Irish Bookstores

by Sheila Connolly

I love to visit bookstores.  You know, the real ones, in buildings.  My family trained me well:  we used to go to Doubleday’s in New York, as a treat, or to Brentano’s in the first mall I saw, in Short Hills, New Jersey (I remember when it was being built, and I used to take the bus there before I could drive).

Alas, too many of them are gone now.  Those that survive hang on by their fingernails, fueled more by the dream of owning a bookstore than by the income they generate. Most indie bookstore owners these days are there for the love of it.

 

But that’s not true in Ireland.  I know, because I’ve tried to visit as many bookstores as I can.  When I’m in Dublin I usually stay in a hotel around the corner from the Temple Bar, where there are plenty of bookstores, starting with The Gutter at one end, past the radical one (called Connolly’s). Closer to Trinity

College there are a couple of good used bookstores.  Go toward Saint Stephen’s Green and you find one that actually had a section for Cozies (I asked the woman at the register why, and she said, because people ask for them.  Yes!)  Cross the bridge over the Liffey and you have Eason’s, the country’s largest chain.

 

 

And it’s not just true of the city.  I spend a lot of time in Skibbereen in West Cork.  It’s a thriving market town with a population of about 2700 people.  (The supermarket and the weekly year-round farmers’ market make me want to weep, they are so much better than mine here.)  Three bookstores, including one that features an array of antiquarian books and maps.  Not just “old” books, either:  the last time I was in there, they had a first edition of a book by the 16^th century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, in its original binding, and if that wasn’t enough, according to the bookplate it had once belonged to the Dean of Trinity College.  And it wasn’t locked away in a glass case—I held it and leafed through it.

 

Ireland is a country that cares about books.  And writers as well: Ireland offers tax exemption to artists (who live in Ireland) and who produce “original and creative” work, including books and plays. It must have artistic merit of course, and this is defined thus: 

--A work has cultural merit if its contemplation enhances the quality of individual or social life as a result of its intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic form and content. 

--A work has artistic merit when its combined form and content enhances or intensifies the aesthetic apprehension of those who experience or contemplate it.

There are more details and exceptions, but you get the drift.  The maximum amount an artist can exempt is €40,000, which as of this writing is about $53,000.  I’d bet most writers would be happy to earn that much, exempt or not.

Books are expensive in Ireland.  The mass market format is all but unknown, so there are only hardback and trade format.  The latter usually costs about $15 a book—and yet the stores thrive. One clue that I haven’t been able to follow up on came from a recent conversation with a writer at Bouchercon (he’s English and lives in England, but he writes fiction about American crime), who told me that in the UK and Ireland the government provides some form of subsidy for bookstores.  Would that it were so here!

 

My own books are not available in Irish bookstores (even the one set in Ireland).  Happily (or unhappily, depending on how you feel about Amazon) they are available through Amazon UK, although that’s fairly recent.  Yes, they will ship to Ireland, but the shipping cost per book is more than the cost of the book itself. Sigh.  The books don’t appear to be available in Kindle format, and I can’t speak to how many Irish residents use e-readers anyway. It’s an imperfect (literary) world. 

But as you read this, I will be in Ireland, stopping at every bookstore I see. 

Coming February 2014

 

 

Where are the bookstores?

by Sandra Parshall

Answer quickly, without taking time to ponder the variables: Which state do you think has the most bookstores per capita?

No, it’s not New York, and it’s not California. It’s Montana.

Montana comes in first in Publishers Weekly’s survey of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. With a population of 1,005,141 and 64 bookstores, Montana has a per capita ratio of 1 store to 15,705 residents.

Wyoming is second, with 35 stores serving a population of 576,412, and Vermont ranks third with 38 stores for 616,011 residents. The rest of the top 10 in per capita ratings are Alabama, Tennessee, Nebraska, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri.

Dead last is New Jersey, which has 217 stores but a population of 8,864,500, giving it a per capita ratio of 1 to 40,851.

