Thomas Beeby stood on a little brick island, surrounded by the ocean of dark wood shelving units, soft green carpeting, and smooth jazz that is the new Barnes & Noble super-bookstore at 659 W. Diversey Ave. The middle name in the architectural firm of Hammond Beeby and Babka, Beeby played a principal role in designing another local shrine to the book: the Harold Washington Library Center building, which houses the Chicago Public Library`s main collection. He`d been asked to come take a look at the superstore, which opened in late September, and offer his expert opinion. He was impressed.
The entrepreneurial new wave in bookselling, superstores is meant to do for literature what Toys `R` Us did for toys; that is, allow a chain (like Barnes & Noble) to seek to achieve dominance in a given market (like Chicago) by gathering a staggering array of books under one unusually large roof, and then discounting them.
As of today, there are six Barnes & Noble super-bookstores in the Chicago area. The one in Evanston has an espresso bar. The one in Deerfield has a glassed-in sunroom at the south end and a big children`s section-really a children`s sub-store-at the north. Compared to most of the bookstores you`ve been in, they`re huge. Aggressive, too-in their discount policies; their rapid, heavily-leveraged expansion program; their tendency to locate near established bookstores; even their decorating. And together with a few like-minded chains, they are throwing much of the book business not only into chaos, but into an angry, anguished sort of chaos.
Barnes & Noble has by far the heaviest corporate commitment to the concept at present, with 100 superstores already in operation around the United States-four of them here; but Crown Books is expected to open a Super Crown in the Loop Jan. 9, the English Waterstone`s chain opened their second American store here on Nov. 7, and one of the K-Mart-owned Borders chain of 22 superstores has been doing business in suburban Oak Brook since 1989.
Superstores tend to hover around 15,000 to 20,000 square feet and carry from 100,000 to 150,000 titles, although the new Super Crown is slightly smaller, about 7,000 square feet, with 35,000 titles. Crown Books expects to open 20 to 25 Super Crowns in 1993, including a 14,000- square-foot store in February in Skokie; Super Crowns already operate in Vernon Hills, Schaumburg and Orland Park.
By way of comparison, the independently owned Barbara`s Bookstore in Oak Park fits about 20,000 titles into 6,000 square feet, while Stuart Brent`s on Michigan Avenue manages to cram 65,000 titles into a mere 2,500 square feet.
If the superstores` economic strategy derives from Toys `R` Us, however, their aesthetic strategy has had to come from somewhere else. Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio`s experiments with selling books on a price-per-pound basis not withstanding, it`s generally agreed that you can`t do Hemingway and Wharton the way you do Barbie and Ken. Books are special: at once more intimate and more sacred, more mystical and more alive than other forms of merchandise. Even bad books are presumed to have a sort of soul-a piece of the great soul of the culture. That`s why some people have felt compelled to burn them while others can`t bring themselves to throw out so much as an old magazine.
Corporations that develop scores of 20,000-square-foot, discount-taking superstores have to be especially sensitive to this metaphysics of books. After all, the smaller independent shops have intimacy practically built into their close stacks, reverence stamped on their on-premises owners who take pride, as Pat Peterson of Barbara`s says, in ”selecting books, not just buying books.”
You might say that a good independent has the love of books written all over it, whereas a superstore has to convince us that it`s more than just a warehouse.
Which is why Thomas Beeby was so impressed. Beeby found a canny set of
”mixed messages” encoded into the presentation of the Chicago Barnes & Noble, a hangar-like red brick building just west of Clark Street.
One of those messages has to do with a hip sort of casualness, appropriate to the youthful demographics of the neighborhood. ”No need to feel intimidated here,” the message says. ”I`m cool and so are you.” Beeby could hear it in the carpeting and the music, the soft lighting, exposed brick walls, and apparent lack of human or electronic surveillance.
The other message is very different, if not exactly contradictory. Casual as it is, Beeby said, this new Barnes & Noble also creates a more formal civic persona for itself. There is a sense of ”public space,” even ”grandeur”
(his words) in the high arch of the ceiling, with its exposed support timbers and ductwork. The aisles look to be wider than required by law, the shelving perhaps a little taller than usual for bookstores. The personnel keep a low profile, leaving customers alone to browse the stacks. And heavy wooden chairs punctuate some of the aisles, suggesting a place of study not unlike Beeby`s own Harold Washington Center. (Although Beeby also noted that many of the chairs faced into high traffic areas, making it unlikely that anyone would sit in them for very long.)
More important, Beeby said, the Barnes & Noble architects have preserved an impression of unobstructed space and unbroken sightlines. There are no cubbies here. No curious little reading nooks, set away from the main floor. As Tom Howell, the design principal on the project would remark later, the store ”is not a series of discoveries” but a single expanse from the entrance to the back wall, broken up by ”subtle divisions that change your perspective” rather than by walls. It assumes a public openness, and therefore a public dignity. Again, not unlike a library.
Oddly enough, Beeby used the concept of the department store as a model for the Harold Washington Center, appropriating a department store`s easy floor-to-floor traffic patterns and self-service approach. The Barnes & Noble people have reversed this formula, turning a commercial space into a pseudo-library where you check books out on your credit card.
