One lamentable consequence of the rise of the Internet is the decline of used book stores. I first noticed this trend while in San Diego for Marine training several years ago. While exploring the shops depicted on a flyer promoting used book stores within the city, all I came across were going-out-of-business signs and empty storefronts. In the short time between the printing of the flyer and my reading the flyer, numerous stores had shut down operations. Even in highly literate locales, such as Harvard Square and Washington, DC, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a used book store.
On the Internet you're almost guaranteed to find what you are looking for. In a used book store, you're almost guaranteed to find what you are not looking for.
I had some success finding what I wasn't looking for tonight at McIntyre and Moore Booksellers in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. This is why I prefer shopping over the counter to shopping over the world wide web. Among the tomes I stumbled upon were a UK first-edition of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, a sturdy hardback of Thomas Sowell's Marxism, and an obscure book from the 1960s called A Passport to Utopia: Great Panaceas in American History. In fact, my wife and I bought a foot-long stack of books to qualify for a 10% discount--an imaginative deal you'd never find at Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon, or any other book-selling behemoth.
Like Second Story Books in the DC-area, McIntyre and Moore is among the last of a dying breed. Inspired by this troubling phenomena, I've created the Endangered Business List. I mean no disrespect to those on the Endangered Species List. But with all apologies to the Black-Browed Albatross and the Boreal Felt Lichen, used book stores have played a more meaningful role in my life than snakes, bugs, and weeds. Rather than a government protection scheme, the Endangered Business List will merely be an instrument to encourage my readers to frequent second-hand book shops. When we save used book stores, we will move on to protecting other endangered but worthy businesses: ice-cream men, drive-in movie theaters, pizza parlors run by real Italians, etc.
OK, who's with me?
All the 2nd-hand stores need to do is sell on the internet as well as in the store to stay in business, right?
I am with you on the pizza parlors. If you want real NY pizza don't go to a parlor in Manhattan, you have to go to another borough such as Brooklyn, or even the "real" fifth borough, Hoboken. I mean who has really ever been to Staten Island?
