There’s a track on Jon Brion’s unparalleled 2004 soundtrackTo “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” that’s been playing in my head lately. “Bookstore”Although it only lasts 52 seconds, its character, which is made up of eerie strings in reverse order, remains remarkable. Joel and Clementine meet in the movie at a bookstore.
The logo is never shown, but I’ve always known it was a Borders. The warm colors, those angled shelves rising just to chin level — the setting of the bookstore chain is etched into my memory. But I’m one of the last kids who grew up with it. Fifth graders today have no memory of the place I’m about to describe. And they’re just as forgetful as I was once. “Eternal Sunshine” in late high school or early college and think they’ve found a niche and unknown brilliance in it, that scene in the bookstore will be nothing more than that: a scene in a bookstore.
It’s more to me.
***
The carpet in children’s section. That’s what I remember. The space-themed cosmic purple/blue carpet was flattened in between the aisles. People stopped looking at the shelves and spines from above their heads. If I was smaller, shelves were higher back then.
There was a little platform where they’d give readings, where authors would presumably sit and leaf through their new picture book to a crowd of adoring kindergartners, though I never went to one of those. My Borders was in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, just down Kercheval Avenue from Ace Hardware. There used to be a Jacobson’s department store across the street, but it closed before I was born or soon after and I only know because my mom mentions it whenever we drive by.
I went there to look for Percy Jackson and Warriors books — the two series that held my third-grade class in a pop-literary chokehold. I found a Harry Potter set somewhere. It was purchased by my father at midnight in 2007. “The Deathly Hallows,”The one my brother ordered him to camp out for.
These are the things I noticed. Here are some I didn’t.
Ann Arbor was the first location where Borders was founded. The first Borders store was opened in Ann Arbor. Open in 1971 at 209 S. State St. — now the site of a CVS — but the owners relocated a few years later to 303 S. State — now the site of the MDen — and in 1994 to the corner of Maynard Street and East Liberty Street — now home to Knight’s Steakhouse, Sweetwaters and Slurping Turtle.
The Liberty location would become the flagship Borders for 17 years. The space used to be a Jacobson’s department store, which my mom would find funny.
The company quickly expanded beyond Ann Arbor. In the mid-1980s, they opened a second location in Birmingham (Mich.), which was just a few minutes away from where I went to high school. The founders Sold the companyKmart owned 21 Borders stores in the U.S.A in 1992. This number grew as Kmart opened franchises and airport shops, and expanded internationally.
Borders was the most popular bookstore chain in 2000. Some had cafésAnd sold Starbucks coffee. They sold CDsAnd CD players, branded mugs and toys — Bakugan and BeybladesThey did, if I remember correctly. They sold books and had a wide variety of bookmarks. They sold physical books. And that might’ve been why they didn’t last.
In 2010, there had been more than 500 Borders stores in the U.S. None.
The company was losing money. They hadn’t turned a profit since 2006. It occurred to me that my Borders memories were all from this period when things were getting worse, though I didn’t know that. I can still smell the new paper and the silence between the shelves. In reality, the model was failing behind closed doors.
Amazon Arrived1995. Jeff Bezos, as he is known to do, took away a source for happiness. It was easy to order books online, and they were always in stock. You didn’t have to drive 10 minutes to the nearest Borders. Instead, click “purchase”You should wait for the package arrive at your house for a few more day. Borders Contracted2001: To sell books via Amazon rather than promote its own online presence.
Barnes & Noble, too Some pressure was appliedJumping to sell ereaders such the Nook (remember those?) Their competitor was several years ahead. They’d consolidate the scraps of the brick-and-mortar bookstore chain niche once Borders was dead and buried.
And now it’s buried. It’s a collective memory that will die with my generation. And maybe I’m reading too much into that fact. But I don’t think I am. There’s an importance to the spaces we inhabit. There’s the nostalgia of returning to a place you haven’t been in too long. Then there’s the nostalgia of a place you can never return to.
I’m nostalgic not for something that went out of fashion or lost its trend, but for something that is obsolete — a culture or a way of engaging with art and the world that is no longer useful enough, attractive enough, profitable enough to exist. This is what scares the hell out of me. Like the many other normal and ordinary aspects of growing up, it carries more weight than you’d think or want.
One day, Borders in my town was closed and replaced with another store. That’s okay by me. You can see how they evolve as they change. Here’s what I can’t quite live with: The very first Borders was here in Ann Arbor, and it is now a drug store, or a restaurant, or a gift shop for parents with an abundance of cash on game days — and I never knew. I didn’t watch this place change. It did not change by my participation. It did not change over my lifetime. It is still something I miss.
***
This scene is from “Eternal Sunshine”It is meant as a reminder of one these characters. As the memory fades, shelves turn to white and titles fall off the spines. The store’s warm colors turn cold. The music plays in reverse.
I thought they had shot it in Borders. I thought I recognized it, that I couldn’t mistake it. It was taken in a Barnes and Noble. They once mentioned the name. But, we see them the same way that we want them to, true or not.
Everything inside Borders was being bought the day my hometown shut down. The iconic sign, the light fixtures and the CD racks. My mom and myself went. We paid $14 for one of the shelves. My brother helped me lift out the shelf from the trunk after I asked him. “Why’d you guys get this thing? There’s nowhere to put it.”
I smiled at him and told them to put it in his basement. It remained there for approximately a year. My mom suggested that I take the car outside. I knew she meant curb, but I dragged my mom’s car into the backyard. It sat in rain, snow, and rain until it began to rot. I couldn’t understand why it was bought in the first place or why I refused it to be thrown out. It’s something like music playing in reverse.
Julian Wray serves as the Books Beat Editor. You can reach him via [email protected]
Source: I was a Borders client when the last Borders bookshop closed.
