All your books in one basket

Once upon a time, Luzerne County in Pennsylvania was teeming with bookstores. The Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre Township alone had two: B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Another Waldenbooks was located in the West Side Mall in Edwardsville. Downtown Wilkes-Barre had the Book and Record Mart. Kingston had one of two Tudor Book Store locations, and a newcomer moved into the West Side Mall in the early 1990s: the Village Green Bookstore. And that's just counting retailers. There were also numerous used book shops throughout the area: Book Swap, The Hermit, Mostly Books, and numerous others whose names I have forgotten. Farther afield, many outlet malls had excellent bookstores that sold remaindered and overstocked books - two in the Crossings in Tannersville, one in Vanity Fair in Reading, and another located near Bushkill Falls in the Poconos. In addition, every year or two a pop-up remaindered bookstore would set up shop in a vacant space previously occupied by a supermarket or other large retailer for a month or two, bringing an enormous and random selection of books - sometimes a single copy apiece - at deep discount prices.

I'm not sure if all of these stores were ever open simultaneously. B. Dalton was an early casualty in the late 1980s or early 1990s, leaving the Wyoming Valley Mall with a single bookstore. The Book and Record Mart didn't survive long into the 1990s, closing shortly after The Village Green opened. Neither did the Waldenbooks at the West Side Mall, which shut down in the late 1990s. The Tudor Bookstore once posted a warning that big chains like Waldenbooks and the recent arrival Barnes & Noble (which opened in the Arena Hub Plaza in 1999) were threatening to drive independent bookstores like them out of business - and they were right. The Village Green lasted through the late 1990s, possibly a bit longer. But by then, online bookseller Amazon was well on its way to becoming the monster it is today. The Tudor gave up the ghost in 2008. Waldenbooks didn't survive long, closing its last regional locations in the Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre Township and the Laurel Mall in Hazleton in 2010, and the Borders in the Viewmont Mall in Dickson City closed in 2011. (In both cases it was not just the individual locations closing, but the entire chains.) As far as I know, all of the outlet mall bookstores are gone, and I haven't seen or heard of a pop-up remaindered store coming to the area in over ten years. Books-a-Million moved into the closed Borders location to become Lackawanna County's sole bookstore, while Barnes & Noble emerged as the sole surviving bookstore in Luzerne County, albeit with two locations: the main one at the Arena Hub Plaza in Wilkes-Barre Township, and another in downtown Wilkes-Barre that serves as the college bookstore for King's College and Wilkes University.

The search results for "bookstores wilkes-barre". Note that in addition to the two
locations of Barnes & Noble, a third, highly specialized bookstore is listed.

Then a tornado tore through the Arena Hub Plaza on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, ripping the back wall off of Barnes & Noble.

Technically, this did not leave Luzerne County without a bookstore. The Barnes & Noble in downtown Wilkes-Barre is a serviceable bookstore, with an adequate selection of books. In addition to the alternative bookstore listed above (which, in reality, carries mainly magazines full of photographs), Ollie's Bargain Outlet is also counted as a bookstore, and does carry a large but fairly random selection of remaindered books of all sorts. Retailers like Sam's Club, Walmart, Target, and Kmart still have book sections, mainly carrying new releases and popular books. At the other extreme, most libraries - and this area has many libraries - have an extensive selection of books for sale, ranging from recent releases to rare and strange books looking for new homes, and periodically hold large-scale book sales.

(EDIT, September 16, 2018: A friend just reminded me that "Library Express in the Marketplace at Steamtown [formerly the Mall at Steamtown in Scranton] is both a branch of the Lackawanna County Library System AND an indie bookstore. They have a mix of new and used books and they'll order anything for you that they don't have. Book orders usually take a week to come in." I've bought several books at deep discounts here over the years, and have also been to some poetry readings there.)

As of yesterday, three months since the tornado, Barnes & Noble has opened what they are calling a "pop-up" bookstore in a previously vacant space in the East End Centre, about a mile and a half from their tornado-damaged location. It has a fraction of the books and magazines the main location held, and has a feeling of impermanence hanging about it. The original plan was to repair and reopen the old location by Thanksgiving. Now the plan is to keep the pop-up in place through "the holidays" - Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Years? - and reopen the old store sometime early next year.

Amazon, the online shopping juggernaut, is an amazing resource for people looking to buy books. New books, used books, rare books - if they don't have it, they'll do their darnedest to find it for you. Their domination of the books sales market is widely held responsible for the fairly rapid demise of bricks-and-mortar bookstores since Amazon came onto the scene. Yet there is something visceral and undeniably sensual about being able to walk into a bookstore and see, feel, smell, and even maybe read the book you'd like to purchase, and to be in the presence of other book lovers - to the point that Amazon is actually experimenting with opening bricks-and-mortar locations.  

Once upon a time, this area had numerous bookstore choices, new and used. Now we're down to two locations of Barnes & Noble, a network of libraries selling used books, and a handful of other places that only incidentally carry books. A few years from now, will we even have that many choices? Or will bricks-and-mortar bookstores become a thing of the past?