Hail and Farewell To A Bookstore

Can we have a moment of silence for Borders?

If you’re a Pelham book lover, the Borders on White Plains Road in Scarsdale may have been a haunt of yours, as it was for me. 

But with the chain’s recent bankruptcy filing, it has decided to close hundreds of its so-called “underperforming” stores, including the Scarsdale location. I question whether it truly was a laggard or whether high rent was a more telling factor in the decision. Several of the chain’s prime Manhattan stores are being shuttered, too, leading me to think the choice has as much to do with cutting overhead as it does with disappointing sales.

But whatever the reason, the store on White Plains Road has a big “Store Closing” banner draped across its façade, and yesterday I got another in a series of e-mails from the chain telling me that the end is nigh—for that store, if not humanity in general.

I’ve always preferred Borders to Barnes and Noble, its larger rival, in part because of Borders’ roots. The original Borders in Ann Arbor, Mich., started life as a used-book store, and there’s really nothing better in life than whiling away an afternoon in a good used-book store. I suppose I should add IMHO here. It’s just barely possible to imagine that other people might have different definitions of an ideal afternoon.

Short of a good used-book store, a new bookstore is a good substitute. I do plenty of online book buying, and the slightly creepy tracking software on such sites does a fairly good job of suggesting books I might like based on my past purchases. The main problem is that I usually already own the titles they’re pushing.

But no virtual bookstore can provide the bliss that comes from standing in front of a bookshelf, head tilted sideways, and discovering a book that you weren’t looking for, had never heard of and didn’t know you had to have until that very moment.

My son, a friend of his, and I recently went up to the Scarsdale Borders for what will probably be the last time. Almost everything in the store was at least 25 percent off.

My son soon tracked down a copy of “The Accidental Billionaires,” about the founding of Facebook. I believe I’ve that he wants a Facebook page. And in no time, his friend found a book about the sabotaging of Nazi Germany’s atomic-bomb program.

But we ended up staying for almost an hour and a half because I kept thinking of titles or authors I wanted to find. It’s that one-book-leads-to-another phenomenon.

I’ve been meaning to get Tom Rachman’s “The Imperfectionists,” about expat journalists who work for an English-language newspaper in Rome, and they had it. That got me to thinking about Alan Riding’s “And The Show Went On,” about Parisian cultural life during the German occupation in World War II. They had that, too.

On and on I went until I faced a mutiny by the boys. I’m still not sure how I convinced myself that I needed “A Very Short Introduction to German Literature,” but these things happen.

I know that book lovers are not supposed to shed any tears over a big, impersonal chain, but I’ll miss the convenience of this Borders. It was close, and it was on one of our family's most-travelled paths.

If, on the other hand, the store’s closing prompts me to spend more time at one of the independent bookstores in nearby towns, so much the better. For starters, there’s Womrath Bookshop in Bronxville and Anderson’s Book Shop in Larchmont.

If you have any personal favorites in Westchester, I’d like to hear about them. One of them might have the latest title on my want list, "A Very Short Introduction to Russian Literature."

I can't live without it.