"More bad news!," Groucho Marx justifiably griped as his heralds blew their trumpets to announce Margaret Dumont’s arrival in Duck Soup.  I’m starting to know how he felt. Seems that every day brings another grim announcement of the passing of an old friend, and I don’t mean specifically a human old friend. This week the news informed us that Borders Bookstores has not managed to dig itself out of the bankruptcy quicksand they’d been sinking in since February of this year.

Around that time they began shuttering select stores in the Metropolitan area, including those on Park Avenue and in Kips Bay, not to mention most of their New Jersey outlets. Now it’s curtains for the rest of them, which means we lose the highly convenient branch at Penn Station, which happens to be a godsend for those of us looking for something interesting to do while waiting for a train. Let’s face it—this news is majorly depressing and frankly I can’t relate at all to anyone who feels otherwise. This leaves Barnes & Noble as the only high-profile bookstore chain, but I’m not optimistic about their longevity either. Their best Manhattan branch, after all, the spacious one that was one of the centerpieces of the Lincoln Center area and the best stocked for those interested in books on the entertainment industry, closed up shop at the start of this year and the neighborhood has been that much less interesting as a result.  

Reports tell us that bookstores are suffering because of people’s preference for ordering online, most readily from Amazon.com. And of course there are those depressing e-readers for people who apparently have a disdain for actually holding a physical book in their hands. If you can merely plug your metal object into your computer and download the latest best-seller, why ever set foot in something as inconvenient as an actual store, right? So, there, I’ve made the connection to “new media.” So how come I’m not feeling that this is progress, vital and necessary for our future well being, and an improvement over how we’ve lived for decades? Because I don’t think it is. Convenience (not to mention occasional bargains) is great, believe me, I know. It certainly is gratifying to know that you can find a book online that might not be at the store you choose to visit, but why is it so necessary for everything to be done on the technology that is already dominating our lives? Is anyone else starting to notice how this replacement of the real by the virtual is diminishing the job market (consider this: 10,700 employees will lose jobs as a result of these Borders closures) and leaving us with less and less options of how to vary our pastimes?

Do people not get that wonderful sense of civility and community walking into a building covered from wall to wall with books of all shapes and sizes? That excitement of stumbling upon a book you didn’t even know existed? Seeing them all lined up, piled up, stacked up next to each other in such a way that gives you a sense of hope because it means there are books on seemingly everything and that other people are just as eager as you are to explore worlds beyond what they face on a day to day basis? Is it beneficial to obliterate bookstores in the way that record stores were wiped out, making the retail landscape that much more boring and empty? Have you noticed how many vacant storefronts are out there and how long so many of them have remained so?

Believe me, I know I’m once again fighting a losing battle and the cynics (who prefer to call themselves “realists”) will once again win, but I will certainly stand my ground on this one and be willing to be called a sentimentalist and a nostalgia junkie. I think that the physical book and the physical bookstore represent the very best of who we are. I look at them as respites from an all too chaotic world of the “new-new-new;” a world that refuses to acknowledge something from even a scant few weeks ago because there something more up-to-date on the market has replaced it.

What's more, I’d much prefer to receive an honest to goodness real live book as a gift then be told, “Here … I got you this download but I didn’t have time to wrap it.”