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Thinking outside the big box and other re-entry notes

The problem with going on vacation is that rest and sleep and reading time remind you how you're supposed to feel. And then real life intrudes. Still, there is little sadder than a bar being held up by people in their late middle age living the Jimmy Buffett dream, drinking cheap liquor in expensive real estate, which we encountered a most nights while picking up dinner to go for eight.

Anyway, the whole lot of us went to the beach — my in-laws, the uncles, Mamaw, Maggie, Susan, and me — and did mostly nothing for a week, except read and eat and try to walk off a few calories while Maggie played in the waves. Think, even, in complete thoughts, though I seem already to have lost that facility. I don't have a laptop, so it's easy to disengage from e-mail once the car starts, and few people use the phone for business these days so that, too, was easy to ignore.

Because my wife's family owns CoffeeTree Books here in Morehead ("Eastern Kentucky's largest independent bookstore," we've started branding it, though there's not much competition for the honor, alas), we covered the hearth with advanced reader copies of various books, and I was able to read at random will. A glorious binge. Sparing the details, I will note only that William Gibson's next novel, Spook Country, which comes out in early August, is more rooted in the present and yet every bit as prescient about the future as Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive were, and perhaps I should go back and see what he wrote inbetween. And that the mess of post-Civil War reconstruction explains a great deal of what went wrong in this country for the following hundred years, and is probably an object lesson for what we should not do in Iraq, though the slightest interest in history would've kept us out of that debacle.

We came home to the usual stack of newspapers, which I looked through quickly to see if there were any news about UK basketball worth knowing and any clues as to who I should vote for in the gubernatorial primary next week. (No, to both.) But above the fold on the Lexington Herald's Sunday opinion section, was a month-old column by the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker, noting that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has eliminated its book editor position. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-parker2507apr25,0,3784142.column

Halfway through Parker's piece I figured out why I'd stopped to read it, beyond tribal loyalties to unemployed editors: "Ironically," she writes, "book publishers are partly to blame for the disappearing book sections, as they've cut advertising in print media. Instead, they prefer to spend on front-table book placement in stores that costs as much as $1 a volume and reportedly delivers more bang for the buck."

No, we don't see any of those placement bonuses at CoffeeTree, if you were wondering. (Retail consolidation doesn't make publishing a music magazine any easier, either.)

And that's the point. Those incentives aren't available to stores of our size, and we sell a lot of books. (They do, I just change the lightbulbs occasionally.)

Because the book to which I would most like to draw your attention is Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle, published by Beacon Press in Boston, which is associated with the Unitarian Church. I note the publisher because Mitchell writes, a few pages before my present bookmark, that this book was turned down by several larger houses simply because they feared Barnes & Noble and Borders wouldn't carry it. (They do, at least online, as does Amazon. To their credit. Or perhaps it's the certainty of their confident market positions.)

Now, I need and want to be careful here. Both those chains are very good to No Depression, and, with the decline of the record store and of many independent booksellers (see the rub?), they are among the most important purveyors of new and even fringe ideas in today's marketplace.

But please buy Big-Box Swindle from your local independent bookseller. Or check it out at the library. Or buy it from one of the boxes. But read it. Please.

Mitchell has not written another screed against Wal-Mart, though it can, in part, be read that way. She has assembled a great deal of information which argues for the importance of local business (which circulate dollars through the local economy and are far more involved in civic affairs), and for the destructive consequences of our big box, category-killer economy, from Wal-Mart to Bass Pro Shops to Victoria's Secret. All of which she addresses far more eloquently than I have time or need to do here, though finding food to eat on the interstate that doesn't come from a chain these days is nearly impossible.

What I would note here, today, is simply that we have been force-fed the notion that saving a penny justifies everything which follows, that the lowest possible cost is the highest public good. (And never mind that we're not necessarily saving money at Wal-Mart.)

Some of you will remember an earlier blog posted here about the new postal rates, written by major publishers to favor their economies of scale and revising the USPO's historic commitment to the diversity of ideas, which diversity this nation's founders believed (as do I) to be essential to a function democracy.

A reader sent a link to an NPR story, which interviewed Robert McChesney on behalf of we small publishers, and a woman from the postal regulatory commission. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/05/11/06 He also noted that the media hadn't done much to pick up this story. But, of course, since these regulations benefit big media, why should they?

Listen carefully to what the woman, whose name I've not committed to memory, and shan't, has to say, for she argues blithely that magazines are going to die anyhow in the face of the internet (no, we're not; we do quite different things, serve quite different purposes; bad magazines will die, and some good ones won't adapt); that all publishers can save money if they follow these new regulations (which have to do with how magazines are packed and such), leaving off the additional costs which go along with that, or its sheer impossibility for some of us; and that the tradeoff to this new rate structure would have been another penny increase on First Class stamps.

Balderdash, all around, but that last one really galls. The rate increase could as easily have been spread among all publishers, and ignoring the USPO's historic role in promoting diverse opinions is, at best, offensive. But it's that penny that gets to me. The higher good here is saving consumers a penny on the stamps they use to pay bills and, for those without internet access, to write their relatives? That is the higher good, that penny? We would — and I know this is hyperbole, but it's good hyperbole, so indulge me — we would sell our democracy for a penny?

Unrelated final thought, or at least I think it's unrelated. The accident of a shared cab ride during SXSW has led to this little life during wartime playlist, on MTV's Urge site. Because I'm a Mac user, I can't see nor use the site, but I promised to link to it and I seek to keep my word. http://www.urge.com/launch/?page=playlist&id=92631&referrer=nodepression&source=grantalden_playlist

Posted by grant on May 15, 2007 8:41 AM | Permalink