The closure of Serendipity Books in Berkeley warranted a blurb in the NY Times but not in local rags. Then again, there wouldn’t be all that many people here in the Bay Area who would mourn, care, or even notice. Serendipity was an offputting and strange place, down there on bleak lower University near all the sari stores of India Row. The place was weird even by Berkeley standards. I’ve never been one to pass by a used bookstore without wanting to go in and peck around, so I visited the joint several times. But on each visit I noticed the same situation:
1) It was deserted.
2) Nobody was buying anything.
3) It was utterly disorganized and downright hazardous to navigate.
4) The “help” — or rather the paid-to-be-there-denizens — were profoundly unhelpful and downright hostile.
5) I felt unwelcome and unwanted.
Maybe the problem is that I am a reasonably well-dressed, clean, and polite man. That’s anathema to establishments like Serendipity that aim for a quirky atmosphere while violating every elementary rule of successful retail. Serendipity had the quirky part down pat. But there was no point in ever going there to buy a book. I got the distinct impression that they would rather slit their collective throats rather than actually help a customer. Basic courtesy was an alien concept to the owner and the in-store clerks, who apparently suffered torrents of bullying and abuse and thus had little, if any, incentive to make the store successful.
Serendipity contained an overwhelming assortment of books. They were everywhere — piled up on the floor, stacked in corners, haphazardly plopped into shelves. No cataloguing or arranging or organizing. I suppose the idea was for you to go crawling around, find something interesting, and then figure out a way to buy it from the proprietor, provided he was in a selling mood that day.
Nevertheless, Serendipity opened its doors to the public and at least claimed to be a commercial establishment. After several encounters I mentally condemned them for their breaches of basic courtesy and never returned. I’m a fervent lover of books, but my relationship with them is healthy and not shot through with destructive co-dependence. Serendipity Books represented to me a love affair gone sour, like a long-time couple who have become so inured to their appalling mutual cruelty that they can’t even see how repellent they have become, nor do they care. People learn to avoid them, to leave them to their twisted sadistic tango.
Serendipity was just an obvious example of the shortcomings that have dragged down numerous bookstores. The difference between Serendipity and Cody’s Books on Telegraph was more of degree rather than kind. Cody’s violated elementary retail practices less blatantly than Serendipity, but nonetheless a trip to Cody’s was an alienating, upsetting experience, caused mostly by the routine Berkeley indifference-cum-hostility of the clerks as well as an overall holier-than-thou atmosphere. I sympathize with the difficulty of acquiring decent clerks in Berkeley: one is so often faced with UCB students whose sense of cultural entitlement and intellectual superiority is severely challenged by the grim reality of working a retail cash register, an activity that can be mastered by any schmuck with or without a high school diploma. Waves of resentment pulsate out of those morose faces. But Cody’s could have taken on the challenge more successfully than it did. Instead, it rode its snooty attitude to the grave.
Nor was there that much difference between those two echt-Berkeley joints and Border’s Books, at least from the viewpoint of an ordinary person who entered the place with the intention to acquire a book. The average Border’s was offputting, alienating, pestered with rude and indifferent clerks, and characterized by an every-man-for-himself ethos that turned a potentially civilized pastime into an endurance contest. Making it out of a Border’s with your sense of personal worth and dignity intact was a notable achievement; most of the time, the place just made you feel like a faceless cog in a commercial machine. At least the abuse was up close and personal at Cody’s, in comparison to Serendipity’s studied (and I think sincere) indifference.
However, there is one major difference between Serendipity and the other two stores: Serendipity did not fall victim to e-commerce and the Internet, despite the NY Times statement to the contrary. It was never a bookstore in any sense of the word, but rather one man’s personal hobby that opened its doors to the public at scheduled times of the day. Serendipity Books would have closed after its owner’s death whether there was an Internet or not.
Bookstores in the face of Amazon’s arrival remind me a bit of Richard II in the face of Henry Bolingbroke’s campaign; both capitulated almost instantly, spewing rivers of self-pity but remaining blind to the failures that instigated their downfall. Once Amazon and its ilk came along, establishments like Cody’s didn’t have a chance of survival, unless by some miracle they could be kept afloat by Berkeley intellectuals hanging around all afternoon reading and not buying anything. Why bother with Cody’s—which sold good ol’ retail books that they got from distributors, just like every other bookstore—when you can get the same books faster and with less hassle from Amazon? Unless Cody’s had what you wanted on the shelf (unlikely; it wasn’t very big) you had to order what you wanted. That took a lot longer than ordering from Amazon, and you had to deal with Telegraph Avenue and those sullen kids at the counter to boot. For the real customers, i.e., the ones who buy books regularly, Amazon & Co are the better mousetrap to end all better mousetraps. I used to support places like Cody’s (however begrudgingly) because they were there and nothing else was. But I abandoned them as soon as I had a better place to go. Obviously so did a lot of other people. It isn’t the Internet and e-commerce that wiped out Cody’s and Serendipity and Stacey’s and Border’s. I didn’t have to abandon them as soon as Amazon and eBay and online used-book networks became available. I dropped them all because I was heartily glad to be rid of them. None of those now-defunct stores ever earned, or deserved, my loyalty.
I would hold that a used bookstore that treats its customers with courtesy and professionalism would have a much better chance of survival. At least I might actually go there and buy stuff from time to time. But then again, I’m not so sure that brick-n-mortar bookstores have much of a future, not even the nicest and most earnest used-book stores imaginable. So many of them have relocated online to eBay, where you can browse from the comfort of your own home and enjoy much the same opportunity for happy discovery as in physical stores. I just can’t see the point, beyond a certain nostalgia for a past that really isn’t worth revisiting, to mourn the passing of dinosaurs like Cody’s, faceless conglomerates like Border’s, or un-stores like Serendipity. It’s almost like getting all starry-eyed about the village rat-catcher’s shack or something.