Only a few years ago, bookstores helped define neighborhoods. They were physical and cultural markers on the landscape - showcases of what mattered, there and then.

“It’s an antiquarian business model in a changing world,” admits Melissa Mytinger, manager of Cody’s Books in Berkeley. That Mytinger still has her job is cause for celebration of a sort: Cody’s is a storied institution in more ways than one, but the saga of late has turned bleak.

In the past two years its 10,000 square-foot Telegraph Avenue flagship on boutique-lined Fourth Street has closed, and the business has moved to a 7,000-square-foot outpost one block from UC Berkeley.

But survival beats the alternative: locked doors that mean there’s no chance you’ll stumble across some unexpected volume of insight or delight. It’s a fate known to anyone who loves bookstores, who visits a familiar shopping street and remembers what was.

Mytinger and the 18-person staff are doing the right thing by tailoring the selection to Berkeley’s distinctive academic clientele. They’re even scheduling afternoon appearances by authors who might appeal to readers from nearby Berkeley High School. The shelves are filling up, and more books are on the way.

“We’ve had to give up on the idea that we can stock every book that we love,” says Mytinger, 60, who joined the staff of Cody’s in 1982. “That model doesn’t work anymore. It isn’t viable.”

The hope is that this year’s model - lean but not mean - will evolve into something that attracts people willing to buy books in person rather than simply adding to their online shopping carts.

Cody’s might also help downtown Berkeley emerge as a cultural and artistic destination. At the end of the block, construction crews are pouring concrete for the future home of the David Brower Center, conceived as a four-story clubhouse for environmental advocacy groups. Work also has started on a new home for the Freight & Salvage folk venue. On the drawing boards are more ambitious projects, including a home for the Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum.

Why should we care? After all, who needs a building stuffed with paper in the age of clicks and mortar?

Because a good bookstore is like a good city block: varied and rich, with layers that bear evidence of imagination and pride. There’s a tactile connection to the ephemeral world of ideas. This is merchandise, but it’s not something to be worn for a season or hung up on a wall; it’s something to be discussed and shared, maybe even something that will shape your thoughts and actions. There’s more going on than the creation of a scene. It’s the slow formation of identities, of thoughts and passions and who knows what else.

In the grand scheme of things, bookstores’ long retreat isn’t a crisis on par with climate change or the war in Iraq. Some stores will survive at least for another generation, Cody’s among them, I hope.

But the landscape has changed irrevocably. Ultimately, we’re all the losers - in ways we don’t even yet know.

Excerpted from SF Gate

“Hard time goes slowly and painfully and leaves a man bitter…. Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.”

Earlier we blogged about Shakespeare & Company, an English-language bookstore which sits just across the Seine from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. In its two incarnations, it served generations of authors such as James Joyce, Alan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

So it was with sweet anticipation that I picked up Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There at the library, hoping for a personal glimpse into the bohemian life in the eccentric world of George Whitman. The book is subtitled “A Paris Sojourn At Shakespeare & Co.                

“In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafes… That night at Polly’s, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”

Mercer’s visit to Paris was not entirely of his own choosing. In 1999, Mercer was a young crime reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, with a couple of true crime books under his belt. Unfortunately, he had indiscreetly outed one of his contacts and, after receiving a threatening note and experiencing a break-in, he fled for his life. He ended up in Paris, penniless.

It did not take him long to discover the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, where George Whitman was legendary for offering bed and sustenance to those in need.

On the book’s dustjacket, one reads that he “found himself invited to a tea party among the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s. Having been inspired by Sylvia Beach’s original store, the present owner, George Whitman, invites writers who are down and out in Paris to live and dream amid the bookshelves in return for work. Jeremy Mercer tumbled into this literary rabbit hole, found a life of camaraderie with the other eccentric residents, and became, for a time, George Whitman’s confidant and right-hand man.”

Mercer does go on, in this reader’s view, about his own importance and the deprivations he suffered. And his titillation at petty crime can be a little wearing.

Regardless, Mercer’s account of life at the bookstore is entertaining, and his portrait of George Whitman lovingly details his whimsies and contradictions. His stories of the other bookstore denizens - exotic Nadia,  rival  Kurt who is constantly polishing his unfinished screenplay, Simon the neurotic British poet - tell us a little about why they are there: travel and adventure, scholarships, disillusionment. The details are there: the petty rivalries; the formation of lifetime friendships; the many rituals adopted as the “tumbleweeds” adapt to the quirky requirements of bookstore residency: writing their biography, reading a book a day, and helping out with the constant cleaning chores.

But so little is said about the Paris of the imagination which conjures up visions of poets in cafes and painters in garrets.  Perhaps this reader wanted to see more of that magic and less straight journalism, and perhaps reality never has the same loveliness as dreams. After all, during a return to Paris several years later, even Mercer noted that things had changed since he was part of Shakespeare & Company.

Time Was Soft There is rather like a nice postcard of the Eiffel Tower. It leaves out the soul of the city that has inspired more creativity than any other.

Kilometer Zero is right in front of Notre Dame, on Ile de La Cité. It is the point to which all the highways in France refer.

If you stand on Kilometer Zero, facing Notre Dame, you will see a bridge called the Pont au Double. Cross it to the left bank of the Seine. The large street along the river is St. Michel. Cross it. Now there is a tiny park and after that, you are in front of Shakespeare and Company, the most charming bookstore on earth.

