By the end of the Aughts, a death was coming for which I felt no empathy or remorse: the bankruptcy of Borders. After spending most of the Nineties modeling its franchises on local independent book and record stores and then systematically putting them out of business, the global K-Mart affiliate was out-Bordered by an even more ravenous market structure—Amazon. The block-long, nearly identical carcasses of its many stores still litter the landscapes of many downtown areas, including the 700 block of New Hampshire Street in Lawrence, Kansas. Both as an independent bookseller whose retail channels include Amazon and as a product of nearly forty years of reading, I like to think quixotically that my Lilliputian arrow protrudes along with millions of others from the hide of the fallen giant.
Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts