Paperback Nostalgia: High Culture at Low Cost
Teargas and Idealism
I finally caught up with the documentary Paperback Dreams that chronicles two west coast American independent bookstores — Kepler‘s and Cody‘s.
There is a couple of choice parts…
- Kepler’s opened with the ambition of carrying every paperback in print — all five thousand of them. That was in 1955.
- Cody’s was the first bookstore to ever have a computer — “an IBM the size of a fridge, that was the best investment we ever made.”
- On the subject of selling books on the internet “Bezos was Time’s Man of Year. Right up there with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler.” Sounds harsher than intended but still really funny.
- Kepler’s had a large customer base but only 27% called the store their primary location for buying books. Typical stores can count on 40% of the customers’ purchases.
- Cody’s had readings 30 times a month.
- Andy Ross, Cody’s owner, quotes T.S. Eliot.. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
There is an undercurrent of anti-anti-intellectualism in the doc. The internet is called “glib” on several occasions. At first I thought that was the documentary maker’s fault but the special features — particularly the mini-doc on the big boxes — makes it clear they weren’t as blind as I thought. The “rush that came with becoming an intellectual only after spending a few dollars” in these stores is the same rush many people have after discovering the internet. The parallelism is ignored in the movie but that doesn’t make it a weaker flic.
The doc made me think of Clay Shirky’s post on bookstores from a few weeks back. Teleread also published some thoughts on the topic.
Update: just got word that McNally Robinson is in bankruptcy. It seems to follow the Cody’s pattern — successful store owned by passionate owners survives the big box phase by becoming big boxes themselves only to over expand and drown in debt. I would normally have thought that sad but after seeing Dreams I now think it is simply the business cycle at work.
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