In 1917 Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, opened an American bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company. It was a bookstore, a lending library, and centre of activity and contact for English-speaking writers and artists in Paris.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published by Shakespeare and Company, and books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in England and the U.S. were available to buy or to borrow.

James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Andre Gide, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Janet Flanner, Samuel Beckett, Virgil Thomson, Harry Crosby, Sherwood Anderson, and many others frequented the place.

Shakespeare and Company has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s.

Inspired by Sylvia Beach’s original store, the present owner, George Whitman, invites writers who are down and out in Paris to live and dream amid the bookshelves in return for work.

In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. was opened by Whitman in August 1951.

George had found himself in Paris after the Second World War, not wanting to return to America straight away. He enrolled at the Sorbonne to improve his French and found a small hotel room on Boulevard St Michel. During his studies he amassed a large collection of English books and used his room as a library and bookstore.

It was only after a conversation with his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti that George took seriously the notion of opening a bookstore in Paris. So, in 1951 he managed to acquire a small apartment opposite Notre Dame de Paris, which was then converted into the front of Shakespeare and Company.

His bookstore is a sanctuary for writers, aspiring writers and artists. From the day that George opened he has invited writers to share his home. Some 50,000 have placed their heads on Shakespeare and Company’s famous pillows. Such people as Henry Miller, Anäis Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Alan Ginsberg have shared a tea and a pancake with George.

Since 1951 the bookstore has stubbornly kept its utopian ideals in a changing world. Many who knew the store back in their youth return as adults to find an institution that has not been altered by the passing years. The shop has continued the legacy of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, inviting writers and encouraging new writers. However, George has done it his way. Some have called him an eccentric, while others have called him a light in a dull and homogenized world.”

Some bookstores are filled with stories both inside and outside the bindings. These are places of sanctuary, even redemption.

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

I have let my imagination run wild with the result that a stranger walking the streets of Paris can believe he is entering just another of the bookstores along the left bank of the Seine but if he finds his way through a labyrinth of alcoves and cubbyholes and climbs a stairway leading to my private residence then he can linger there and enjoy reading the books in my library and looking at the pictures on the walls of my bedroom.

Over the years I have combined three stores and three apartments into a bookstore on three floors that Henry Miller called ‘a wonderland of books’.

When I opened my bookstore in 1951 this area in the heart of Paris was crammed with street theatre, mountebanks, junkyards, dingy hotels, wine shops, little laundries, tiny thread and needle shops and grocers. Back in 1600 in the middle of this slum our building was a monastery with a frère lampier who would light the lamps at sunset.

I seem to have inherited his role because for fifty years now I have been your frère lampier.

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”.

I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.

Shakespeare and Company
37 rue de la Bucherie 75005 Paris

Shakespeare & Co.

Read The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

George & Co., the film

Interview with George Whitman in The Literary Review

It survived two world wars and the Great Depression. But it couldn’t survive the onslaught of online ordering, big-box stores like Chapters and the expansion of books into grocery stores and drugstores.

The Book Room in Halifax, a literary landmark - billed as the oldest bookstore in Canada - is shutting its doors at the end of March, after 169 years.

The Book Room on Barrington Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia, opened for business in 1839 and survived two World Wars and the Great Depression, store president Charles Burchell said in a release.

But the retail store couldn’t outlast big box bookstores, Burchell said, nor the ease of ordering books online, competition from book selling pharmacies and grocery stores or the pressure to lower prices to reflect a stronger Canadian dollar.

The final nail in the coffin was the dual pricing of books, with higher selling prices in Canada than in the United States.

Publishers couldn’t react quickly enough to the change, Burchell said, pointing out that books take about three years before they reach the market. It’s the only retail industry he knows of where the selling price is already set, he added.

“The only way you can make any profit is to control that margin in-between and that has to pay for everything.”

Burchell said The Book Room will begin “an orderly shutdown of its retail store and dispose of its inventory” over the next few weeks. The company’s wholesale operation will continue.

“I am extremely disappointed to make this announcement as The Book Room has been an institution in Nova Scotia,” he said. “The bookstore has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression and economic ups and downs over its 169 year history.”

Burchell said that during his 42 years with the bookstore, he invited “hundreds and hundreds of local authors, authors from across Canada and around the world to come and meet their reading fans.”

Before the advent of the computer, Burchell said the store received letters from “all over the world” requesting special books be sent to them.

“To fulfill their request was such a gratifying feeling for me as well as my staff,” he said in the release.

Canada’s oldest bookstore, The Book Room was first established in 1839 as The Wesleyan Book Room and by Christmas of that year had produced a catalogue of books and started filling “Special Orders.”

In 1876 the store was located at 125 Granville Street and in 1925 became The Ryerson Press Book Room.

Following closure in the Spring of 1949, due to a devastating fire, the store re-opened that November in Halifax’s Chronicle Building, remaining on Granville Street. The new owners dropped “Ryerson Press” from the store’s name, keeping The Book Room and continuing its bookselling tradition in Halifax.

In May of 1996 The Book Room moved to its present location at 1546 Barrington Street and continued to offer Halifax, Canada and the rest of the world an amazing selection of books.

“It’s a very dark day in the book industry,” bookseller Heidi Hallett said, “We are really, really sad to see them close.”

“It’s definitely a sign of the times, with people shopping online and big-box stores and all that, but it’s just so incredibly sad because we need independent bookstores.”