Picky and Healthy

As you may or may not have heard Borders Books is closing its doors. They haven’t been doing well for a while and despite what seems like their team’s best efforts they just can’t make their business model work.

As you also may or may not know I work in book publishing. Up until my recent promotion I did the support work for the sales reps who sold to Borders. I even got to take a trip out to Ann Arbor to the Borders headquarters last year.

Because of this I know quite a few people who are losing their jobs. And quite a few who have already lost their jobs in the previous months. The papers say 11,000 people will lose their jobs in all, which is pretty terrible.

While I obviously have a professional connection to Borders I also have a personal one. Growing up as the daughter of two librarians I always loved books. But I actually can’t really remember going to a bookstore until a Borders store opened about half an hour from my parents’ house.

At first they were only books, then they condensed the book section and also started selling music, and over the years they added movies and paper products and all sorts of gift-y items.

But I’ll never forget how excited I was to take my spending money to Borders as a child. I remember buying Saddle Club books and Sweet Valley Twins books and all sorts of other books, and CDs, back in the day.

My grandparents (the same ones I went to visit in Portland) used to take us to Borders all the time. They always spoiled my brother and me with $10 or $20 when we saw them and rather than taking us to get toys or candy they used to take us to Borders, and we loved it. I would usually get a book and Nick would usually get a CD, but we would spend hours looking around.

I still remember how the books had barcode stickers on back that were kind of texturized and I loved peeling them off slowly as I read the book.

Eventually a Borders opened close to my parents’ house and that was great, but by that time I think I was in college. When I was growing up there were no Barnes and Noble stores by my parents (and there still really aren’t, the closest one is about 45 minutes away) and I can’t think of where an independent bookstore would have been (although there are two now). There was a Walmart and Kmart by my parents’ but we never went there and although I know they sell books now, I’m not sure they did when I was younger, and their book selection isn’t so great. Target is the only big box store with a good book selection and one of those didn’t open by my parents’ until I was in college.

So, until we started ordering books from Amazing (probably when I was 14 or 15?) Borders was where we went to get all our books. I actually remembered while writing this that I based my college admissions essay on something that happened to me at a Borders store. My friend and I were there shopping one night and a woman had this terror child and she looked at us and said, “whatever you do don’t have kids.” And I wrote my college admissions essay about how I wanted kids.

Anyway, I will always be thankful for Borders. Books are amazing things and who knows where I would have ended up if I didn’t have those Borders stores to aimlessly browse in? Maybe I wouldn’t have become a reader and who knows what ramifications that would have had. Or maybe I wouldn’t have been inspired to write my college essay and I wouldn’t have gotten in to college.

RIP.