Talking Shop
The first time I encountered a Borders bookshop was in Seattle in 1994. I was making a series of radio programmes which involved a journey down the west coast of the U.S.A. from Washingston State to California.
The very idea of a vast multi-storey bookstore, complete with coffee shop, seemed to me to be the height of sophistication. Imagine it - they actually encouraged you to sit around for hours, leafing through unpurchased volumes while sipping a hot beverage. They clearly trusted you not to spill foaming lattes over the pages. How grown-up!
Back in Scotland at that time, bookshops were stuffy places with signs on the door warning you not to bring food or drink on to the premises. The staff often affected an air of superiority. I remember going into a shop in Glasgow and asking the sales assistant for a copy of Macbeth. His eyes rolled skywards in despair and he let out a sigh like a deflating inner tube.
"Do you mean the Shakespeare play or the Scottish poet George MacBeth? It does help if you can be more specific."
So I was sorry to hear that the Borders shops in Britain were closing down. Will future economic historians call this recession the Woolworths to Borders crunch? Or is there worse to come?
What I liked about Borders is that they opened late and provided a respectable reason to go into the city centre just before bedtime. I'm getting too old for pubs, clubs and casinos but a twilight rifle through the biography shelves always gave me a bit of a thrill.
The trouble is, I did tend to do more browsing than buying. In recent years I would look at the cover-price of the books and think how much I could save if I nipped home and ordered the same volume online.
And I always wondered how cost-effective it could be to allow all those impoverished students to sit around on armchairs for hours leafing through magazines. Now, I'm no business expert but if it had been up to me I'd have chased most of them out of the shop with a carpet brush.
So farewell Borders...and my apologies for all those spillages I never owned up to.
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