Support your local bookstore

I am one of a dying breed of people who still enjoy reading books.  Actual books.  You know, with paper pages and such.  

I'm not perfect at it, and I will still hunt down the lowest price with the best of them, but I am trying to be better about purchasing things in my town.  Scratch that, in independent businesses in my town.  Don't get me wrong, I still shop at Walmart and Target, but if I can get it at Raven's Used Books, then why head to Barnes and Noble?  Well, at least in theory.  

For starters, Raven's didn't have what I was looking for.  Sure, I enjoyed gingerly walking through books stacked up to the ceiling with other books laying horizontally on top of vertical texts, only to find an old chrome toaster shoved in between sections as a book end of sorts.  I loved the sound of the rain outside, as I walked through exposed brick in the basement-esque setting and tried hard not to disturb any of the stacks of books on the floor because there was no more room on any shelf for them.  It made me think of the quotation by Agatha Christie,

It was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other
way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of
their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong
hand to keep them down. (1963)

 Were I to own a book store, I wish it would be just the type that Raven's is, but I would wish to have enough volumes to intrigue/bring in all ages of people, living all types of dreams, pursuing all types of careers. The gentleman running the shop was very sweet in informing me that they did not carry the type of book I was looking for, and I was struck with the thought that although I have walked in this shop so many times, in all of the years I have lived in or near Northampton, I've only ever bought one thing there.  How do shops like that survive?

This brings me to another thought.  How do shops with surly staff survive?  I went to another bookstore in town, Broadside Books, and asked the "gentleman" at the counter for help.  I was greeted with a sigh and a look that very much stated that I had somehow disturbed him.  He stared at me with  eyes that were glazed over and made me feel as though I had somehow offended him by asking my question.  After enduring his snarky answer, I thanked him, though for the life of me, I'm unsure of why.  I knew at that moment that even if they were the only place around to carry what I wanted, I would never buy it there because the man was rude.  Rude because I had asked a question that he apparently deemed either stupid or perhaps just annoying.  

It reminded me of the safety found in Barnes and Nobles.  Huge book warehouses where you can ask the automatons a question and they don't seem to find it stupid because either a) so many other people have asked so many truly stupid questions that day that yours doesn't seem so bad in the scheme of things, or b) they don't feel the need to judge you based on the type of reading material you are looking for.  Perhaps even c) though they work for a huge company and perhaps feel no sense of true loyalty to it, they still want to aid you in navigating their huge place of employment.

In the end?  I did not buy the book I wanted at a local shop and will either find it in the library and rent it or buy it on half.com.  But, I honestly tried.  I took what little energy I had at the end of a long day and an even longer week and waited until my baby was in bed.  I headed out and walked in the rain after trying to find parking in downtown Northampton on a Friday night.  I looked solidly on my own for quite a while before asking for any help.  

I wanted to purchase my book locally.  

I just didn't want the attitude that came with it free of charge.