Home Away From Home
Aug 29 '00
I am a well known book hound. One of my essential destinations on the fabled trip to Britain was Hay-On-Wye, town of bookshops, and I would not be deferred even when two writer friends we met in London tried to tell me it was a rip off (it wasn’t, it was glorious and it is reviewed at Booklover's Heaven trvl-review-5A1B-18CBF82D-396A6B81-prod5.) I do not buy books online. For superstitious reasons known only to my subconscious, I need to hold the book, look at the book, leaf through the book, before I am willing to buy it. I have been in and out of several hundred book stores, some now closed, and I have two regular favorites, both chains, that I will share with you.
Borders Books & Music
Found on the web as borders.com
I work at Borders and have for the last five or six years (with that one ten month interlude at Northern Ohio Live.) Now most people will tell you not to shop where they work, but Borders is different. The staff at Borders is more knowledgeable and intelligent than I have found at other chain bookstores. I once asked for a phone book at another chain store and the clerk tried to look it up in the computer. We at Borders have read, thought about, or studied just about every subject imaginable and we’ve been know to play punning games and discuss our favorite words in our downtime. If you are nice to your clerk all available means to find the book you are looking for will be exhausted including asking other employees who might know and calling personal friends. (If you are mean, you may find yourself with the "nope, can’t find it. Is there anything else?" treatment.)
The remainders selection is also very good. Yes, there are piles of garbage to wade through in an effort to find the good stuff, but you’ll find that any place. Hint: the remainders shipment arrives on Thursday. Your best selection of sale books will be found in Thursday evening or Friday.
The magazine selection is amazing, if I do say so myself, and since I unpack most of the 3000 titles my store carries, I do. Come, leaf through my mags, just put them back where you got them.
The video selection used to be really good, but the corporate office (you know, the people who don’t actually talk to the customers) recently decided that they would rather use the video space for DVDs. So if it’s videos you seek, seek elsewhere. For DVDs, enter here.
Half Price Books
Found on the web as halfpricebooks.com
As the name implies, most everything in Half Price Books is half price (or less.) They stock used and remainder books organized with just enough logic to keep the average person from weeping. They also don’t have their stock inventoried on computer so you can’t ask for a title and be led to its exact location as in Borders, but the clerks will show you the correct section. The books are also not consistently alphabetized. I once stood in front of a shelf in a Columbus Half Price Books trying to figure out how it was organized for ten minutes until it dawned on me that each shelf went from tallest to shortest. The décor is generally nice, wooden floors, wooden shelves, the occasional chair, free coffee and tea. The clerks, while not of the caliber (this is almost half sarcastic) of Borders clerks, are fairly knowledgeable about books in general and I have yet to see one get rude. Half Price Books also buys books, but I don’t recommend selling them your unwanteds because they pay precious little. And they also generally have used videos, CD’s, and books on tape. Half Price Books is still good enough that I’m willing to hop in my car and drive an hour to Cleveland to shop there every other month.
These are the best national book chains I have found (local stores are for another review.) If I didn’t work at Borders I would still shop there, but I would go to B&N for sale books, they have more. And even through I do work at Borders, I still find my way to Half Price Books with alarming regularity (alarming because the stack of books that I’m getting to is starting to teeter.) So come on in, we’re all friends here. Just put that magazine back where you found it.
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