It's not the end of the world, but it's a real shame.
As Roberta Cole's column in Closing the Gap in this edition points out, the loss of a community bookstore is personal.
When Madison Park Books closed its doors last month, a point of light disappeared from the neighborhood.
It was the classic bookshop: A tree-shaded, triangular, brick building draped with vines. The compact space, which opened as Madison Park Books in 1987, was like a mirror reflecting the community's tastes.
Literary fiction was big, and so were topical nonfiction, cookbooks and serious gardening books. The poetry section was commendable, and the children's section first-rate.
Credit owner Sue Draper and her committed staff for creating such a welcoming haven.
Blame increasing rents, the humdrum Seattle malady, for hastening the bookstore's demise.
And lament the closure of any independent bookstore and what that increasing trend portends.
Statistics vary, but it's safe to say that in the early 1970s independent bookstores accounted for more than 80 percent of the bookstore market. A decade later, as the chain bookstores began making their presence felt, that share dropped to about 70 percent.
By the mid-1990s, with the added presence of the Internet, the independents market share stood at about 40 percent. The American Booksellers Association has seen its membership reduced from about 5,000 to less than 2,000 in the last decade and independent market share down to 15 percent or less.
It's the Wal-Mart effect.
Book publishers can't afford to take risks in what they publish. They have to be sure in advance that the big chains will carry their products. This isn't about the purity of the marketplace: This is about market dominance by the big chains with their major book orders transacted by very few hands. As a result, the marketplace of ideas, in book form anyway, is an increasingly fragile ecology.
Business-inspiration guru Tom Peters once admonished a convention of independent booksellers by informing them they were not book-sellers but retailers - the words of a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The perfect man for our time.
Meanwhile, as Sue Draper told this newspaper in a 1999 interview, referring to her childhood and to the well-stocked children's section in her store, "If children appreciate reading early, they never need to be lonely."
Since Madison Park Books went dark the neighborhood is a slightly lonelier place.[[In-content Ad]]
