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Fresno's last indie bookstore closes its doors
- Dec 20 2011
- 3
An actual conversation.
Me: So sad Fig Garden Bookstore is closing.
S (a friend): Yeah. It's too bad.
Me: That's gonna leave a big vacant spot in the Village. What do you think can even go there?
S: Maybe they'll put in something depressing, like a Baby Gap.
If you've seen "You've Got Mail" a hundred times like my friend, it's sort of funny ... because it's a movie about a independent bookstore closing and in it Meg Ryan says ... never mind. Just watch the movie. Or don't.
The point is, the Fig Garden Bookstore is closing. The doors will be shut by new years, possibly before. There's an everything-goes sale happening and the shelves are already mostly cleared out, according to Kathi Lamonski, who owns the store with her mother Jean Shore.
In a story in the Fresno Bee, Shore says she's ready to retire. That's understandable. Owning a business, much like rock-n-roll, is a young man's game. Even in the best of times, in the best of industries, it's a rough trade. Eventually the allure of it becomes the very thing that wears you down. Easy to see how those grand kids (or great-grand kids in Shore's case) start looking extra enticing.
And they've fought the good fight. Against the big-boxers (the place did outlast Borders) and eReaders and Amazon. Fresno is now left without a independently owned bookstore: At least not one that doesn't deal in used or speciality books (that smells like opportunity for someone with the youthful enthusiasm for it).
Readers shouldn't worry. There are still plenty of places to buy (even Costco has best sellers), though they'll need to find another place to congregate. It'll likely be online, if it's not already.
As for the vacant storefront, I doubt they'll be putting in a Baby Gap any time soon. It would be a Crew Cuts, anyway.
3 Comment(s) for "Fresno's last indie bookstore closes its doors"
As the grandson of Dodgson's Bookstore owner Louise Dodgson, my grandmother had predicted the demise of the independent bookstores 25 years ago when she retired. I have always tried to keep true to her memory by only shopping in the independent stores, but as time went by, it became more and more difficult to find one.
I raise a first edition Saroyan to the memory of all the independent stores that struggled for so long but gave us so much character in Fresno and in the United States.
Man. The book selection at Tower Records was super cool. That's where you went to buy the stuff your couldn't find at the big-box places. Stuff like the Anarchist Cookbook and whatnot. It totally introduced me to some cool stuff. Sad that most won't get that kind of experience again. There is the internet, I guess, but it is not the same.
That's sad, but it's a two-edged story, isn't it? Books are wonderful things but they're too expensive for poor people. And we have a lot of poor people nowadays. You can't have the same experience of holding a good book in your hands, but if you have internet access, most of the content that's in those books is available for free or nearly free online.
The Library is a good place to get the book experience. They have some really expensive, oversized, coffee-table books that you can take home and wrap your mind around.
For free.
Give every citizen a computer and internet access and that will go a long way to make up for the loss of those cool bookstores.
A book that stands out in my mind was from about 15 years ago. It was at the old Tower Records/Books when they had a pretty good selection of weird/unusual books. It was by Crispin Glover and it looked like an old used book. It was just wonderful, but I couldn't afford it at the time. I stood there laughing out loud at what a wacky trail blazer Mr. Glover was! Here's a description of how he "wrote" some of his books:
"He constructs the books by reusing old novels and other publications which have fallen into public domain due to their age (for example, Rat Catching was constructed from an 1896 book Studies in the Art of Rat Catching, and Oak-Mot was constructed from an 1868 novel of the same title). He rearranges text, blacks out certain standing passages, and adds his own prose (and sometimes images) into the margins and elsewhere, thus creating an entirely new story."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Glover
http://books.google.com/books?id=SygEAAAACAAJ&dq=Rat+Catching+Crispin+Gl...