News has crawled west that Frog Hollow Books of Halifax is shutting its doors after 25 years of independent book sales. When I lived in Nova Scotia, I spent far more time at Bookmark, on Spring Garden Road, located next to the Daily Grind. Bookmark had a deeper catalog, and its proximity to magazines and baked goods next door was entirely agreeable. But I did attend Frog Hollow readings and book launches, and there can be no doubt that these kinds of events will always be missed.
Message boards discussing the demise of Frog Hollow discuss service concerns, and they talk inevitably about the convenience of shopping online. We have heard all this before, and as someone who buys a ton of books on the internet, I can sympathize. Having grown up in Newfoundland, we bought what Jim Baird carried at WordPlay or, worse, what washed ashore at Coles in the Avalon Mall. But, as I have written before in this space, what is lacking in the online experience is the ability to browse effectively. Is there any better experience than finding, in a genre-oriented section or amongst the new releases and recommended books, something you did not even know existed? In our comfort, this is the only discernible echo of a way of life that rewarded skill and attentiveness with the ability to support ourselves. Perhaps the kind of curiosity we express in bookstores is the way we have been supporting our curiosity and our intellect. Do we lose this online?
The struggling independent bookstore cannot hold the depth of stock necessary to nurture always the curiosity about which I talk, and it relies on a keen buyer and keen staff, but perhaps that is not even enough.
A recent trip to Market Mall in Calgary revealed the sad reality that Play had closed its doors. An independent music chain with three locations in British Columbia and Alberta, it suffered the kind of fall-off you see in little bookstores. Where is used to have, say, deep holdings in folk and blues, it started carrying little more than new releases with a token catalog presence.
My question, moving forward, is who will inhabit all this evacuated commercial retail space? There is no need for the proliferation of cheap clothing stores, where you can find shoppers sifting through, looking for a bargain. While the thrill of the hunt persists there, there is little evidence of intellectual curiosity amongst those who moil for cheap socks and shoes.
It is a shame about Frog Hollow but try as I might (and I grew up in Halifax and did my BA and MA there), I only *once* ever found a book there that interested me enough to buy.
Conversely, I've spent more thousands of dollars than I care to contemplate at Book Mark, Back Pages, Doull's, and The Last Word - all stores which seem still to be doing alright in this difficult market.
I think their stocking choices, not online sales and the proliferation of big box sales, is maybe the only real reason they couldn't make it.
Posted by: Colleen | August 20, 2009 at 09:49 AM