Barnes & Ignoble

For summer reading, Barnes & Noble recommends The Diary of Anne Frank. So here’s the presumed scenario: The sun is out, you’re under your candy striped umbrella at the beach, children in the near distance are making sandcastles on the shore, and you are immersing yourself in the magical world of WWII-era Amsterdam, through the eyes of a 13-year-old Jewish girl whose family was forced into hiding, and who later perishes in a concentration camp. If this is a bit light for you, Barnes & Noble suggests Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a summertime alternative, so you can brush up on your Middle English, like you’ve been meaning to. Or if Objectivist philosophy is your thing, an anthology of Ayn Rand’s previously unpublished writings – The Early Ayn Rand (only 508 pages)- is a welcome member of the B & N "Summer Reading" display.

Really?

By now it’s old news, if it was ever news at all, but in this year’s edition of City Pages‘ "Best of the Twin Cities," Barnes & Noble Booksellers took "Best Bookstore (New)" in the reader’s poll. In a city with as many funky community bookstores as ours, this was a bit surprising to me, because in terms of customer experience, I’ve always found B & N a bit lacking.

I don’t want to rant about how B & N is bad for the universe and promotes global warming and cannibalism and pedophilia. We’ve all heard it all before. So I’m going to try and make a good, old-fashioned pro/con list consisting of the chain’s merits (which it certainly has) and demerits, and see if maybe one outweighs the other.

I assume there might be some crossover in readership between City Pages and The Rake – possibly even some with this blog – so I invite anyone and everyone to comment with why they like (or don’t like) Barnes & Noble, and to educate me as to what I may have missed – probably a substantial amount.

So here goes:

PROS

Squatter’s Rights – You can sit in a Barnes & Noble for as long as you want, without feeling guilty. (I tend to start feeling guilty after about fifteen minutes in Magers & Quinn if I don’t find anything I want.) It’s kind of like a library, but with newer, better smelling books.

Bathrooms – I’m pretty sure that most B & Ns have bathrooms that are functionally, if not explicitly, open to the public.

Author Events – Probably the biggest benefit B & N brings to its communities is their ability to get big-name authors in otherwise-skipped-over towns. The branches Downtown and in the Galleria are especially good at getting some writers of note to Minneapolis and St. Paul. To name a recent few: Keith Gessen, Darin Strauss, and, thank God, Mario Lopez.

Discounts – When it comes to the bottom line, B & N is the best on giving us fairly significant price cuts on our favorite magazines and books.

Kids’ Sections – I suspect this may have had a lot to do with its City Pages ranking. Maybe the one thing that many indy bookstores lack is a decent children’s section (though check out Birchbark Books in Kenwood). It seems B & N caters as much to youngsters as to any other demographic, fully aware that they still have imaginations to be stoked and exploited.

Har Mar – More than any other B & N I know of, the branch by Har Mar mall serves as a neighborhood hub. They have one of the corporation’s rare ‘used’ sections, and are willing to host a Chinese conversation group. Also, I’ve heard it’s a good spot for singles to meet.

And the CONS.

Before I start, I want to say that I’m going to try and keep the cons to problems encountered within the actual bookstores. Whatever B & N‘s global ramifications may be, the CP poll was about user experience, not where we shop with the cleanest conscience, or where we shop because everywhere else has been mysteriously put out of business.

More Discounts – No, I don’t want to save another ten per cent today by signing up for a new credit card. Nor give you my zip code in order to buy a magazine.

Selection – It’s often hard to find the book I’m looking for. Despite their vast shelving space, B & N‘s management mandates that branches constantly cycle through their shelves, weeding out the books that don’t sell as well as they’re supposed to. Because of this, it’s difficult to come across older books. A lot of the time they’ll have an author’s best-seller, but none of the rest of that particular author’s output. Perusing the Calhoun Village branch, I was unable to find any books by Celine or Bernard Malamud, and they had only one book each of Chekhov, Grace Paley, and Proust. The poetry section is even more barren – a sort of Blockbuster video approach to stocking. Only one collection each by local heavyweights Robert Bly and Louis Jenkins, and several omissions (There were, however, several copies of the poetry collections by Jewel and Ani DiFranco.)

Books, but not Reading – This is my biggest beef: B & N promotes books, and the selling of materials bound in traditional book form, but only minimally and incidentally promote any actual reading. Their ‘Summer Reading’ display, for example, is simply preposterous, and shows the company’s complete lack of attention to their readers.
As is now well-documented, the books that appear up front and on the chain’s various ‘favorites’ tables aren’t selected by staff; publishers pay to have their books in those spots. This means that advertisers determine what we see, not people that care about what we’re actually reading.
Because of this, some mismatching authors appear linked together. I especially liked how the new cardboard Ernest Hemingway display is next to the display with Mary Higgins Clark and James Patterson’s books. It’s kind of like putting Skittles next to the organic fruits.
Call me condescending. But I assure you there is no way in Hell I’m more condescending than the Barnes & Noble executive who commands that there be a rack for "Magazines America Loves" in his stores.

I think that’s all I’ve got. It seems the list is weighted toward the pros, though I have to say the last two cons are really the clinchers for me (I don’t live anywhere near Har Mar, nor do much shopping for kids, which effectively mangles my personal pros). Again, we here at The Rake are all about opinions, we thrive on them, so if you’ve got one, or many, throw it out there, yo.