an historical fact that the decline of the bookstore and the rise of the Internet happened simultaneously; one model of the order and presentation of knowledge was toppled and superseded by another. For bookstores, e-books are only the nail in the coffin.”
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abandoned