James Patterson, patron of booksellers

Not what it once was.

"I think it’s a hugely important that we have bookstores, certainly right now. It was even a shame that Borders went out of business, honestly. But we need more—I mean, we have a place in Westchester and the nearest bookstore is half an hour, which is just kind of crazy. Even when I was a kid, there were books everywhere; there were books in drugstores, there really were a lot of places you could get books. Not necessarily a huge selection, but they were around."

Author James Patterson is a little older than me, and worlds away in life outcomes, but we share a love of books and libraries and bookstores. This quote rang a bell for me. In the 1970s, when I was a teen and had a little pocket money from an after-school job, I bought books. 

My town had a tiny library, run by elderly ladies who seemed to resent checking out books. The selection ran to the tastes of the local, second-generation cotton mill mandarinate.

There was no bookstore. There was a newsstand downtown, whose paperback holdings seemed to dwindle every year. But every general department store that came to town had a big wall of paperbacks, and there I found the most amazing things. I got a boxed paperback set of Churchill's war memoirs and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. New best-sellers I read the titles of in the weekly report in the local paper, and now could read for a dollar or two. Classics, too.

Drugstores were big booksellers in the interwar years, then gave it up. By the 1980s, the department stores pretty much had, as well. A mall came to my town, and, in it, a tiny Barnes & Noble hardly worth the space for the scope of its inventory. It killed off the newsstand in town, and the strip mall department stores went empty, too.

Now, adults have the world at their fingertips via the internet. But it'd be nice if the kids in small towns, trying to reach out- at least in their minds- to worlds, and place, they fit in better, if we had some of that old, easy access. Now paperbacks, where you can find them (mostly Wal-Marts) are dumbed-down in quality and jacked up in price.

So thanks to James Patterson for doing some yeoman service for the art- and people- of the bookstore world.