A Requiem for Borders

The liquidation announcement that signaled the death knell for Borders, the national bookstore chain, was greeted by many with dismay, but not necessarily surprise. For folks who regularly included a sojourn to their local store on Sunday mornings or Friday evenings, the removal of Planet Borders from their orbit is akin to a black hole in their lives. In the widely-circulated Associated Press article about the liquidation, a 42-year-old woman laments, "So where are we going to buy books from? I just got into reading books the last two or three years, and they just keep closing all these bookstores..."

Whether you shopped at Borders or not, whether you liked Borders or not, the closing of the chain will have an impact on our community. Santa Fe is a small city, so chances are you know an alumnus of the Borders sales floor or a recently laid-off employee. Visitors and residents respond with shock when they're told they can't while away a hot summer afternoon in the Sanbusco Borders café anymore. And for such a huge book behemoth to fall, many people are chattering that it's the canary in the coalmine about the fate of the book itself!

But Santa Fe is luckier than many communities. For one, we have a plethora of independent new and used bookstores all over town, pushing us up in the "bookstores per capita" category. While Borders may have been a big name, they weren't the only literary game in town. Let's see, there's Collected Works, Garcia Street, Nicholas Potter, The Ark, Big Star, Book Mountain, True Believers, and about half-a-dozen more. We also have an impressive number of libraries. There's us, the three-branch Santa Fe Public Library, with shelves and shelves of books, CDs, and DVDs; programs for children, teens, and adults; and dozens of free online resources that you can access from home. There are other college, government, and museum libraries in town that can fulfill pretty much every information need you have. And if you want a destination for those Friday nights or Sundays, all of the museums run by the Museum of New Mexico have free admission to New Mexico residents on Sundays, and many museums and galleries have Free Fridays.

I'm not a prophet, so I can't say if the demise of Borders heralds the demise of all print information and entertainment. I can say that the written word has seen upheavals before, and while Borders may have gotten steamrolled by the latest one, libraries have a good track record of adapting and and thriving. To the 42-year-old who mourns the demise of Borders, I encourage her to browse in her local library and seek out other bookstores, and to see what's been there all along.

Image by George England via Wikimedia Commons.