The Worst News Day Ever

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

I was so sad to read the earlier post about La Contessa's closing and I was writing a friend about it and she pointed out this recent story about McIntyre & Moore:
http://somervillenews.typepad.com/the_somerville_news/2007/03/is_the_writing_.html

Comments

[disblfsuspender.livejournal.com]

This sucks. One of the (more minor, but still) reasons I moved here was the great used book stores, and one by one they are kicking off. If a scholarly / specialty place like M&M can't survive here, I'm not sure where it can. Online, probably, but there's not the same sort of browsing and serendipity there.

I buy there occasionally, and have never had problems with staff. I want bookstore (and all retail, for that matter) staff to leave me the hell alone until I ask for something, and they do a great job of that, and are polite and civil otherwise. The long hours are good too, especially as compared to most of the rest of the retail in the Square, which seems to be mostly closed by the time I get home at 7 or 8 on weeknights.

The only thing I would change would be to do something about shelving, categorizing, etc. It's pretty easy to have your eyes glaze over in there, because it's just booksbooksbooks as far as the eye can see, with not much to break it up. Maybe some of the staff-recommendation sorts of models that other stores use? Especially as arcane as a lot of the stuff they carry is, it'd be great as an interested amateur/layman to have some guidance. And while the taxonomist in me appreciates the fine-grained categorization, stuff doesn't often seem to be filed where I would intuitively think it would be, or is filed inconsistently(Some Latin American fiction in its own section, some in general Fiction, that kind of thing.) Minor quibbles, but those are probably the main reasons I don't shop there more than I already do.

But yeah, this is probably more a case of this neighborhood being a victim of its own success, and of the economics of the book business than of anything M&M has done wrong. I hope they can stick it out, but I've seen this story play out over and over again with bookstores I liked, and I know how it usually ends.