The Publishers Weekly report gives numbers for all states and DC. Every type of bookseller was counted: chains, independents, Christian bookshops, and big-box stores like Costco that have book departments. 

Most states, PW found, have more traditional bookstores than big-box stores and more independents than chains. The top three states in the number of bookstores per capita have few Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million outlets. Vermont has only one chain store, one big-box retailer, and 36 independents. However, six states – Arizona, Maryland, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin – have more big-box stores than traditional bookstores.

The largest states in the country are all in the bottom half of bookstores-per- capita rankings:

California has 1,185 stores, more than any other state, but they serve a huge  population of 38,041,430, so its ratio is 1 to 32,102 and it ranks 46th.

Texas, with a population of 26,059,203 and 1,004 booksellers (second highest number in the nation), is 35th in per capita rankings.

New York is 49th, with 19,570,261 residents and 505 bookstores.

Florida, a bit smaller than New York with a population of 19,317,568, has more bookstores – 797 – giving it a ratio of 1 to 24,238. Florida ranks 29th among all states.

Overall, the survey found that the U.S. has 12,703 booksellers and 313,904,193 residents, a national ratio of 1 store per 24,053 people.

An interesting finding is that states with the most Christian booksellers tend to rank higher in the per capita ratings. In many states, the presence of Christian stores is the deciding factor in the per capita rank.

I was a little surprised to discover that my state, Virginia, has 372 bookstores. (Where are they?) With a population of 8,185,866, the state has a per capita ratio of 1 to 22,005 and is 26th on the PW list.

You can see the story and the rankings here. Where does your state stand?

Irish Bookstores

by Sheila Connolly

I just came back from two weeks in Ireland, most of it spent in a (very comfortable modern) cottage on a windswept hill in County Cork, a mile from where my grandfather was born.  Parts of my brain and a chunk of my heart are still there, so you may be hearing a lot about it in coming weeks.

 

I quickly came to understand where the legend of the bean sí, the keening fairy woman, comes from:  the wind was relentless, howling around the eaves.  But the rain held off most days (and guess what:  when it rains, you get rainbows!), and I did all the research things I planned to do, like talking to the local gardaí (police) about the details of a murder investigation.  I guess I'm not your typical tourist.

 

But one thing that struck me over and over:  the Irish love books.  I spent a couple of days in Dublin, and I took pictures of every bookstore I entered, from large chain (Eason's) to hole-in-the-wall places selling used books.  They're everywhere.  They're well stocked, and they're full of buyers.

 

What is curious about this is that books in Ireland are expensive.  From what I saw, there is no equivalent of our American mass market paperback (the small format).  Most Irish books are published in what we would call trade format, which is larger and more expensive.  With very few exceptions, they cost ten Euros or more.  That's around thirteen dollars.  Heck, I don't pay thirteen dollars for a paperback.

 

But the bookstores appear to be thriving, and there are lots of them.  I spent the most time in the town of Skibbereen, which has a population of just over 2,000 people.  It's an ordinary market town, not fancied up for tourists.  I'd live there in a moment—it has great restaurants, an amazing year-round weekly farmers market, a long and occasionally tragic history—and more than one bookstore.

 

A department of the extraordinary supermarket sells books, along with paper goods and school supplies.  There's another bookstore down the street (note:  there really is only one main street) that has a good selection of new releases.  And there's an incredible bookstore a bit further on, called Time Travellers Bookshop, which sells new, used and collectible books.  My husband and I spent quite a bit of time there poring over titles. I should note that the owner is actually German and does sell over the Internet, and one of his assistants is Scottish, with a Welsh husband; they all opted to settle in West Cork because they fell in love with it.  That should tell you something. So, three bookstores in a town of two thousand people.  My town, population ten times that, barely supports a rack of best-sellers in the local Hallmark store.

 

It is heartening that a country full of people who are keeping a close count on their Euros still believes that books matter, and that people are willing to pay good money for them. Yes, there are also public libraries, and even at the farmers market there are used books for sale.

