Black Gate

The Odyssey stands alongside Gilgamesh as perhaps the earliest Western examples of fantasy literature. You can still start a fight among Classicists over who wrote the epic and its companion, The Iliad: for that matter, you can start a fight over precisely when it was written. (Or compiled. Or told by one person and written down by another. Or, according to one theory, the year that a Boeotian sat down and decided to invent the Greek alphabet solely for the purpose of recording the best story he’d ever heard.) The current consensus says the 8^th century BCE, but ask again in twenty years.

While thematically the Iliad is a work about power and anger, the Odyssey is about the consequences of anger, about the effort it takes to leave warfare and vengeance behind. But above all else, it’s about homecoming, and what homecoming means in the aftermath of Troy. Most specifically, it’s about the journey of Odysseus, the architect of the Trojan Horse, from the beaches of Asia Minor to his home on the Greek island of Ithaca.

The trip would have been faster if he had decided to walk.

Odysseus’ journey home is told in the first person: he has washed up on the shores of Phaeacia and is found by Nausicaa, daughter of the king of Phaeacians. She brings him home (hoping to keep him), and once he’s gotten a bath and his first hot meal in years, he begins to tell the story of why, ten years after the fall of Troy, he still hasn’t managed to make it home. As he tells of his adventures, he quickly moves out of the known world (first Troy, then an encounter with the Ciconians of Thrace) into the unknown, the land of myth.

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So everyone’s crying about the demise of Borders, though it wasn’t that long ago we were all crying about how it and evil twin Barnes and Noble were driving  local independent bookstores out of business, even as we were shopping mostly at Amazon to get the books we found browsing at the physical bookstore at a better price (sinner, heal thyself). Like everyone else, I used to love going into the megastores, and maybe felt a little guilty about it, but not so much that I stopped doing it, because the small guys just didn’t have the inventory to browse through.  Which is also why I used to like going into Tower Records, too, but the same thing that’s happening to the music megastore (of which “Borders ‘n Noble” was once a subset) is catching up to the bookstore. You want to browse inventory, you go online, for both selection and prices. And you don’t have to get into the car and drive anywhere to do it.

On a personal level, the Borders closing doesn’t affect me. Here in Charlottesville, we have more used bookstores per square foot than coffee shops, along with long established local retailer of new books and, yes, a Barnes and Noble (though not a superstore, meaning little in the way of music or video, though that’s being downsized anyway).  And, truth, be told, it’s been a while since the Borders experience peaked; in an effort to become profitable, the chain started emphasizing mass merchandising over book selling, becoming more like a mall store than an intellectual haven, and there was nothing more idiotic than staff running around with those silly headsets to give the illusion of instant customer service.

The primary attraction of going into a Borders (and Tower and all the other megastores) was that feeling that you can get in your hands just about almost anything you wanted, no matter how esoteric, and that’s not quite the same thing as pressing “The Look Inside” link online. While as eReaders ultimately displace the physical book, that distinction may become less important, but whether chat rooms and customer reviews can replace the barista who can recite from Nietzche, Heinlein and Bob Dylan is another matter.

Nor is the experience disappearing entirely for bookstores (or record stores), but it’s going to be harder to find if you don’t live in Portland (Powell’s Books) or New York City (Strand, for example, which is cleverly offering a free gift at its store to anyone who comes in with a Borders Rewards card).  These bookstores continue to survive because, unlike Borders, they haven’t tried to replicate their physical presence across the country like the Borg while still expanding their online footprint. Moreover, their brand identity distinguishes themselves from Amazon as knowledgable curators of their product (as opposed to a legion of Harriet Klausners and algorithms that tell you what you like based on past purchases).  Therein may lie the future of the physical bookstore.

That and maybe Apple acquiring Barnes and Noble.

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