So the Borders bookstore chain filed for bankruptcy (it's a US-based brick & mortar retailer that apparently had small forays into the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore) and recently I went in to stock my shelves with what I was sure would be a bonanza of discounted philosophy books. I am here to tell you of my disappointment.
To begin with, the store was half picked over already, with empty shelves and whole sections devastated by consumer locusts. Not so literature and philosophy, however. Much meat remained on the bone, giving me hope. I was greeted at the philosophy 'shelf' - for that is what it has been reduced to at my local store - by a relatively full selection of books headed by a large "20% Off" sign. Not the fire sale discounts promised on the outside of the building or desired by me. Never mind, I thought, worth a look.
There was a time when the Philosophy section of a decent commercial bookstore had a solid selection of texts from philosophers that you normally think of when you think of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc. In some cases you'd get tier 2 selections like Epictetus, Anselm, Leibniz, Berkeley and Russell and/or a selection of contemporary works from the likes of Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Quine, Adorno, Dennett and maybe Rorty. I mentioned on a previous podcast my complete shock at not being able to walk into a book store and find a copy of some text we were reading that I used to see regularly at book stores. I just always assumed the peach colored Oxford version of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the hunter green Selby-Bigge/Nidditch Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and the Kaufmann Nietzsches would always be there when I needed them.
I'd like to believe that others more agile and astute than myself cleared the store of most of the original, classic texts and left only what I found: commentaries, secondary authors and, oddly, most of the Vintage line of Foucault. But the shelf was too full: no gap where the Dialogues should have been, no gaping hole for the Critiques, no lacuna where Beyond Good and Evil et. al. should have been. After scouring the shelf, I settled on the following:
- Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (yes, the peach colored Oxford version. Consolations of Philosophy indeed!)
- Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Burl has browbeaten me into at least getting a copy. It remains to be seen if/when I read it.
- Simone De Beauvior's The Ethics of Ambiguity. The back blurb made it seem like I might like it.
- Heri Bergson's The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Talking about metaphysics, science and experience and one of those 'I probably should read that guy sometime'
Left on the shelf were Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Gadamer's Truth and Method (I know, right? Why was he there? But the print was just too small). I don't know if Borders closing marks the end of brick and mortar book stores in favor of digital content and online shopping - meaning Barnes & Noble is shortly to follow suit, or if this is just a case of mismanagement. I hope the latter so that there is one remaining place I can waste an hour of a Saturday waxing nostalgic for my youth but I won't be surprised if Mark, Wes and the digital e-reader mafia have won.
--seth
Maybe it’s just a Borders thing, because I remember you bringing this up on the Hegel episode.
The nearby Barnes and Noble has two bookcases of philosophy where I was surprised to find a bunch of Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophy as well as a lot of minor works by Russel, Popper, and others. Only some Foucault though, and no Derrida or others.
Thanks for letting me know. Might not only be a Borders, but also an Austin thing. We have a local chain of used book stores called Half-Priced Books that carries a lot of detritus from college students and I suppose people are more likely here in a college town to hold on to books. There’s interesting stuff at any given store, I just got tired of going from store to store when looking for something specific. Hence my new library subscription (which is about 60/40% hit or miss so far).
–seth
Good choice on Pirsig – my favorite! I have gone thru 2 pbks and have a hardcover of both his books. There is an online text of ZAMM and one of Lila w/ the (yucky) story stripped out.
I do not like books as I am legally blind and cannot read one w/o special high-power Magoo lenses and holding the book just inches from my nose. I will do it when there is no choice. I think this fact was in the back of my mind (maybe semi consciously aware) when I did not heed freshman era whisperings of ‘liberal arts’ and philosophy, and instead did engineering.
With controllable font sizes and online sources, I have grokked tons of philosophy over the past decade.
Remember, the library can always get you a copy via Inter Library Loan.
Borders gave up on selection a long time ago. As a programmer, when Borders first opened a location in Omaha, I was thrilled. I could get all kinds of obscure books about various work-related topics, or read a few pages if I didn’t really need the whole book. For a long time, I resisted giving my loyalty to Amazon instead because being able to look through the book (the whole thing, not a random chapter) before buying saved me a lot of money at times, and I liked the convenience of getting what I wanted within an hour or two of conceiving the need.
Sadly, a few years ago, Borders decided that they were better served by carrying 1,000 copies of 5 books instead of the other way around. No longer could I find the computer science books (and philosophy, and history, et al.) that I was looking for. True, I could special order, but Amazon was faster and less expensive if I had to go to that trouble.
From a business sense, that may have been a sound decision, but I know that I have spent a lot of money with Amazon over the last few years, and with Prime I can get things fast enough and for a better price than Borders usually manages. I will miss them, but I know why they are going away.
I think you have a point. I mean if the whole point of a bricks and morter store is that you can browse the physical shelfs, what’s the point of have a large volume of a small selection? You’d think they’d cater to having tons of obscure stuff you’d never think to buy except because you just happened to see it and oh doesn’t it have beautiful cover art or an interesting title or an endorsement by some other person you love. I mean you’re right. Borders and the box stores ended up just becoming giant distribution centers for a handful of “best selling” titles.
* Mortar
The difference between the sections labeled Philosophy and Metaphysics at Barnes & Noble is a subject worth some reflection. As y’all probably know the latter tends to be populated by books with titles like The Secret Power of You Now Being and How It Can Help You in Life and Love. Should philosophers completely turn our noses up at this stuff? Does ‘New Age’ fill a role in popular thought — especially in the United States — because of the specialization of philosophy into a narrow academic subject? Can we therefore blame Anglo analytic philosophers for this by abandoning existential concerns during the 20th century? Perhaps New Age is the half-way house for folks who are liberal and anti-authoritarian but still desire a sense of spirituality and religious feeling about the universe. I have no empirical data to back this up, but I have a strong feeling that in continental Europe where kids learn traditional philosophy in high school there is less of this stuff.