But the books? Well, it may be too early to know for sure, and the store insists it will wait to hear from its customers to learn what they want, but at first glance Legacy Books didn’t seem to have anything that anyone else—chain or not—doesn’t have. They intend to stock unusual works, small-press books, but none of these intentions had borne fruit on my early visit. They do not sell music or videos. The largest sections are Children’s Books and Cooking. A snob like me winces when he sees similarly large groupings under New Age, Relationships, and Paranormal, but I thought, “What does it matter if they have stuff that I don’t want, as long as they have stuff I do want?”
As a literary academic with a fondness for poetry, I made a beeline to the poetry section, a little smaller than the comparable sections at the Preston Royal Borders and the Northwest Highway Barnes & Noble. The offerings were meager, erratic, disjointed. For no discernible reason, the poet with the largest number of books was Charles Bukowski, that old drunken madman. Homer came in second. Go figure. At the Preston Royal Borders, Maya Angelou seemed to be the poète du jour, probably because of her celebrity stature. (Borders also features CliffsNotes and a big rack of new fiction at 30 percent off. So does B&N.)
Wrinkles must be ironed out. It’s hard to know why one should prefer one bookstore to another. Perhaps Legacy Books will become the home away from home for Dallas intellectuals, especially if its reading series takes off.
And it’s harder to know whether it will provide real competition for Half Price Books, especially the Mother Lode on Northwest Highway. One recent Saturday afternoon, it was full of people, some of whom had to wait more than an hour to get bids on the books they’d brought to sell. The manager told me that in January business was up 10 percent from a year ago, and that in December sales were down a hair but still over the target. In bad economic times, readers will unload more of their unwanted stuff, not necessarily to buy groceries or even to empty their shelves, but more generally to feed their buying habits. Bartering—turning stores into the equivalent of libraries where you make a withdrawal and then return to make a deposit—might be the secret to the new economy.
Its biggest fan would never make claims for the beauty of the store. Picture a cross between a high school gym and Home Depot. Part of the floor is covered in industrial carpet; the rest is plain concrete. The shoppers are far from elegant. You can’t always find what you want but, as Mick Jagger might say, you might just find what you need. At Half Price you may find books from last year, and the occasional best seller, but don’t count on anything. You’ll find odd collections of remainders. Does anyone want one of the dozen copies of William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Thomas Gray, marked down from $65 to $29.98? Half price, indeed. The poetry section goes literally from A to Z, Dorothy Alison (I knew she wrote prose, so I learned something new when I saw her verses) to Stefan Zweig.
At the front of the store are the shelves and cases of “collectibles,” the most valuable of which are locked in glass cases. Want a first edition of Charlotte’s Web signed by Garth Williams, its illustrator, for $350? Or a signed first edition of Nelson Algren’s 1949 National Book Award-winning The Man With the Golden Arm ($250)? You’ve come to the right place.
But back to the retail scene. Wandering through the stores, I decided to run a little test. With my smiling, innocent journalist’s grin, I asked random employees at Borders and B&N what they were reading for fun. One clerk, evidently a non-reader, was nonplussed. I, too, was somewhat taken aback. He had a slacker look about him, so I assumed, wrongly, that he was a bookworm. One guy named Amsterdam, by Booker Prize winner Ian MacEwan (big points for that one). One said Tolkien; another said vintage 1960s comic books; a third waxed rhapsodic over the hot new vampire writer Stephenie Meyer. Two spoke with enthusiasm about recent sci-fi work. None of them had the time to engage in fuller conversations. Commerce trumped book talk. My heart did not leap up. So much for the chains.
“Are you an English major?” I asked, hopefully.
“No, I’m studying business,” he replied. “But literature is where my heart is.”
His answer made me think I might want to return, carbon footprint be damned.
