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The death and life of a great American bookstore

It seems wrong to begin a story like that, doesn't it? Particularly a story about a bookstore. It should begin "In the beginning," or "Once upon a time," or "It was love at first sight."

Especially "It was love at first sight."

After 40 years in business, Borders No. 1, the company's original Ann Arbor store, is scheduled to close on Monday. By late August, posters on the windows declared, "NOTHING HELD BACK!" -- and that meant the fixtures and furniture as well. The goods -- books, but also games and puzzles and teddy bears and throw rugs -- gave off the sour tang of a picked-over flea market.

A lonely security guard stood watch; he was added just recently, an employee said, after a shoplifting incident.

Borders Rewards customers have been receiving e-mails for some time now, ever since the chain declared bankruptcy and announced it was closing its 399 remaining stores. A month ago it was "30 to 50 percent off!" Now it's "60 to 80 percent off!"

There was recently a sign taped to No. 1's front door. It said, "Now Hiring: Apply Online at Borders.com." It was serious -- the liquidators needed to hire part-time help -- but it seemed like a sick joke.

What happened to the love?

"Borders used to be chockablock with books," said Jonathan Marwil, a University of Michigan history professor and author of a history of Ann Arbor. "It has increasingly looked less like a bookstore than a bowling alley, with its wide-open spaces. Now they're selling children's dolls on the front counter. It's really pretty grim."

It was a place where employees were devoted to their jobs. They prided themselves on their knowledge of their assigned sections -- and everybody else's. It was a gathering place and community center, just up the street from the university's main campus.

"We worked when we didn't have to work because we didn't know we were working. We would go into the store when it was closed to do more work," said Sharon Gambin, who arrived for the 1982 holiday season and went on to hold several positions during a three-decade career. "That's how much we loved what we did."

It's an odd thing to mourn for a store. Mourn for the employees who have lost their jobs, yes, but the store? Just another box on the roadside. Hundreds more like it. Move it along, capitalism.

Woolworth is long gone; few were saddened at its passing. Circuit City went belly up; silence. Great downtown department stores have vanished, changed names, disappeared to that Great Retailer in the Sky. (Jacobson's, the upscale department store that once occupied Borders' East Liberty Street storefront, is but one example.) With rare exceptions -- the late Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley once wrote a valentine, "Dear Store," to the city's now-defunct retailer, Rich's -- the public yawns.

They'll probably soon forget about Borders as well. To most of the country, it's just another big-box chain, another in a series of disappearing strip-mall storefronts. Indeed, there's an irony in its demise, for as Borders is blamed for killing off some local independents, now it has been done in by Amazon and the Internet. The circle may go 'round again: Former customers may turn to independents, if their towns have them. Or, if they rule out their local chain, maybe they'll just go back to browsing on Amazon.

A shame, because when done right, there's something about a bookstore.

It's a library, a gathering spot, a refuge, a journey. Often it's small, maybe an 800-square-foot storefront jammed into a city street. Or it's idiosyncratic: an old house or converted barn, a rambling lobby or strip-mall space. It may not even be in your neighborhood, but that's where you go.

At its best, it's crowded: sometimes with people, always with books -- books stacked to the ceiling. Books lined up in bookcases. Books spread out on tables, highlighted on platforms, displayed in twirling, 5-foot-high wire racks.

Don't know what you're looking for? That's part of the adventure. A bookstore is governed by serendipity. You walk in and the world falls away. There's no rush. It's just you and the books, these pockets of words and paper that somehow transport you to a different place.

The best bookstores have a certain feel, a certain comfort to them. They're stately but not forbidding. The employees are a mix of the young and the eccentric, college students and lifers. The front of the store features their recommendations, a little offbeat, a little intriguing. If you're looking for something specific, they know where to find it; if you don't know what you're looking for, they can be your Virgil and Beatrice, guiding you through the world.

It is a place with a soul.

For much of its 40-year history, that was Borders. Though it was a chain, with hundreds of locations around the world, during its best years it maintained the feel of a great, expansive local bookstore, the 800-foot space multiplied by 10 or 20 (and much better organized). The choices were manifold, the employees passionate, the adventure always beginning.

In some towns and cities, Borders was it.

