Anti-Climacus

WELL: You probably missed this Yglesias post on the comparative merits of Barnes and Noble versus Borders, and any of these by Terry Teachout on being back in his old hometown, but I had occasion today to sort of link these two.

So I got a book as a present, and a very thoughtful one at that, but one I happen to already own. It was purchased at Barnes and Noble, which I avoid like the plague, because I find their selection to be woefully limited, and their categorizations to be somewhat confusing. But I went anyway. I immediately replaced the book I was given (Yankees Century) with another baseball one-- Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract, and had a little money left, so I checked out my other options.

I far prefer Borders, still, because their orderings of books make more sense (things in corners are more specialized versions of things in the open)--so reference books or, say, U.S. biographies are in a corner, where at Barnes and Noble the philosophy section was in the back corner, not at all visible, behind religious fiction, or something else not entirely compatible with it. If at Borders I wanted to get a replacement for my now-lost copy of Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind, I go to the 'Eastern Europe' history section, which is clearly marked. I'm not sure there was one at B&N.

But enough of the carping--one thing that struck me as great was the vast selection, even in that inferior-quality store, of serious literature. I ended up getting a paperback version of David Copperfield with my remaining money, and it's your average everyday mass-produced paperback--but with the sort of notes and essays you'd expect in the Oxford edition (having the Oxford edition from the library right now, I can say my mass-marketed one compares quite favorably). And I had my choice of editions, as well as every other major Dickens work--and the same holds true for Balzac, or Hemingway, or anyone else I looked at. I can remember the Waldenbooks in Midland having two whole shelves devoted to serious literature. The philosophy section in this B&N was easily twice the size of the one first in the B&N in Saginaw.

And I think people generally critical of the trend of stores to get bigger (as Teachout notes) generally miss out on this positive trend, because they (like Yglesias) don't really have an idea of what having your choice of editions of Pere Goriot means when five years ago you'd have had none to buy, even if you'd wanted to.

Also, a question for Yglesias' readers, who tended to prefer Borders because they were allowed to sit in comfortable chairs and read whole books without paying for them: have you guys ever heard of a library?