Borders Books Boarded Up

I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised when we found the Borders Books at San Francisco’s Union Square boarded up and closed for business. The increase usage of ebook readers: Kindle, Ipad, Nook; and ease of the online purchase of books, has been a slow death for bookstores. This is more troubling still in the city that boasts of having more bookstores than any other in the nation. This particular Borders was always on our destination list when visiting San Francisco’s Union Square. The store front’s covered entryway now serves as a dry place for the homeless to roll out their sleeping bags and as a shelter, from wind and rain, for tourists waiting for trolley cars. The store was a favorite meeting place for my family after shopping in Union Square and to purchase books. The upstairs coffee shop was an especially inviting perch from which to munch on snicker doodles, sip cappuccinos, and read the books you’d purchased. The added bonus was the view through picture windows of the kaleidoscope of dancers, artists, musicians, and the sparkle of holiday lights in the square below. I mourn the loss of Borders all the people who depended on it for their livelihoods, all the books, small press journals, and magazines and the smell of The Seattle’s Best Coffees wafting through the air, and a sense of place and community. I shall never have the same experience walking through cyberspace through the entrance of a a virtual store.
I first was introduced to this particular Borders Books, located on Post Street, a few years ago by my friend, a mystery writer Sue Owen's Wright. She asked me to join her there to meet a former teacher, friend and novelist, John Dufresne. We met in the coffee shop; I bought John Dufresne’s novel, Requiem Mass and asked him to autograph it. I’d not met any author reviewed by the New York Times Review of Books other than local Sacramento writer, Mary MacKey when I read my poetry with her years back. I was tickled pink to have the opportunity. We drank our coffees, exchanged pleasantries and decided to head out for lunch at The Bank, a wonderful Irish Pub at the edge of China Town. Then, it was off on foot to North Beach to City Lights bookstore. The afternoon ended with a drink at the bar next door, Vesuvios which was a regular hangout for the Beat Poets. We sat upstairs by a window and drank whiskey’s looking at the passersby. The light in the bar is dim and I imagined I saw the ghost of Allen Ginsberg haunting the rafters, heard him whisper a passage from the Howl…” in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” I half expected Diane Di Prima, the now Poet Laureate of San Francisco to grace the bar with her entrance, but I think the whiskey and brisk walk through the February wind had gone to my head.
I can’t deny the convenience of shopping at virtual bookstores and the ease of downloading a book to an ebook reader. Also, the prospect of greater access to written materials is empowering but only to those who can afford the devices, the cost of the book, and access to the Internet. But there is no comparison to what it feels like walking into a real living book store, breathing with the breath of books and this, is still free. Reading is meant to be a tactile and a visual experience--or was. I am reading a book, entitled, A Writer’s San Francisco, A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul, by Eric Maisel. The book is beautifully illustrated with pen and ink and colored pencil drawings by Paul Madonna. The delicacy and texture of the drawings can never be translated virtually. There is just no comparison to holding the book in ones hands, opening the book, smelling its perfume and running one’s fingers over the pages--- experiencing the art and words with all of the senses. This finely written and finely illustrated book is an example of what spiritually is lost with the ebook reader. Its invention may mark the end of an era and yet another deprivation to the human senses. I’m hoping the two technologies will parallel each other for at least awhile.