I’ve also bought a few novels there which, being classics that pretty much every bookshop in the world has copies of, probably would not have caught my eye elsewhere. If you’re a compulsive book buyer, in other words, and there’s nothing worth looking at except a ropey-looking paperback of Madame Bovary, you might end up realizing that it’s completely unacceptable that you’ve never read it, and you might then take it with you to the counter and onward toward a future in which you’re slightly better read. ...
I have a slightly perverse fondness for these sub-par emporia, because they have often been the places where I have been forced to stray furthest outside of my usual buying patterns. Sometimes the situation in which our options are most narrowed is the one which ends up most widening our horizons. As great as it is to be able to choose whatever you want on Amazon, sometimes what you really want is to have no choice at all. Which is another way of saying, perhaps, that maybe there is really no such thing as a bad bookshop.
...I am also not particular fond of the "we're more free when we have fewer choices" of which it's an example. Allow me to pick a few reasons:
1. The given examples assume the reader already knows which books are 'really' worth their time. If I'm walking into a bookstore and I don't know that Madame Bovary is a classic of world literature, nothing in that bookstore will make it clear to me.
2. You're held captive to the edition that's available. It's less of an issue now, but when I was growing up the mass market paperbacks were all early-20th century translations: this is why I have editions of Zola where the poor characters speak like Cockneys with a gift for English slang--not exactly what I'd expect French peasants to sound like. The translator has too heavy a hand and, as a result, you can end up not liking something for reasons that have little to do with the quality of the underlying book.
3. Selection is limited. Great, you liked Madame Bovary. Would you like to read something else by Flaubert? Sentimental Education? The Temptation of St. Anthony? Bouvard et Pecuchet? Maybe a good biography? You're out of luck.
4. I'm really not clear on how "this is the best not-terrible book here" is superior to "any of these books would be interesting." Even as much as I love the books I read, most of them are substitutable: there are a very small number of books that have changed my life in a meaningful way. If Guns, Germs and Steel was one of those books, then my apologies to the author of the piece. But if reading it is a shorthand for "an interesting book I might not have tried out otherwise" then why not the presumably different book that would've been purchased at the better bookstore?
I suspect the truth of it is closer to that line from the Office a few weeks ago. The way business works now is this: if I know what I want, I go online and purchase it at the cheapest possible price, and I'm happy. If I don't know what I want, then I want to go to someone who can direct me in a useful way. And it's hard, I think, to argue that this is not the best of all possible worlds.
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