Remembering Borders: gone but not forgotten!

I’m taking you back a bit here. More than a decade, I think. It was the opening of a Borders store near where I lived in the Wirral, North West England. Shortly after it opened I visited to see what all the fuss was about.

The new store was in the middle of a large shopping outlet. It was a huge warehouse filled with books, CDs and a Starbucks cafe. What was not to like!

That first visit was remarkable. I had been working on a PhD thesis for some years, and finding the books I needed was always tricky. One book, for example, I had tracked down to a bookshop in Australia as it was long out of print at that time (the book, Barbara Hannah’s “Encounters with the Soul” in case you were wondering). I waited weeks and weeks for that book to be shipped half way around the world. It arrived whilst I was away on summer holiday. I was so excited when I found the parcel on my return. I was equally excited when I borrowed a book from the British Library through my local library for £2-75. Being able to access books like this was amazing.

So, imagine how exciting it was to browse through bookshelves and find book after book that was on my reading list, all in this bookshop just a few miles from where I lived. After about half an hour I emerged from the bookshelves with a pile of 20 or so books. Of course, I knew I couldn’t afford to buy that many books in one go – I had to put most of them back. But just knowing that the books were there was the exciting bit! Knowing that I could call in anytime and pick up a book.

That’s only half the story. In the CD section I was amazed to find a whole set of shelves dedicated to one record label. And that record label was ECM. To understand why this was a big deal, read this blog post. Having been obsessed with music on this label (Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Ketil Bjornstad, Sidsel Endresen) since I was 15 I couldn’t believe that a shop had a huge chunk of the label’s catalogue there for me to buy.

Again, much as I would have loved to borrow the whole collection of CDs and promise to return them once I had listened to them – I had to content myself with a couple of purchases and placate myself with the fact that I could return again at my leisure.

And I did – many times.

But my visits weren’t enough – no single individual’s shopping habits can save the fate of a shop. After several years of happy shopping, Borders changed. It was struggling with competition from online sellers like Amazon (or perhaps it was only Amazon!) Borders made the fatal mistake of chasing sales to the bottom of the market. Instead of sustaining an incredibly wide range of specialist books, they filled more and more shelves and tables with cheap books. That part of the market was really busy already. They would never sustain a business model in the pile them high and sell them low part of the market.

The inevitable happened just before Christmas one year (I think it was 2009). The store closed as Borders went through a massive restructuring in the USA.

I really miss that store. Of course, I can buy whatever I want through Amazon. And for second hand and out of print books there are global sellers too. In Liverpool, where I live there are independent bookshops too (although they struggle to keep going) and a branch of Waterstones and Blackwells (but they were never quite into the eclectic buying patterns of Borders). Somehow, it’s not the same as being able to walk the store and pick up books as I passed. Then, to enjoy the total pleasure of browsing through the books and music in the coffee shop before deciding which to buy.