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Lament for a Fallen Bookstore
By David Scribner
This week, the exquisitely intelligent and charming Stockbridge Booksellers on Elm Street is having a going out of business sale, preparatory to closing its doors after a four-year attempt to create a unique literary community. Of all places, Stockbridge, with its legions of summer tourists and with its well-educated year-round residents, would seem a likely location for a cozy bookshop.
Locally-owned bookstores function as more than just another retail storefront. They become portals into the wider world - a real life, physical doorway, not a virtual one, where you can turn the pages and smell the freshness of a new book.
Local bookstores are neighborhood treasures. Imagine how diminished Lenox would be without Matt Tannenbaum's Bookstore or Great Barrington without Eric Wicska's Bookloft. There on their shelves are the latest products of human inquiry and consciousness, alongside the available classics. And with such an array nestled in the heart of a town, they reinforce the values of local independent businesses - another outlet for curious minds young and old, a place to browse, a place to meet and a place to hear the works of poets and novelists and playwrights, of historians and biographers, a place representing the civilized side of our culture and our lives, a place where the written word counts for something.
Some will blame the departure of Stockbridge Booksellers on the purported decline of reading in favor of the more visually entertaining and less challenging material available on the Web. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Others will point to the marketing clout and proliferation of big box stores, from Wal-Mart to Barnes & Noble.
Still others will explain how the online megastore, Amazon.com, can command the print marketplace -- as well as the marketplace for music, DVD's, toys and dozens of other products - by having pioneered its one-click shopping option from the convenience of your own computer. Of course, Amazon's success is in no small part due to the partnerships it has established with other organizations - such as WAMC Northeast Public Radio, which gives lip service to local enterprises - whose Web sites provide a link to Amazon and which benefit from any sales from that link.
But personally, I blame it on Ronald Reagan - or rather I blame it on the voodoo economics he promoted, much as he promoted General Electric before he got into politics. Thirty years later, his concoction of economic theories, inspired by the neoconservative think-tank at the University of Chicago, still casts a spell over public perception of the so-called free market system.
The most insidious tenet of the Reagan ideology is the concept that all enterprises and public initiatives must be judged and supported only if they provide a favorable cost/benefit ratio. This criteria has infected public policy, our educational system and our way of thinking of what's valuable in our community. A theater festival, for instance, has to become an engine of general economic development before it is worthy of support - never mind that it might simply cover its own costs and that performances are inspiring in and of themselves, instructing us how to be better human beings.
The Reagan ideology leads to the disparagement of the very idea of publicly shared and commonly enjoyed resources, such as public spaces, public education, and universal health care - anything exempt from private exploitation is anathema, in this world view. It tears at the fabric of a sense of community.
A bookstore, like a public library, is an antidote to the depredations of the spirit, private and public. And Stockbridge Booksellers deserves more public acknowledgment of the services it offers and has provided than it has so far received from town leadership.
A few years ago, Stockbridge outsourced its children's education to Muddy Brook. In a few weeks, there will be one less local bookstore, and Stockbridge will be the loser -- again. It takes a bookstore to make a village.
Next week: Dear President-elect Obama: Don't be fooled by the Commonwealth's health care system. It's sick and broke.
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At dawn on Saturday morning, Sept. 27, 2008, men in jeans, flannel shirts and workboots were getting into old cars and battered pickups outside what is known by the Hispanic population in Valatie, N. Y., as the
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Regional Passenger Rail Projects Await Green Light
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©2009 David Scribner
Starving Artists Detective Agency
255 North St.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts 01201
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