Or maybe not. Though design principal Howell confirmed Beeby`s analysis, asserting that ”above all, (the Barnes & Noble people) wanted the stores to feel like a traditional library,” the company`s executive vice president, Steve Riggio, pooh-poohed that notion. Riggio seems to think of the superstores as a kind of honeyed literacy trap: a ”wonderful, warm, cozy atmosphere” that will attract and capture some of the 60 percent of American households that never buy books. ”I think we should look on the store as a celebration,” Riggio said.
A good many people in the Chicago book business couldn`t agree with him less. With a remarkable unanimity, Riggio`s local peers are apt to contest his perception of the superstore atmosphere, his claim that superstores expand the market for books, and most especially his contention that a new Barnes & Noble is cause for celebration. For these folks, design it how you will, you can`t take the Toys `R` Us out of the superstore concept.
During a recent phone interview, a reporter had only to mention superstores to Stuart Brent to hear him growl over the line.
”When you have a great party, you don`t have it in a hall,” Brent said. ”You have it in the kitchen.” The superstores` size and alleged impersonality offend the very essence of Brent`s approach to bookselling, which is flagrantly idiosyncratic. Receiving visitors at his round table in the back of the store, prowling the aisles between shelves festooned with postcards from Nelson Algren and photos of Saul Bellow, Brent is the store and the store is Brent.
He is proud of having dispensed books ”personally, affectionately, with warmth” for the last 45 years. ”I believe,” he remarked, ”that I`m part of the human experience of the people of Chicago.”
Other independent booksellers say they find the atmosphere at the superstores ”seductive” but ”cold.” Or they deride the claim that superstores can expand the market for books (”I don`t think they can do with a little advertising what the school system hasn`t,” commented Paul Berlanga, who manages the Booksellers Row store in Lincoln Park. ”Nobody`s going to say, `Wow! What a store! Let`s read!` ”)
Many independents suggest instead that Barnes & Noble and its kind will merely divide the existing market differently, a charge apparently borne out by the experience of people like Erica Nocera, manager of the Booksmith in Nashua, N. H., who reports that her store has yet to recover fully from the loss of sales occasioned by the arrival of a Barnes & Noble nearby.
”I expect we`ll stay healthy,” predicts Pat Peterson, whose Broadway Avenue Barbara`s sits just a few blocks from the Diversey Barnes & Noble,
”but we`ll lose our growth.”
The independents` most serious accusation against the superstores, though, is that superstores will ultimately wield far too much power with publishers, that one day, having squelched smaller competitors and
consolidated their dominance on a national scale, they will be in a position simply to dictate which books are and are not printed in the United States.
Detective novelist Sara Paretsky explained the potential danger well during a discussion on WBEZ-FM 91.5 radio recently. ”Books have been unique in giving us a way to hear voices that we may not want to listen to as a society, but that are there and give us food for thought,” she said.
”When you have a player like Barnes & Noble, which is heavily leveraged and controls right now 10 percent of the book orders, what happens is that they start getting out of publishers what it is they want or need to carry in order to make sufficient cash flow to service their debt. This means that the potential is there for important voices to be silenced.”
Or as Berlanga of Booksellers Row put it, America`s readers and writers will suffer ”censorship by cashflow.”
What we end up with, then, is a set of dark scenarios, in which a few huge stores stock thousands and thousands of titles and yet give us a narrower variety of books to read.
In which a handful of big-time merchandisers wrap themselves in the imagery of literacy while subtly breaking it down.
In which Hemingway and Wharton finally get done like Barbie and Ken, and difficult writers don`t get done at all.
Is that really the future? Or do independent booksellers read too much Orwell? For all her anguish over the superstores, Pat Peterson is preparing to beat them on service. So is David Schwartz, a respected Milwaukee independent who acknowledges that the appearance of a Barnes & Noble right across the street from one of his stores ”might be the end of me,” but who also remembers that Waldenbooks and B. Daltons (owned by K-Mart and by Barnes & Noble, respectively) were supposed to kill off the independents, too. Instead, they helped increase overall readership. And when those new readers got bored with the selection at the chains, they came to the independents for something more. Says Stuart Brent, ”I can`t conceive of the worth of a city without independent booksellers.”
Meanwhile, another super-sized bookstore suggests the possibility of a third way. Waterstone`s, a subsidiary of the venerable W.H. Smith and one of the two largest chains in the United Kingdom, opened a 20,000-square-foot, 110,000-title outlet on Michigan Avenue in early November, the second of what company officials hope will be 100 in the United States.
With its heavy, black built-in shelving units and its maroon carpeting, which resembles nothing so much as an enormous power tie, the Michigan Avenue Waterstone`s is even more posh, more ”literate,” and authoritative in tone than the Barnes & Noble stores. The difference, says project director David McRedmond, is that whereas the Barnes & Noble stores rely on the New York home office for much of their inventory, each Waterstone`s is to be run as an entity unto itself.
”I hate calling ourselves a superstore,” McRedmond said. ”Most chains buy their books in New York. (Chicago store manager Robert Nichols) will control all the buying” at the Chicago Waterstone`s. This approach is meant to make the new store as responsive as an independent to the needs of its customers. ”We`re very interested in those who want a very good bookstore,” McRedmond said.
Perhaps it should be taken as a hopeful sign that the other tenant in Waterstone`s new building is F.A.O. Schwartz rather than Toys `R` Us. In any case, W.H. Smith CEO John Hancock pointed out that his company has long experience in getting the public to read, having ”made money out of people`s literacy for 200 years.”
