Barnes Ignoble

by Anonymous

Some years ago, I attended an event for a poet/novelist who was reading from his latest novel at a packed St. Marks Church literary series night. He was captivating, reminiscent of the great radio storytellers of the thirties. When he finished people cheered and whistled enthusiastically. They were totally moved by the event—or so I thought.

In the courtyard outside the reading, a professorial character waxed prolific about all of the great novelists and poets he’d seen move audiences over the years in Manhattan, everyone from Truman Capote to Salman Rushdie. He lamented, “This reading was OK, but the days of great readings are long gone.”

Must it be forever?

While there are still brilliant writers working hard, publishers taking chances on the next hopeful bestseller, and passionate independent bookshops handselling favorites, many factors have undeniably stripped book events of their once-grandoise soul and character. While New York seems somewhat impervious to the corporate stripping of culture, I fear our literary scene will suffer the same fate as did coffee houses in the face of Starbucks.

The dwindling attendances for lesser-known writers have caused publishers to slash budgets for author tours. The future of the independent bookstores in our city is uncertain. Two to three hundred 200-300 are closing across the country every year because of chain bookstores, one-stop shopping juggernauts like Wal-Mart, and online superpowers like Amazon.com. Less people are visiting the little guys, lured away by the promised discounts and the efficiency of, well, fast-food bookstores.

These superstores are well stocked in bestsellers. They cater to the attention spans of customers who want an autograph or a photo of a big-name author but don’t have the patience to sit and listen to someone read. And the online booksellers take the actual experience of browsing obscure and forgotten tomes among actual books out of the equation completely. If no one's going to the bookstore anymore, who's going to show up for a reading?

Flip through Time Out New York’s “books” section or the Village Voice and calendar you will be hard pressed to find a book event that isn’t a bestselling author or celebrity. Most often these high-profile events don’t even include a reading or a talk because of time constraints. They're held in spaces that are virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the store with stray book browsers wandering through the event space, yapping on a cell phone. The allure of people sitting in a cozy space listening to a writer speak about his or her work has been replaced by staffers directing troves of people into lines and pushing them through to the cashier.

If you love book culture, this is all pretty bleak.

So, what can you do?

The best places to go to book events in the city are the places that are intimate. Many of them aren’t bookstores but venues that team up with local independent booksellers.

A lot of these places serve alcohol which can enhance the overall experience significantly.

You can seek out the authors who have events and make them what they once were well-attended by people who support and appreciate writers and what they have to say. Champion the lesser known writers as you would the underdog politician or the indie band that's playing in Williamsburg. Perhaps the period of “great readings” doesn’t have to be completely extinct. Start the revival.

(Photo of Argosy Books on 59th Street from JKonig's flickr stream.)

Comments

[Angela Salamy]

Honestly, it's what keeps me from writing the next great novel...or even a little pitiful novel...I fear it would just get lost among all the others at McBorders or end up on the $1.99 table a Books-A-Kabillion...

[Lisa]

I can tell you're not very old if you think Starbucks replaced the coffee houses. Most of the indie coffee houses started only AFTER Starbucks became a success. On the Upper West Side, when I was at Columbia, the Hungarian Pastry shop was a novelty, because you could buy a cup of coffee and sit there for hours reading. It seemed so European. There were only a handful of places like that in all of Manhattan.

All the other corner coffee bars came in the mid-90s.