Oh, woe is me. The windows at 41st Avenue East and East Madison Street are empty - the latest casualty of our economics.
The door is devoid of notices of Harry Potter's most recent adventure, and the door is locked.
I peek in and see knocked-down shelves, greeting-card racks now empty of greeting cards and not a book in sight.
The display windows facing Madison no longer display books that tell you how to conquer the stock market by buying a share of stock a week, or that ease parental anxieties with books on preparing your preschooler for kindergarten with the proper social and educational background.
And freshmen can't go off to college with books on college life such as how to live with a roommate and without a car or the college student's cookbook.
Another window enticed us with the latest best-sellers, both fiction and nonfiction, or books to entice the vacation reader, young or old.
The third window, especially in summer, abounds with books on everywhere you might long to go and books on how you say "How much does it cost?" when you get there.
Every bit of Madison Park Books has vanished.
The ambiance
Sue Draper - who has given 20 years to keeping us aware of what's new and ordering just about any book in print we may have a mad desire for - is gone.
The book club and its leader, Annie, are gone.
All those books for babies, books for triumphant readers who have advanced to chapter books and series that are the current rage with the teenage set are gone.
And, most of all, so is the atmosphere of excitement as people share opinions about various authors and best-sellers.
It's not that Barnes & Noble and Borders and the other large bookstores don't have the books. They have many more than most local stores, but there's no discussing them with that other reader at the end of the aisle or the person behind the desk. I, for one, would be quite uncomfortable intruding on a reader I didn't know in surroundings that are so impersonal.
Chain bookstores are here to stay, even as they slowly consume neighborhood stores across the country.
They do have good features. Barnes & Noble, for instance, has good people at its information desks, who are very obliging when I ask for some obscure mystery and will even lead me to it.
There are usually little coffee shops where you can have a cup of coffee and have something to eat as you peruse books that have caught your eye.
And they're conveniently in the mall with all of the other chain stores.
But one thing they are not: They aren't my own neighborhood Madison Park Books any more than QFC or Safeway is Bert's Red Apple.
Times keep changing
So I am feeling deserted.
For one of the few times in my life, I am now without a bookstore within walking or biking distance.
There was a time there was a book store in almost every neighborhood. But today, I fear, those bookstores are becoming fewer and fewer as the big bookstores in malls make it almost impossible for the smaller stores to compete.
I suppose it is inevitable as bigger is better are the operative words in today's merchandising credo. Driving to the mall is to today is what walking to Main Street was in days of yore.
Still for those who remember a different way of shopping in a different world, the passing of a local store like Madison Park Books is very hard to bear.
Goodbye, Sue. We'll miss you.
E-mail Roberta Cole at mptimes@ nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
