[Southern California Permaculture] The Book Store I Love/by Pico Iyer

Thu Dec 29 17:33:20 PST 2016

Been shopping at Chaucer's a lot this holiday season, grateful, very
grateful, that they and Book Den still with us. Shopping local so important
to the  health of a community. Chaucers employs 24 full time employees!
Margie

LA Times//Op-Ed

Chaucer's, the little bookstore that could

The Santa Barbara mainstay is proof that you can't get everything you want
online.

 <http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/09> November 09, 2012

|By Pico Iyer

o     

SANTA BARBARA -- There was once a little bookstore, tucked into an
unglamorous mall on the wrong side of town, where few visitors were likely
to stumble upon it. Its owner had opened a small shop in 1974 with a modest
bequest from her mother, and she and her husband had had to dip into their
life insurance funds to keep it going. People from across the county drove
for miles to buy books there - and to see friends, to pick up free copies of
the New York Times Book Review, to special-order out-of-print works no one
else could be bothered to find. But these days, so it was said, it was
easier, cheaper - more fun - to shop online. A computer could read your
taste better than you could. One click could bring you the whole world,
radically discounted.

Just as Amazon.com was getting going, a large store called Borders came into
the small town and set up a three-story emporium at its central
intersection. This bright new palace sold CDs and boasted aisles full of
magazines and cookies and coffee; musicians struck up concerts outside its
entrance; thousands of books were sold at vastly marked-down prices; and it
used the cozy chairs and community air of a neighborhood store to crafty
corporate advantage.

http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

But a few years later, to everyone's surprise, the huge citadel of books,
next to a free, multistory parking lot and a five-screen cinema in downtown
Santa Barbara, closed. Just one week before, on the last day of 2010, the
sprawling Barnes & Noble bookstore across the street from it, in the chicest
mall downtown, had also shut its doors. Then the Borders near the town's
large public university closed.

Online retailers and e-readers had become ubiquitous. But the little
bookstore called Chaucer's just kept growing and growing, housing more books
- 150,000 and counting - in its happily overcrowded aisles than the central
megastore had carried in a space six times as big.

How could this happen? Well, 24 of Chaucer's 26 employees work there full
time, many of them for more than 10 years. They have an investment in the
concern that the part-time workers in big-box bookstores usually do not.

People come there just to browse through a carnival-like children's room of
books and toys and games. They come there to meet dates, to receive personal
commendations, often to buy nothing at all. They come there as to a
community center, a sanctuary or a trusted friend's living room (albeit a
living room where Salman Rushdie is reading from his latest, and
sometime-local Sue Grafton is sitting around for four hours to chat with her
many fans). Chaucer's sells no coffee or remainders, but it offers teachers
20% discounts and holds two book fairs a year to raise money for local
schools.

So perhaps the story of the bookstore stands for something larger than mere
books. Most of us can get anything we want online these days - except for
the tactile reassurance of human contact, the chance to do nothing at all
and a sense of connection that persists even after the electricity has gone
off and the batteries run out. Convenience is not always an ideal substitute
for companionship, and speed isn't infallibly the fastest way to well-being.
Even the $2 - or $10 - discounts that corporations can offer may exact a
cost at some deeper level that sometimes we find ourselves paying and
paying.

When the two giant bookstores in the center of Santa Barbara closed, the
owner of Chaucer's, Mahri Kerley, expressed her sorrow; more books were
always better than fewer.

Besides, the passion she'd chosen to share was about something less visible
than the bottom line. When the writer of this article was invited to give a
reading at another new local bookstore - only to find that its owner had
neglected even to buy any books to sell - he wasn't surprised when a worker
from rival Chaucer's instantly responded to an emergency call and brought
down copies from his store, to help out its new competitor, because some
things matter more than mere spreadsheets.

http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

One worker at Chaucer's, after his previous independent bookstore home
(Dutton's in Brentwood) closed down, took to driving 100 miles through the
dark every morning to work at the Santa Barbara store, before driving back
100 miles every afternoon. Another, when I purchased a copy of Siddhartha
Mukherjee's history of cancer, "The Emperor of All Maladies," told me that
the book had shaken her profoundly, not least because she'd been diagnosed
with cancer many years ago.

"You're OK now?" I asked. She certainly looked the picture of health.

"So it seems," she answered. "Not all terrible diagnoses prove fatal."

Pico Iyer is a presidential fellow at Chapman University. This essay is
adapted from one in "My Bookstore," a forthcoming anthology in which 80
writers describe the bookshops they love.

Santa Babara Permaculture Network Logo 
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie at sbpermaculture.org
 <http://www.sbpermaculture.org/> http://www.sbpermaculture.org

P Please consider the environment before printing this email

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