Originally published on Facebook 12/12/09
This afternoon, I struggled. As the Missus was leaving for work, I warred between the desire to take a nap, the desire not to sleep the afternoon away and the necessity of getting a few things done around the place, including a final paper. I dragged myself off the couch and decided to emerge from the house for awhile. The siren song of 'Invictus' was calling my name and although the prospect of 'Avatar' also loomed large in my suddenly cinema hungry mind, I drove to Sycamore Mall, convinced that I could convince myself to take in an afternoon matinee.
Not so much. I had some time to kill before the movie and so wandered up past Ben Franklin and Santa's Workshop, through Von Maur and to the familiar sight of Waldenbooks. Except, it wasn't familiar. It was different- festooned with giant 'STORE CLOSING' signs everywhere and I plunged into its compact shelves for what apparently would be one of the last times with a finely tuned sense of nostalgia.
Waldenbooks at Sycamore Mall was my first bookstore. We lived a hop, skip and a jump away from the mall when I was a kid, so as I got older, trips to the mall, whether to play video games at Tilt or just to look around were increasingly common. I remember seeing The Lion King in the old Cinema I and II in Sycamore Mall. I remember buying my first cassettes at the Musicland in Sycamore Mall (The Counting Crows' 'August and Everything After'-- also a Hootie and The Blowfish and I think a Fleetwood Mac live album as well)-- and I remember Waldenbooks.
I have a love affair with bookstores- and with libraries for that matter. There's a sort of quiet serenity that covers a bookstore that I just adore. Whenever I feel really down and depressed about the state of the world, a trip to my local bookstore to peruse, to look, to drool, to thumb through random pieces of literature never fails to cheer me up. And all that knowledge- all those words, all compacted down into that one space... I feel like anything can happen in a bookstore. The smell, the peace of them-- it's like a ready-made shot in the arm, designed to rebalance your chi if needed.
Anything can happen in a bookstore. Anything can happen in a library-- but in this particular Waldenbooks, I think I really fell in love with books. (You could, as a child, find me inevitably in the science fiction/fantasy section, which is to the back of the store-- on the right.) Waldenbooks saw me through my unfortunate phase of reading every 'Star Trek' novel I could get my hands on. It saw my spread my wings ever so slightly and start exploring David Eddings and McCaffery-- maybe even the occasional work of fiction and I think, combined with a few good English teachers in high school forced me to wake up, look around and start discovering good literature for myself. Everyone remembers their first bike or their first skateboard or whatever--- me, I'm weird, so I remember my first bookstore.
And it's sad- very, very sad that it's closing, but I suppose that was inevitable. Borders (the parent company of both Waldenbooks and B. Dalton) has not been doing well for some years now and is probably headed towards extinction. Barnes and Noble and Amazon are the new faces of corporate bookstores in America, promoting their frankly evil Kindle and e-Reader (no, I do NOT approve of such things. You need to be able to pick up a book to truly appreciate it-- putting it on a glorified iPod only makes it sterile to me...) and Iowa City, the World's Third City of Literature is about to lose a bookstore.
Why isn't this a bigger deal? Maybe I'm missing something, but seriously- why isn't this a bigger deal? Why isn't the City Council doing something useful for once and filing a protest? Can we even be a City of Literature if we start losing our bookstores? Its frustrating to me, because Iowa City truly does deserve the title of 'City of Literature' even if what passes for our city government is too busy masquerading as a glorified version of a Downtown Business Association to actually use the title for some advantage. I hope there's a petition somewhere out there, begging Borders not to close the store- and I hope I can find it in time, because if I do, I'll happily sign it. Waldenbooks was my first bookstore- and it may be geeky or even cheesy, but I'm not quite ready to say goodbye just yet. It occupies that perfect sweet spot between the lousy driving distance and overly large corporate feel of the B&N out at Coral Ridge Mall and the small, compact yet slightly more expensive Indy feel of Prairie Lights downtown. It fits nicely into the local book scene, I think- and if it has reached the end of the line, then Iowa City will be poorer with its absence.
Any thoughts of movies fell away... I couldn't leave without something. One last purchase, just to show I cared. One last discount deal to say goodbye to my first bookstore... it was tricky, because although the 'Complete Bloom County Library Volume 1' was discounted, it's on my Christmas list and I'm secretly hoping someone gets it for me. There wasn't any particular novel I was after- and although I'd like to learn more about the building of the Panama Canal someday, I settled on a unique history of MI-5- rare, because it happens to be an authorized history to celebrate the centenary of the Security Service, making MI5 probably the only intelligence agency in the world to commission an authorized history of their own agency. I deliberated, I browsed and I picked it up, happy to do my part- hoping that the inevitable tides of the recession could somehow spare Waldenbooks--
My first bookstore.
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