The Book Bench | Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores? →
(via The New Yorker)
Excerpt:
I’ll admit that at times I’ve responded to news of random indie-bookstore shutterings as I do to news of catastrophes in faraway lands: with a pang of concern that soon settles into a vague sense of unease about the world and the problem of human existence. But I’ve always suspected that, should the war come home (namely to the shops I frequent: The Strand, Westsider, powerHouse, BookCourt, McNally Jackson, Shakespeare & Co., WORD, Longitude, Bluestockings, Housing Works, or St. Marks), I’d feel differently. And indeed, when news reached me Friday that a link to a petition to save St. Marks books was going around the Internet, I got that queasy, vertiginous feeling you get when you’ve been dumped, fired, evicted, or told that your kitten’s been run over. St. Marks is one of mybookstores, I screamed at the Internet: who thought they had the right to take it away?
Read the rest here.
