R.I.P. Borders

I liked Bor­ders. In fact, there was I time that I loved Bor­ders. It’s because of my time at Bor­ders that I wound up in the tech indus­try. Bor­ders employed not only myself but my wife for a time. It was good to us.

Things change. Now Bor­ders looks like it’s clos­ing its doors.

News came through the Twit­ters and Face­books that Bor­ders will likely be fil­ing for Chap­ter Eleven bank­ruptcy later this week. It makes me sad. Admit­tedly, it’s been a long time since the com­pany was the amaz­ing place that it was when I worked there. I had the gen­uine plea­sure of work­ing with a bunch of lov­able mis­fits who, like me, were highly lit­er­ate but not find­ing a career path in the out­side world. I always felt like we were a bunch of frus­trated grad stu­dents who were pass­ing the time together until the world rec­og­nized our true genius. It was a won­der­ful place.

“The pur­chase of Bor­ders by Kmart in 1992 was not so bad in and of itself, but Kmart’s deci­sion to merge Bor­ders with Walden­books, which Kmart had bought in 1984, was dis­as­trous. From com­put­ers to com­pany cul­ture to focuses on dif­fer­ent types of read­ers, Bor­ders and Walden were a bad fit, and hob­bled each other.”

The slide into demise started before the pur­chase by Kmart. It started when they decided to take the com­pany pub­lic. Our pre­cious lit­tle world of lit­er­acy and cof­fee was invaded by the con­cen­tra­tion on filthy lucre; mar­ket­ing and drive for profit took over. While the near-forty-year-old me under­stands why it hap­pened, the me of twenty years ago felt betrayed by cor­po­rate lack­ies. I don’t think I was the only one. It was the begin­ning of the end, even then.

Bor­ders shifted from being a haven for the book-lover to a place to schlep books until some­thing bet­ter came along. After a time, you couldn’t find those highly-literate book­sellers anymore…it was mostly har­ried peo­ple doing their best to move prod­uct as fast as pos­si­ble. They killed the focus on com­mu­nity events, killed the local con­nec­tions, and became lit­tle more than an over­sized Walden­books. And yet, it’s all we have here in my lit­tle town since the indie book­store on the square has closed down. It’s my hope that, with the local Bor­ders shut­ting its doors, some­one will have the will to open another book­store; some­place for we bib­lio­philes to gather and chat, buy books and share expe­ri­ences. A good book­store is so much more than the books on the shelves. Per­haps, even in the age of Kin­dles and iPads, there’s room for a small, quiet place.

“One minor mea­sure: it’s been years since any­one has men­tioned the once-legendary book quiz given to prospec­tive Bor­ders staffers. Likely most of the peo­ple run­ning the com­pany in the past few years wouldn’t pass it.”

Hav­ing taken and passed the book quiz, I think that says it all. Good­bye, Bor­ders. It was fun while it lasted.

All quotes in this arti­cle are from Shelf-Awareness

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.