 

One final note, from a mystery writer's perspective:  the Irish do not like cozies.  Believe me, I looked high and low and found no more than a couple of lonely copies of Agatha Christie.  There are some great Irish mystery writers these days, but the majority of them write dark procedurals.  I'm still puzzling over whether that reflects something fundamental about the collective Irish readers' psyche, but overall I'm happy that people are reading.

The first book in Sheila Connolly's new County Cork series, Buried in a Bog, will be issued in February 2013.  It will not be available in County Cork bookstores, even in Skibbereen, which plays an important role in the book.  She may have to deliver them herself.

Imagine a world without bookstores...

Sandra Parshall

Do you still have a bookstore within quick driving (or walking) distance of your house? Or is the closest one so far away that it’s easier to go online and order what you want? Do you have a store nearby but still find shopping online easier (and often cheaper)?

 It’s a vicious cycle: online sales (including, now, e-books) eat into the profits of brick-and-mortar stores; the stores start closing and whole chains collapse; the disappearance of stores sends more people online to shop for books.

I live in the Washington, DC, area, where Crown Books was born in 1977, and I remember the TV ads in which a handsome young Robert Haft sat atop a stack of books, looked into the camera, and declared, “Books cost too much. That’s why I opened Crown Books.” In a sense, he was announcing the end of bookselling as we knew it. Not that Crown was the first bookseller to discount new books – Barnes and Noble led the way in 1975 by offering N.Y. Times bestsellers at 40% off cover price. But Crown discounted everything, and that policy threatened stores that charged full price. 

Twenty years ago, Crown had 257 stores in large markets around the U.S. It no longer exists – the company was torn apart by acrimonious legal wrangling within the Haft family – but discounting has become the norm in bookselling and “Books cost too much” is an article of faith for many readers. Even small independent stores offer frequent-buyer cards that allow regular customers to buy at a discount. No bookseller, though, can consistently match Amazon’s prices.

Whatever the root cause, or causes, brick-and-mortar bookstore chains have declined dramatically in the past 20 years, with only Barnes & Noble holding steady. According to a report in Publisher’s Weekly, B&N had 1,343 outlets (counting college stores) in 1991, and today has 1,341. The number has been higher, and the chain has closed some stores in recent years, but so far it doesn’t appear in danger of collapsing under pressure from online retailers and the rise of e-books. The company’s popular Nook and its own e-book business are helping B&N stay alive.

Smaller chains haven’t fared as well. Waldenbooks, a subsidiary of Borders with 1,268 outlets in 1991, died along with the parent company. Bookland Stores, with 101 outlets in 1991, no longer exists. Others that have disappeared include Lauriat’s (48 stores in 1991), Encore Books (65 outlets in 1991; merged with Lauriat’s in 1994), Kroch’s & Brentano’s (19 stores in 1991), and Tower Books (13 outlets). B. Dalton, purchased by B&N in the late 1980s, closed its last stores in 2010.

"Books cost too much!"

Some smaller chains have survived. The southern company Books-A-Million, which has been around since 1917, has 232 stores and is expanding into some of the spots vacated by Borders. Zondervan, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that had 126 stores 20 years ago, was sold and renamed Family Christian Stores and now has 283 outlets. Hastings Entertainment has 146 and Half Price Books has 113. Cokesbury, which had 40 stores in 1991 and increased that number to 76 before scaling back, now operates 57 outlets.

The U.S. had 3,293 chain bookstores in 1991 and now has 2,206, by PW’s count.  A few new independents have sprung up recently, but many long-established indies stores have gone bankrupt.

Where will it end? Will we become a nation where only residents of large cities can walk into a real bookstore, hold new books in their hands and flip through the pages before deciding whether to buy? If we are headed in that direction, does it matter? Can a sparse scattering of tiny independents with limited stock take the place of sprawling superstores with aisle after aisle of printed books available for browsing?

What does access to a brick-and-mortar bookstore mean to you? Will you miss the chains if they all disappear? Do you think children who will never step inside a bookstore and choose books for themselves will have missed out on anything?