dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA (10/03/85)
From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA I'd like to echo David Levine's suggestion that you patronize the independent booksellers. When I travel it is incredibly depressing to walk into a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton's in a shopping center, and see how few books there are, and how many of them are ``Garfield's Tofu Diet'' books, after the wealth of independents near where I live. Something Mr. Levine didn't mention: recently publishers have begun to say they will sell ONLY to the chains. Avon books (considered a high-brow publisher) recently announced they would not accept orders for fewer than <n> copies of a single title, where <n> was a fairly large number, so that now the only way independent bookstores can order from Avon is to join cooperatives which pool the orders for several independents. This is kind of a curious policy for Avon, as they publish a lot of books (e.g., their Latin-American series, with Amado, Garcia-Marquez) which are the kind of books you go to an independent to find. This is just one more example of the shopping-mallification of our society: every shopping mall in the country has a B Dalton's selling exactly the same inventory of books, right next to the teeny-bopper store with a cute name selling sleeveless sweatshirts with bright pastel geometric shapes and the fancy chocolate shop and the record store selling Aerosmith and Twisted Sister records ...