Barnes & Noble

My friend Mark Athitakis pens an ode to the often-maligned (often by me) Barnes & Noble.

The internet fixes this, allegedly. If I were 16 now, I could theoretically discover Lipstick Traces on Amazon. But claiming that online retail negates the brick-and-mortar bookstore is like saying we don’t have to worry about socializing in person now that we have Facebook and Twitter.

I can't say that I quite share his appreciation. B&N and Borders didn't reach my distant corner of suburbia until after I left for the city as a young adult, so neither store was part of my formative reading years and I never had the sort of pilgrimages that Mark describes. However, in my early twenties I did become addicted to the B&N mail order catalog which somehow magically arrived in my mailbox one day, and from there I regularly bought obscure remaindered/overstock titles for ridiculously cheap prices. For a few years, then, the catalog was my primary source of books, until I moved to the city and its indie and used bookstores. So I'll always be grateful to B&N for that old catalog, though their stores have done little for me.