"I find in books a comfort and a companionship, a refuge from an urgently insistent world," wrote Ann Miller in the Longmont (Colorado) Weekly about the closing of that town's Borders, its only new-book bookstore. "I am worried about the folding of bookstores like Borders and the lost opportunity for browsing. ... There was no better place for grazing the written word and for meeting the best of friends."

Joe Gable, who managed Store No. 1 from the mid-'70s to the mid-'90s, puts it more simply.

"My goal," he said, "had always been to make the Ann Arbor Borders the best bookstore in America."
.....
The Borders brothers had a feel for business. In the era before personal computers, Borders kept track of every single title on three-inch-square punch cards. Inventory was deep and rich. The inventory approach, an innovation of Louis Borders, led to a separate business, Book Inventory Systems, which the company supplied to other major independent book vendors. Tom Borders oversaw the store.

But it was Gable who reveled in books.

That often meant bucking the tide, not difficult in a countercultural college town that had been a center for the antiwar movement. Borders' employees, a crew of well-educated individuals who had to pass a qualifying test, were assigned specific sections and empowered to oversee them. Everybody cleaned the store; everybody pitched in on customer service.
And everyone took pride in their knowledge of literature, science, publishing and, well, knowledge.

"Pre-Google, there was a spot near the front of the store where I could stand and say out loud almost any Google-y type question, and somebody within earshot would know the answer," said Kaimowitz.

The store was richly stocked with works from small presses and university publishers, and often sold more of those titles than it did best-sellers.

"We used the term 'a world-class inventory' and didn't throw that around lightly," said Robert Teicher, the company's longtime fiction buyer. Gable prized merchandising displays dependent on several copies of a specific title, not just one or two. "We not only bought them, but bought them to be displayed," Teicher said. "So they would send us two copies, and Joe would get on the phone and say, 'I need seven copies. Or 10 copies. I need to display this thing.' "

They sold, too, he added.

"We were book people," he said.
.....
The employees were proud of Borders' success. They shared in the profit of the store. They had a "funky little handbook" that specified Borders would be closed seven holidays a year so employees could spend time with their families.
.....
Ann Arbor loved it back.

"Suddenly there were thousands of serious readers in town," staffer-turned-essayist Birkerts wrote in his book, "The Gutenberg Elegies." "They thronged the aisles of the store, asked questions, placed orders. The books had an aura, an excitement about them."

When the university wanted to show off the town, it took visitors to two places: Zingerman's, a legendary deli, and Borders. Locals knew they could find obscure philosophy texts and up-to-date computer science manuals, and they shared their love with the staff.
.....
Pretty soon the budding chain opened a third store, in Atlanta, and a fourth store, in Indianapolis. By 1992, when the Borders brothers sold the chain to Kmart for about $125 million, Borders had 21 stores.

Some analysts have called the sale the first step in Borders' decline.
.....
The problems began three years later, he said, when Kmart spun off the Borders division -- which now included another Kmart book retailer, Waldenbooks -- and the company went public.

"When you become a public company, you have certain obligations, and in my opinion, when those responsibilities and obligations are not managed correctly, (they) lead to what we have now."

But during the '90s, the future looked rosy. Borders grew and grew, second only to Barnes & Noble. There was a Borders in Singapore. There was a Borders in the World Trade Center. The stock price flew high. At its peak there were more than 1,200 Borders and Waldenbooks stores, employing more than 30,000 people. Where did it go wrong?

Ask someone for the reason Borders went under and they'll give you a list. There was the Kmart deal and aftermath. There was the Borders Rewards program, which was offered free to customers, giving them little incentive to use it -- unlike B&N's plan, which charged a fee. Others point to the decision to sell CDs, which backfired when the music technology changed to downloads.

In fact, new technology began haunting the once-cutting-edge store. In 1998, Borders created a website but three years later handed its online business to Amazon; by the time Borders decided to reclaim its web presence in 2008, it had fallen far behind its competitors. Borders also was late to e-book readers, finally partnering with a Canadian company for its Kobo reader -- well after Amazon's Kindle and B&N's Nook took over the market.

Then there were misguided investments, overbuilding, personnel turnover. As Hemingway once wrote about a man going broke, it happened "slowly, then all at once."

