SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 – Long ago, Barnes & Noble maintained a large store in downtown Minneapolis. At lunchtime on most workdays, whether I was grabbing food, running errands, or enjoying a rare power lunch at Murray’s Steakhouse, my office-return path took me to Barnes & Noble. Often, I made the bookstore my only destination over the lunch hour.
The store disappeared long before the pandemic altered our habits and whereabouts. People discovered online book-buying, and my wife’s own booming online book-sale business was a reminder that book-browsing had also changed.
In older days yet, just beyond Barnes & Noble, you could lose all connections with reality by browsing inside Jim and Mary Laurie’s used bookstore. Descend to the basement selections and before long you’d forget important things about yourself—that you still needed to grab something to eat; that you had a job at an office in a tall building nearby; that you had a 1:00 conference call with people who worked in offices in tall buildings in much bigger cities; that you were married with kids; that you owned a house and owed mortgage payments because you were married with kids, and therefore needed to keep the job in the office in the tall building, which meant you couldn’t be late for that 1:00 call, so for lunch you’d have to settle for chips and a Diet-Coke from break-room vending machines.
In the bliss of amnesia, you’d rediscover the poetry of Robert Frost in a handsome edition in a dusty corner of Laurie’s bookstore. Or you’d come face-to-face with George F. Kennan—“Mr. X,” as he was identified in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs—on the cover of his overstock-memoir. (I bought it, and finding it such a great read, I wrote him (then quite elderly) a letter. Kennan’s secretary sent a kind reply, explaining that the famous diplomat and his wife were sailing their yacht along the coast of the wife’s native Denmark.)
I never departed that bookstore as the same person I’d been when I’d entered it.
Those days are themselves “history”—the bookstore section where I spent the most time. I miss drawing books from their shelves, admiring their covers, paging through their contents, and often—posting the required bail to release them from consignment.
Now people have gone the way of books. Lots of people I “May Know” appear on my FB feed, just as Amazon “knows” many books I’d find interesting. People, like books, however, do better in person. When walking the skyways to and from Barnes & Noble, I always met people I knew. Often an acquaintance in the company of a work colleague would stop to chat and introduce me to the colleague. Soon we’d be well into advanced chapters about our lives. Over the years, I heard many intriguing stories, interesting viewpoints, all material . . . for so many books that could be written.
Now, it seems, “real” interaction has been displaced by “virtual” exchanges, making all of us poorer.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
