Barnes and Noble Appreciation Post
⚡️📚Barnes & Noble Appreciation Post ⚡️📚
I’ve had this post tucked in my brain for a few weeks, but the other day, my friend Ashley sent me this opinion piece by Tish Harrison Warren, a regular contributor to the NYT. It’s about bookstores, and as you can see, it’s titled “An Ode to Bookstores and Promiscuous Reading.” I don’t know if it was intended to be published so closely to “Prime Day” (today is the last day), but I’d like to think so. (Btw, it is alternately titled “Why America needs good books — and lots of bookstores.”)
Really, it’s a piece about how online book shopping doesn’t compare to in-person shopping since hopping on Amazon just gives us what we want/what we came for. This isn’t news.
What I liked about this, though, was the praise she gave for good ol’ Barnes & Noble: “And this [lack of exposure to a broad selection] is why I find myself, to my surprise, cheering even for Barnes & Noble. It’s strange because at one point, I saw the big-box bookstore as the enemy. I championed the small, indie mom-and-pop store (and I still do!)… Looking back, I didn’t know what an embarrassment of riches we had: so many brick-and-mortar bookstores that I could be choosy and arbitrarily snobby about them. So now, 20 years late, I’d like to officially apologize to Barnes & Noble.”
When I was younger, I frequented B&N ALL the time. From the one of my teen years in Bellevue, WA that was transformed from an old bowling alley, to the one in Park Slope where I would head solo on Friday evenings after a long week with two young children, B&N was my favorite place to explore.
The other week I visited a B&N — rare occurrence! What a treat to peruse the aisles upon aisles upon aisles of books. Online marketing (including #bookstagram) tricks us into thinking a book makes a big splash and then months later is “gone.” Not so at B&N; they have the square footage…and they use it. Scroll down to see two books that I was genuinely surprised to see — displayed cover out, even. (They caught my eye because I had read and posted about both of these somewhat “random” books here and here.) Embarrassment of riches, indeed.
originally published on instagram