"When Borders expanded, they brought in executives from supermarkets and department stores (all of whom insisted they were readers), and the result was a shuffle of titles and more downsizing against a backdrop of financial engineering, which only seemed to make matters worse," Public Affairs founder Peter Osnos wrote in The Atlantic.

For Gable, who moved to corporate in 1996 as a senior project manager and still witheringly refers to the executives as "the grocery guys," it was one frustration after another. At one point, he said, Borders spent millions renovating stores and then decided to create a model for the "store of the future," with different fixtures and carpeting -- none of which, according to Gable, could be retrofitted to Borders' 500 stores.

"They spend millions developing this stupid ('store of the future') and then six months later they pull the plug on it," he said. "So picture the money just pouring out. Then they get a new guy in. I say, 'What do we need?' (He says,) 'We need a new idea for a store.' 'Well, what could that possibly be?' 'Let's call it "the concept store." ' Let's have more consultants, and let's develop totally different fixtures -- metal fixtures -- and let's have a different layout, this time instead of a racetrack, people will find things by bumping into them!"

In other words, another "store of the future."

Meanwhile, the core of Borders' business, the focus on customer service and selection, had fallen by the wayside.

"You see the devolution here," said Teicher.

"Not only did they not pay attention to the selection," Gable noted, "they continued to downgrade the selection by emphasizing in its place things that were nonbook items. The point was that Borders was completely indistinguishable from B&N and the competition. The books that you could buy at Borders you could buy at Costco -- cheaper."

The customers, he said, knew it. Locals had always been sensitive about even the smallest changes -- Gambin remembers the horrified reaction when the Ann Arbor store switched from paper to plastic bags -- but the changes in philosophy were too much.

"A woman came up to me on the street a number of years after I left the (first) store, and she said, 'I have something to confess to you,' " Gable said. " 'You know I was a loyal Borders customer for over 20 years. I wouldn't even think of going anyplace else. I will never again go to Borders. ... It used to be I was able to find what I want, and if I couldn't find it myself someone would help find it for me. Now I go in there, and not only do they have this (nonbook) stuff, but nobody knows if you have the book or not.'

"The problem with the new guys," Gable concluded, "is they tried to take the book business, which is complex and boring, and make it simple and sexy."
.....
For those who know No. 1, its demise is a knife to the heart.

Sharon Gambin, who had risen to No. 1's human resources manager and had the company catechism down pat, recalls a key incident with emotion.

"A few years ago, my heart was broken," she recalled. "They hired a man, who was a Borders GM, and gave him, the poor soul, the task of making Store 1 like every other store in the system."

No. 1 is breathing its last. As August drifted into September, there were still plenty of books -- indeed, more now that the store was in liquidation than there were a few months ago -- but the titles are a strange mix. Some two dozen copies of Hilary Duff's "Elixir," a young adult novel, lined one shelf. Other bookcases included a guide to Ibsen, a Holocaust memoir, several copies of a Denis Leary rant and countless romance novels.

Brian McDonald and Joshua Fireman, two U of M undergraduates, went through the sci-fi section with equal parts glee and sadness. They weren't born when Borders was founded, weren't alive when it started expanding, yet they knew it as well as any old-timer.

"I remember coming here from elementary school," says McDonald, an area native.

"It's sad," agrees Fireman, who also grew up in southeast Michigan. "I'm buying as many books while I can."

Ann Arbor will survive. Downtown is thriving, an eclectic and walkable mix of shops and restaurants
Her voice breaks. "From that time, I went through a period of (asking), 'What am I doing?' "

"We'll bounce back OK," said Diane Keller, president of the local chamber of commerce.

Still, she can't help but lament Borders' closing: "It was a warm place to go. It felt like your Borders."

"I think there is a sense of loss," said Marwil, the U of M history professor and author. "Given what's happening to the whole book trade, I don't think there has been quite the investment emotionally. If Borders had collapsed in 1998 there would have been a real sense of grieving. This is like the shoe dropping. And Borders had lost a quality of individuality. But still ... you can't help but feel twinges of what was." More at http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/12/first.borders.bookstore.closing/index
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