Flashback 2011: Enjoy a local bookstore while you can

Book Bin's old location on Church Street, 2016.

     "Moonstruck" is one of my favorite movies, despite a prominent role played by Nicholas Cage. It's so well-written, with many memorable lines that prove useful in regular life. "Your life is going down the toilet," alas, has been deployed more than once.
     And a useful edict that I considered just last week, while modulating my tone about the Charlie Kirk candlelight vigil — "Don't shit where you live." 
    With that in mind, I've never posted the pair of 2011 columns about my beloved local bookstore, "The Book Bin." Mainly because the second, which I'll post Sunday, caused the then owner to give me a stink eye whenever I walked in, making me feel even more unwelcome than I ordinarily do most places anyway.
     If you don't remember the 2011 columns, you can read this and try to imagine what sparked a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. You can wonder, but you won't hit on it because, to quote a truism not in "Moonstruck," you never see the bullet that hits you.

     Most books are published on Tuesdays, the day when what few bookstores remain put them out on sale, one of those quaint traditions of publishing about to vanish along with the stores themselves.

     Jackie Collins’ 27th novel, Goddess of Vengeance, was one of the books published last Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Dillon Perlow stopped by the Book Bin in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook to pick up the copy the store had tucked away for her.
     “A girl has to have a little light reading,” explained the Glenview woman. She also bought Linwood Barclay’s The Accident on the advice of Nancy Usiak, a Book Bin saleslady.
     As the two books were being rung up, the women talked about what they were reading.
     “I just finished Language of Flowers,” Perlow said.
     “I read Story of a Beautiful Girl,” Usiak replied. “I found it more impactful.”
     “I just loved that one,” Perlow agreed.
     An average day in the life of a small independent bookstore, one with a children’s section with toys in the back, a faux fireplace with comfortable chairs in the front, a store that has been in business for 40 years.
     Meanwhile, in the city, a better-known bookstore, Borders, was marking its 40th birthday, coincidentally, by going out of business. The last day of its last downtown Chicago location, on State Street, was Wednesday.
     “STORE CLOSING — EVERYTHING MUST GO — 90% OFF” read the stark red and yellow signs in the windows of Borders. Inside, the shelves were mostly stripped. The remaining books weren’t worth the match needed to burn them: Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal. Sydney Omarr’s Astrological Guide for You in 2010 and How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green.
     Bargain hunters milled around — there was always a crowd at Borders; it was, for those of us so inclined, the place to go, to stroll after dinner and, maybe, pick up a book.
     Obviously not an experience people valued enough, as consumers learned to prefer the undeniable Christmas morning joy of receiving another smiley face Amazon box.
     Borders was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., by brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Their chain steadily expanded until, at its peak, it had more than 500 stores.
      The Book Bin was founded in 1971 by Janis Irvine and her husband Lex.
     Irvine said someone approached her about opening a second store in the late 1970s, but she turned him down — with two stores, she reasoned, she’d always be in the back room, working, and wouldn’t be out front talking with customers about books, the part she loves.
     She has no joy seeing the giant crumble.
     “It really is not satisfying,” she said. “To see any bookstore close breaks my heart.”
     And Borders once was really something.
     “You had to take an examination [in literature] before you could become a salesperson at Borders,” she said. “They were terrific.”
     Large or small, each bookstore that closes, Irvine said, means one less place “where people can go in and exchange ideas and talk about books.”
     Perhaps the most incredible thing about the Book Bin is, though small, it is staffed by four saleswomen, plus a high school clerk.
     “We never sit around reading,” Irvine said, and indeed, as frequently as I stop by, the stock always seems to have changed — Wednesday the new Jackie Kennedy interview book was published, and three copies were already prominently displayed.
     Make no mistake. Books as tangible objects are doomed. In 2011, for the first time, sales of e-books surpassed sales of adult hardback books — Amazon delivers more e-books than paper books. That’ll never change.
     People like to save money, and to do so will ditch human interaction: first telephone operators, then gas station attendants, then bank tellers and now bookstore clerks.
     I try to focus on the advantages. As a guy who once lugged around bricks of Remembrance of Things Past, I appreciate the new technology. But oh those drawbacks: I never would have read Alfred Lansing’s gripping adventure Endurance if a young Adam Brent hadn’t pressed it upon me in his father’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue. Stuart Brent’s is long gone, as is Adam’s shop on Washington Street. Someday they’ll all be gone.
     But not yet. The Book Bin, for one, remains, at 1151 Church St., and on Thursday, it celebrates its 40th birthday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everything in the store during those hours will be an Amazon-like 40 percent off. There will also be wine and hors d’oeuvres — try getting someone to squirt that into a Kindle along with your e-book.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011