R.I.P., Borders

When I first moved to Detroit in 1987, I didn't have a car. If I couldn't walk to a place, I couldn't get to it, pretty basically. I managed to remedy the situation within my first six months, but at that point I didn't really have any idea where to go. So I asked around my fellow grad students. They all had one answer: Borders.

In those days there were only two branches of what was eventually going to be come the massive, and now defunct, Borders chain. There was the original stores in Ann Arbor, and the much-closer and smaller branch in Southfield, Michigan. Borders was my very first off-campus venture that winter. It was supposed to be a great bookstore, and I was a graduate student who collected any book that looked remotely interesting. More importantly, it was a straight shot from campus up a major artery, and I was pretty sure I could find it without getting lost.

Borders was magical then. It simply was the best bookstore in the world. I'd been to Scribner's and Barnes and Noble and other pretenders, and enjoyed them all, but Borders was magical. On my first visit I didn't emerge for four hours. I started to visit every Saturday morning, making a day of it—a bagel in my old clunker of a car on the way, a good three hours among the dense stacks of Borders, then a long lunch somewhere cheap with my find of the day.

Borders had everything, back then. In the days before Amazon or other online retailers, they offered a rich back catalogue of authors past and present. Every favorite author I had at the time was represented on their shelves. They carried books by E. F. Benson of which I'd never heard, and the kind of obscure British novelists that starred in the wettest of my grad school dreams. The place was like Disneyland, drenched in light from its tall windows. It even came complete with a fleet of helpful workers who could answer any questions I ever had. The test that Borders employees had to pass in order to gain employment there was tougher than my literature qualifying exams.

My parents both loved Borders, too. When they'd visited Detroit, the bookstore was the first place they wanted to visit. My dad usually found his patience tried in bookstores, but he could linger for hours in Borders' rich history section. My mother would accumulate a stack of books a couple of feet high, every visit, and walk out with two shopping bags full of volumes, each of which tucked with one of the store's endearing and ugly hand-drawn bookmarks. Together we drove, during one visit, to Ann Arbor and discovered the original store together, a two-story building in which we could all get lost for hours.

I loved Borders for years as they opened up branches throughout the Detroit area. The Ann Arbor branch was always a test balloon for experimental programs—they tried selling software for a few years, and then were the first store to sell CDs and videotapes, well before the others.

Apparently the experiment worked, because when even more branches began to open up in the area, they all had the video and CD sections. Shortly after that, the chain went national—and it changed.

When Borders expanded into a nation-wide chain, the depth of selection disappeared. The titles on the shelves homogenized. Instead of the quirky and unpredictable picks by the branch's booksellers, the end caps and tables were filled with paid placement. The amount of bookshelf space shrank; the amount of games and gifts and notecards and just plain old crap grew.

I became disenchanted with the chain early in the 2000s, roughly around the time I started getting published. I kept getting reports from irate friends who'd walk into Borders and find that none of my books were there—like it's my fault. I kept asking my agent and publisher to figure out what was going on, and it turned out that the woman who ordered juvenile titles was on maternity leave. Apparently the chain didn't delegate her duties to anyone else, or bother to have a backup. Now, Smooch had its own problems, but when one person goes AWOL for months and there's no one to order your books for an entire nationwide chain of stores, there's definitely some kind of problem going on.

It was soon after that I found Borders wasn't a destination any longer. It was the place I'd go when I had time to kill when a Barnes and Noble or independent bookstore wasn't around. I certainly wouldn't go for the book selection, which was spotty, or the CDs, which were hideously overpriced. I couldn't always count on the clerks, some of whom were enthusiastic and knowledgable, but others were so disgruntled or overworked or just plain ornery that they'd grunt and jerk their shoulders in the direction of the computer I was supposed to be using instead of bothering them as they restocked the magnetic poetry section.

I'm sad that Borders is no more. When its doors closed last week, I hadn't stepped foot into a branch in at least a year. Yet in my memories of when I first became acquainted with it, it was heaven itself—a golden, sun-drenched expanse of bookcases filled with interesting things to read and crowded with happy people anxious to discover something new