KATZ THE COLUMN
The Age
Saturday March 26, 2011
WHERE will we go now? What will we do? More Borders bookstores could be closing soon and that means thousands of us book-loving literary-minded non-spending tight-arses will no longer be able to pop round for our quick little six-hour book-browsing non-buying visits. No longer be able to settle into a comfy chair and read all the Man Booker Prize nominees in one sitting. No longer be able to rip out a nice passionfruit sponge-cake recipe from a cookbook then pop it back on the shelf. No longer be able to listen to free CDs using the CD-sampling headphones until we break the barcode scanner. No longer be able to grab a recently vacated table at the Borders Cafe and finish someone's half-drunk latte, dribbling it all over an $800 photography book with a print-run of three. Why are you going bankrupt, Borders, when so many of us book-loving non-spending tight-arses have been supporting you for years, whyyyyyyyy?So where do we go now? What do we do? I guess we could try recreating the Borders experience in alternative retail environments: we could try Target, they have a book department, though they don't have comfy chairs ‚€¯ you have to grab a Babylove Happy Hippo booster-seat from the infant department, strap yourself in, then rest your feet on a stack of discounted Julie Goodwin cookbooks. And their book selection is poor: it's mostly just books about the Kokoda Track and a copy of 1001 All-Time Funniest Golfing Quips Volume 1 ‚€¯ and as we all know, it's Volume 2 where the tee-hees really tee-off. And on top of that, it's really hard to concentrate on your free book-reading when you've got the toy department next door with all those noisy kiddies. Can you believe parents actually take their children there, let them play with the toys, then walk out without buying anything? Appalling.So where do we go then? What do we do? We could try a large Swedish furniture store ‚€¯ I know it's probably not the first place people think of when it comes to literary pursuits, but it's still pretty FL’€˛CKIG good. Sit yourself down in one of their fake living room settings and grab a prop book from the GREVB’€CK bookcase ‚€¯ you'll find a small selection of Swedish titles including Var ’€˛r Mina Gummist’vlar (Where Are My Gumboots?) and the gothic masterpiece R’varor Sm’r I Stockholm (Raw Butter in Stockholm). And if you prefer reading on the toilet, you can duck into a fake bathroom setting with a light instruction booklet ‚€¯ I highly recommend the Steig L’€˛TTSAM trilogy, The Girl With The Hanging Storage Baskets, Set Of 3.But it's still not Borders, it's still not the same. I suppose there's always the option of just staying home and reading free educational ebooks on Project Gutenberg Online, but they're pretty meagre offerings ‚€¯ it's just politically incorrect propaganda like The Communist Manifesto or crude so-called "comedy" like Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales about how "Nicholas rose to pisse but leet fle a fart" which is hardly funny at all, not like an all-time funniest golfing quip would be.Look, maybe when us book-loving literary-minded non-spending tight-arses get this desperate, we might as well do the unthinkable and stroll into a small independent bookstore and . . . (oooooo it pains me just to ponder it) . . . actually BUY a book. Actually pay for a book and bring it home and read it. And no, you book-loving literary-minded non-spending tight-arses . . . do not even CONSIDER keeping the receipt and returning it when you're finished.
Ā© 2011 The Age
