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Source: Encounter, September 1973.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Once every five or six weeks, on a day when my work has gone very well or very badly, I take the 104 bus up to Columbia University, where I lunch on ghastly food in those Broadway joints the students seem to like, glance through the little magazines in the nearby stores, and spend half an hour at the Columbia University bookshop. I’ve been doing this for eight or nine years now, as a way of passing some time in contented aloneness. Usually I buy a book or two at the Columbia store, telling myself that I ‘need’ them, and sometimes that’s even true.
A few weeks ago I again undertook this ritual journey, went to the Columbia bookshop – and suffered mild shock. It was no longer there. It had been replaced by a ‘new bookstore’, sublet to Barnes & Noble, featuring paperback texts used in classes. (Also, about 30 hardcover new books, half of them written by Columbia professors – distinguished volumes, no doubt, but comprising a somewhat narrow selection.)
Those tempting shelves of solid, hardcover history, philosophy and sociology, those generous selections of poetry, fiction, literary criticism and classics – some of them published as far back as four or five years ago! – all gone. In their place, a dispirited, mediocre paperback store, better, to be sure, than the one at the college where I teach, but not, by the most generous description, a serious bookshop.
It seems a pity, a real loss for those few thousand people in New York who care about books, and a loss too for Columbia, probably the most distinguished university in the city. For if it’s important to provide students with first-rate physics labs, gyms and professors, then it’s also important that they learn what a first-rate bookshop looks like. They might try it; they might like it. At Columbia they no longer can.
A little while after this piece appears in print there will probably arrive at the Book Review a letter from a Columbia vice-president saying that the university, caught in a budget squeeze, had to abandon its once-distinguished bookshop because it was losing a sizeable number of dollars each year. Perhaps by way of reply, I’ll say that Columbia should feel obliged to subsidise a bookshop for the same reasons that it subsidises other educational facilities, or perhaps I’ll get irritable and snap something about cutting the number of academic bureaucrats in order to have enough money for the things that really matter. But whatever answer I give won’t be easy or entirely persuasive, since it’s foolish to look down one’s nose at the financial problems of universities like Columbia. Those problems are all too real.
But there is another reality: that in the whole of New York, with its many universities, we don’t have a bookshop that could match in range and depth of holdings a store like Blackwell’s in Oxford or the stores one sees in Rome and Paris and even a provincial town like Palermo. We have the Gotham Book Mart, fine for literary people, and the Eighth Street Bookstore, fine for recent and topical books; but we don’t have a store that will stock, as the one at Columbia used to, both recent and not-so-recent books of intellectual substance, a store that will also carry, say, the Everyman series and perhaps even a few Loeb Classics.
It’s a scandal. Not one of the major scandals in this sad and beaten city, nothing to arouse the indignation that a score of our injustices can or should still arouse; but a scandal nevertheless. And in saying this I’m aware of the problems that publishers and booksellers will cite: the high rents, the excessive number of books published each year, the small sales of serious books, the sheer cost of keeping a book on the shelves for more than a few months.
All true enough, but not reason enough. For we should not accept in regard to a small matter like a comprehensive bookshop the argument that we ought also to reject in regard to large matters like poverty, schools and employment – the argument, I mean, that circumstances must overwhelm intentions, that policy creates its own defeats, and that in an admittedly complex world the best we can do is to reflect upon our sense of complexity.
Is there a solution? Perhaps the publishers could get together and jointly run their own ‘Blackwell’s in New York’. Perhaps a few hundred writers could invest a thousand dollars each ... but what a nightmare. Imagine a stockholders meeting at which everyone keeps screaming that his or her book isn’t being given adequate display. Perhaps a wealthy young man in love with letters would do for bookselling what James Laughlin did for avant-garde publishing some decades ago. Perhaps a bookseller both high-minded and shrewd could make a go of a first-rate bookshop.
All rather unlikely, all tokens of fantasy? Probably so. Yet the fact remains that serious books, never to be best sellers, do get published, there are people who might buy them if they could so much as get a look of them – and that gets harder and harder.
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