A Love Letter to Neighborhood Bookshops – The New York Times

NASHVILLE — Parnassus Books is normally the happiest place in Nashville, cheerful with bantering booksellers and wagging shop dogs and everybody-knows-your-name regulars and out-of-towners wearing the stunned look of a child in an endless candy aisle. But when I stopped in last week, the store was too quiet, too still. “What’s going on?” I asked Andy Brennan, the manager. He looked at me for a long moment. “Amazon is opening a store at the mall,” he finally said.

He meant the Green Hills Mall, which lies directly across the street from Parnassus. He didn’t need to tell me what it meant for Amazon to open a store there. As a writer friend of mine says, “That’s like Russia rolling in to occupy Czechoslovakia.”

Amazon may feel like a godsend to readers who live miles from the nearest bookstore or library, but to independent bookstores, Amazon is Russia, the First Galactic Empire and Voldemort all rolled into one vast, unstoppable force for destruction. Because the cost of business for small stores far exceeds that for Amazon, the online goliath has already cost far too many cherished neighborhood bookstores their lives.

Independent bookstores have responded by providing what Amazon’s business model prevents it from offering: story time for children, signed first editions, book clubs, personal recommendations by professional booksellers whose knowledge of books is both broad and deep. An independent bookstore is a crucial community center, a place to meet kindred souls and hear favorite authors talk about their new books.

In 2011, Nashville found itself without a single bookstore of that description in all of Davidson County. The story of how the best-selling novelist Ann Patchett and the former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes met and created Parnassus Books — “We were like newlyweds in an arranged marriage,” according to Ms. Patchett — is now the stuff of legend. Eight years later, the store still hews to Ms. Hayes’s first vision for it.

“Mt. Parnassus in Greek mythology is the home of literature, learning, and music,” she wrote in a mission statement. “We will be Nashville’s Parnassus by providing a refuge for Nashvillians of all ages who share in the love of the written word. We will partner with and support local writers and artists, businesses and institutions. We will strive to bring readers the best books in literature, nonfiction, children’s books, local interest, and the arts in both printed and digital formats. We will provide venues for writers to connect with readers, and readers to connect with books. By doing this we hope to complement and add to the rich cultural character of the Athens of the South.”

Amazon has demonstrated no gift for creating anything like such a store, and that’s in part because independent bookstores don’t operate according to the normal rules of capitalism. They aren’t trying to beat each other. They aren’t even trying to beat Amazon. They’re creating communities — cozy places to beat the heat or come in from the cold. An independent bookstore is a place where someone comes around the register as soon as you walk in the door and says, “You have to read this; it has your name all over it!”

Parnassus hosts some 250 author events a year, and I have always felt incredibly lucky that I get to sit in that store and listen to some of the greatest authors of my age read from their new books. This summer, I felt luckier still when Parnassus hosted the launch event for my own first book. After Ann Patchett introduced me, I walked onto that little stage, looked out at what seemed to be every reader and writer in this town, and cried.

Every store I’ve visited on book tour has its own unique culture, but at every one I have felt at home. All the booksellers felt like old friends, and all their customers, too. In those stores, readers have waited patiently in line for me to sign their books. They have grasped my hands and told me their own stories of love and loss, their own stories of heart-lifting encounters with nature, believing I would understand. I always do. Whether a bookstore is in Tennessee or Pennsylvania, Georgia or New York, Alabama or Illinois, the people I meet there are family.

An independent bookstore’s bottom line ensures the prosperity of its entire community. Bookstores cherish their staff and consistently turn customers into friends. Perhaps most importantly, they follow a business model that supports and sustains authors, whose creative work is the very foundation upon which the publishing ecosystem is built.

Anyone who has lived without an independent bookstore knows how crucial it is to support the ones that survive — to buy books there, of course, but also to evangelize for them, to let others know what’s at stake. Books may look the same wherever you buy them, but that doesn’t mean that the lowest price is the best value.

Neighborhood bookshops will always be focused on people, and their true currency will always be human relationships. They can only trust that readers and writers will continue to value and support them, too, no matter what happens in the giant mall across the street.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.