A nice note from Catherine at the Community Bookstore.
Weeeellll . . . guess summer’s kind of getting to be over, so time
to get back to the . . . no no no — NOT the bloody grindstone, but . .
. the fun business of steering this old ship? Eh, well, whatever. And
there’s plenty of Indian Summer left, anyhow.Those
of you who saw the City Section piece on the closing of Liberty House
on the Upper West Side (started by Abbie Hoffman and the like to help
finance the civil rights movement in Mississippi) may have been struck,
as I was, by what one patron said: "It was really sad, because it is
one of the last places that had really expressed the values of the old
West Side, which have literally disappeared store by store."
(italics mine).Is it just me, or is it rising to the collective
conscious that "stores" not only define the character of a
neighborhood, but in some weird way serve as the public space in which
people play out a big chunk of the communal part of their lives?Or,
another funny anecdote which occurred to me . . . some years ago,
certain stores were asked to put yellow stickers in their windows,
which would indicate to children that if they were in trouble, they
could go into such a store and expect to receive help. We had one.What strikes me as funny, now, is the idea that you’d need a sticker —
this place is more often than not positively heaving under a mass of
children, all of whom don’t seem to have a doubt in their mind but that
the place is theirs — part of their home . . . as, indeed, it is.And
a last sweet one — today there was a woman wandering around in here,
taking it all in . . . "This place is amazing!"
she said — sort of barked it at me, as if maybe I didn’t know. Then
she wandered around some more, and as if she couldn’t take it in
anymore, she came back and said again "It’s amazing . . . " and
then with a wail "I wish Manhattan had places like this." Huh.
As somone who has worked as a manager of or consultant to five Manhattan independent bookstores, it’s always very dismaying to me to see another indie in obvious peril–but in the case of the Park Slope Community Bookstore it’s rapdily becoming less and less dismaying. For all its owner’s shameless emotional contortions–her handwringing and whining, her affected pseudo-literary laments, her grandiose assertions of her store’s importance and identification of it with Liberty House on the Upper West Side, her outright begging, her self-righteous guilt-mongering–the plain and sad fact of the matter is that she has done a terrible job of managing her store. This is not a secret to anyone in the bookstore business or to any of the publishing reps who have dealt with her.
In a typically narcissistic manner she blames her troubles on the economy, on the state of bookselling in general, on politics and culture, the weather, and (rather insultingly) even on those people who live around her store and who, she believes, owe her their patronage (as she is, she keeps telling us, providing such an irreplaceable service to the community). She tells us how hard she works-and I have no doubt that this is true, and no doubt admirable. However to work long hours is not in itself a sign of working well or competently. She solicits an advisory board, she solicits huge financial support, but unfortunately a windfall of two million dollars would not buy her better business acumen.
Just a short way across the street two other bookstores–admittedly of a slightly different type– quietly persevere, their owners not trumpeting their community service, not implicitly comparing themselves to Abbie Hoffman(!), nor begging nor badgering. These bookstores appear to be run by what in the business is known as real book people. The owner of the Park Slope Community Bookstore demonstrates, sadly, with each of her missives and the state of her store how very far she still is from being this type of professional.