Two respected independent newspapers, one on each side of the Atlantic, recently posed the same question: Whither independent bookshops?
Lamenting the closure of the legendary Cody’s Books in Berkeley, Village Voice asked: “Do bookstores have a future?” Noting an item in the trade magazine The Bookseller that six independents had closed in a week, The Guardian investigated the state of non-chain bookshops in Britain.
Both newspapers pointed to the predators stalking indy prey: chain bookstores, supermarkets and virtual bookstores such as Amazon.com. Transpose those scenarios to South Africa and one can see the same generic antagonists, though in less proliferation. Nonetheless, the threat to independent book dealers is very real and it is growing: for example, some local supermarkets have begun recently to stock better quality fiction at bargain-basement prices. When so-called omnibus versions of Inspector Morse novels peek out from supermarket bins, there might be some temptation not to drop in at one’s favoured indy bookshop. Supermarkets retailing even a limited range of bestselling romance, crime and historical fiction titles, cut into already small margins for independents.
Bulk-buying by supermarkets, monopoly chains and online book retailers chips away further at small and unique booksellers. Publishers’ discounts of 40% to the chains are nice business for the recipients of such largesse, but less so for consumers, who derive very little trickle-down benefit, or for authors, whose royalties are calculated on the discounted amount, or for independent dealers, who can’t risk ordering large numbers of new titles.
But the book behemoths that can slash the price of the latest Harry Potter are deficient in at least one respect. They are not — and cannot be — unique. There might well be relative autonomy in what each branch of a chain stocks, but being part of a brand demands that each guarantees a large degree of uniformity and familiarity. It is the comfort of sameness; what in Anne Tyler’s marvellous novel The Accidental Tourist is a balm of homogeneity and predictability for the timid and the unadventurous.
Books, though, are adventures, and not only in the reading. Among the most seductive aspects of books is finding them. It is here that book culture and book people assert themselves; this is the province of the specialised book dealer.
While convenience is deemed to be a hallmark of online book buying, the virtual buy excludes the tactility of books, and the informed conversation and debate that accompany buying a book from an expert. Amazon and Kalahari are efficient at processing a transaction and moving a commodity that happens to be a book; but they would be equally good at dispatching bars of soap.
However, independent booksellers, among them members of the Southern African Book Dealers Association, can tell one rather more about books than their price, or when to expect orders to arrive. It is this dialogue and social contract between specialist proprietor and book lover — rather than a merely financial transaction between retailer and consumer — that lies at the core of the ideal book-acquiring experience.
To illustrate the perils of what comparatively can be deemed a “wholesale bookstore” experience, consider these two (slight) instances, neither apochryphal, since I witnessed both. In the 1980s, at the Yeoville CNA (long since defunct), a customer asked where she might locate Gus Silber’s Braaivleis of the Vanities. She was directed, after some consternation, to the cookery section. Farther back yet, at the main CNA in Pretoria, sometime in the early 1970s, I saw an elderly man turn livid on being advised to seek out the Diary of Samuel Pepys in the stationery section.
Checking on the availability or location of titles can be no less amusing or frustrating at the big chains these days. Invariably, the first recourse is for a staffer to check the store computer: actual knowledge of the book, or where it might logically be found, being too much to expect.
There are, naturally, exceptions. At the Brooklyn branch of Fascination Books, for example, they love books and know what they are doing. At Boekehuis in Melville, Johannesburg, one finds Corina van der Spoel, the manager of arguably the best bookshop in the country; she has made Boekehuis independent of parent company Van Schaik’s in far more than name.
Expertise also rules at independent icons such as Clarkes in Cape Town; Fables in Grahamstown; Adam’s Campus bookshop in Durban; African literature specialist Xarra Books in Newtown, Johannesburg; Out of Print, Books Galore and Bookdealers in Melville; as well as the other Bookdealers stores in Johannesburg. Something to note is that many of these independents are not primarily purveyors of new books, though they do offer such titles. Instead, their speciality is a diversity of fine, rare and difficult-to-acquire books: books as things-in-themselves. Though it is a small chain, Bookdealers is characterised by just such a sensitivity to books and to the tastes of buyers. It is precisely this carefully calibrated individual attention that the big book businesses cannot offer.
Even when independent chains grow large, they need to retain their individuality. That is not a mission impossible. Here is what the two-part report by Stephen Moss in The Guardian had to say about the biggest indy of them all.
“Foyles is not your average independent. It carries 221 000 titles and turns over £14-million a year, for a start. It also has another outlet at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, and is about to open two more at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London.
“But don’t use the C-word anywhere near commercial director Vivienne Wordley, who calls the shop ‘fiercely independent’ and says, ‘If we don’t differentiate ourselves from the chains, we have failed.’
“Across the water from Foyles, there is failure, at least in terms of numbers. In 1991 the American Booksellers Association had 5 200 bookstores. By last year that figure plummeted to 1 702. Aggressive retail strategies that drove the mom ‘n’ pop corner store out of business similarly have killed off many local bookstores.”
So too in South Africa, with the ubiquitous rise of malls and mall culture. Book lovers here can draw a line, however, by supporting book dealers independent in spirit and practice in the struggle to preserve diversity and the literary from the purely commercial.