Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books, Big Stone Gap, Va., wrote:
My husband and I visited a Borders store at a particularly poignant time. The Borders near our small town closed two years ago, but we spotted one while on holiday in Chicago. Ironically, we had rewarded ourselves with a week in Chicago to celebrate five years of successfully running a used bookstore in a small town in the Appalachian Coalfields.
When we started Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books, Crafts and Cafe, people told us it wouldn't work: e-books were taking over, box stores were the future, Appalachia's economy was dead. All that feel-good stuff. So we figured five years in Big Stone Gap, Va., as the little bookstore that could should be celebrated in style. Our last day in Chicago, we saw the newspaper article that Borders' final 399 stores were closing. We'd visited several lovely used bookshops in Chicago, but went straight to Borders--where employees were already dismantling the computer system. The woman who rang up my two books said their last day of operation would be September. I started, in typical small town fashion, to tell her we ran a bookstore too, I felt bad for her, hoped things would improve. She looked at me with the tired eyes of one who's lost something irreplaceable, yet who has to listen politely to stupid strangers offering platitudes. I shut up.
Bookstores are such lovely places, where people breathe easier, talk slower, think faster. They're art museums for the mind's eye; you just pop in to kill 15 minutes, whether you want to take anything home or not. Sure, Borders was a box store, but it was a box store full of books and people who loved them. Goodbye, Borders staff, and thanks for everything you gave us. A lot of us are rooting for you; good luck.
