I vaguely remember this commercial from my childhood, I think it was for the Yellow Pages. It showed a car driving down the road, with disco music playing in the background, and talked about how you’re on your way to get a funky refrigerator for your funky new apartment, and it’s only available at some funky store that’s an hour away, and when you get there you find that they have it… in avocado-green only. Then the car drives back the other way, and the commercial asks all those time-conscious consumers at home, wringing their hands and fretting over this perceived injustice, “Don’t you wish you’d called first?”

This afternoon, I was that guy. I spent two hours driving around looking for a book. Two hours. It started off simple enough. I’m taking a literature class at the local community college and we had our first meeting today. The teacher listed off four books we will be reading and said that all four were in stock at the independent bookstore across the street from the campus. So, when class ended, I headed over.

As it turned out, only three of the four books were in stock. The fourth, a short story collection named Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, had just sold out.* The woman behind the counter offered to order it for me, but since this is the first book we’ll be discussing and I need to finish it by next Thursday, I said no thanks, I’d look elsewhere.

Before I go any further with this (admittedly mundane) account, I feel like I should explain why didn’t I just buy the books from Amazon ahead of time. One, because this is the third class I’ve attempted to take at this particular school, and the first two were unceremoniously canceled the day before the class was supposed to start. With that track record, I honestly didn’t know until this morning whether I’d actually be sitting in a class this afternoon. And two, because I have a silly love affair with walking into a bookstore and plunking down a wad of cash for a pile of smooth, shiny, brand new books. Most of the time, I won’t let myself do it. I troll the aisles at Goodwill, I make earnest use of my library card, and yes, I take advantage of Amazon’s discounts and free shipping. I am one of those terrible people who’s putting independent booksellers out of business… ironically, the very same independent booksellers I pray to god will still be around in a year or two when (fingers crossed) my labor of love is on the shelves. I can’t afford to buy brand new full priced books all the time, but I can afford to do it once in a while, and when I’m taking a class it’s a lot easier to justify.

Okay, so here I am, at the counter of First Street Books in Kentfield, explaining to the frantic-sounding proprietor who just sold her last copy of Twilight of the Superheroes (undoubtedly to one of my new classmates) that it’s okay, I’ll buy the other three books from her, and find the Eisenberg book somewhere else. I knew of three other bookstores within a few miles. Surely one of them would have it.

Compounding this little adventure is the fact that the Bay Bridge is unexpectedly closed due to a cable that unexpectedly snapped. I already knew, having driven down to the Book Passage last night to hear Michael Chabon read, that traffic around the Richmond Bridge would be clogged to ridiculous proportions with East Bay types who had no other way to get home.** But Book Passage is an independent bookstore, and if I was going to pay full price plus 9% sales tax to the state of California, I wanted to do it in support of an indie. So I braved the backup of confused drivers and made my way to Book Passage.

Book Passage didn’t have the book. When I asked at the counter I was told they had one copy but were it for someone who had already paid for it, so they couldn’t give it to me. (Another of my wily classmates, perhaps?) They did have about fifty signed copies of Michael Chabon’s new memoir, Manhood for Amateurs, on a rolling cart behind the counter. Those pert hardcovers—spines up to show off the perfectly pressed dust jackets—they were laughing at me, I swear it.

Very close to Book Passage there is a Barnes & Noble, and I went there next. No Twilight of the Superheroes on the shelf. I asked at customer service and the man told me they were supposed to have it in stock. He walked back with me to the fiction section but we couldn’t find it. Then he thought maybe, because of the title, it had been misfiled in the sci-fi or graphic novel sections. But no. That would have been too easy.

Around this point, I realized that I can’t remember the last time I spent all afternoon on a crazy hunt for a book. If I have a specific book in mind, I’ll usually order it online, and 7 to 10 days later it’ll appear like magic on my doorstep. Like that Yellow Pages ad I can only sort of remember, this wild goose chase shopping is a vaguely familiar endeavor—I mean, c’mon, we’ve all done it at some point—but have you done it lately? Or has the internet with its “everything you could possibly want for less than a mom-and-pop store could afford to sell it to you (and don’t forget the free shipping!)” mentality effectively removed “I spent all afternoon looking for X” from our shared vocabulary?

My last stop was Borders in San Rafael. To get there I had to drive past the first of two Richmond Bridge exits, and get off the freeway at the second one. Needless to say, it was slow going. (The many, many people getting off the freeway when they saw the first Richmond Bridge sign were in for a rude awakening when they realized they’d have to drive another mile on surface streets before they reached the bridge. Apparently they either didn’t see or didn’t trust the big flashing sign by the side of the freeway telling them to use the next exit, which would feed them directly onto the bridge. Whoops.) And of course, Borders didn’t have the book. I could order it from their website for local pick-up, but that could take up to eight days, which wouldn’t do me any good since I only have six days to read it.

I glanced over the customer service lady’s shoulder to see that Twilight of the Superheroes was published in January 2007, and the last order they placed for it was for one measly copy. I guess that’s what happens when an acclaimed but not super popular book is almost three years old. And when thirty people who are all taking the same class suddenly need the same book, and each of four bookstores in the area only stock one copy at a time—well, do the math. Should I really have expected all of these bookstores to have infinite copies of a 3-year-old book that they only sell once every few months? No. Yet it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t. I blame this on Amazon.

My last hope was the public library. On my way there, I wondered what I would do if they didn’t have the book. If you’ve already been to every bookstore in town and no one can order it for you in time, what next? What did people do in the olden days, before we had Amazon at our fingertips, a virtual warehouse so massive that any book you could possibly want is available in five different formats (paperback, hardcover, bargain, audio, library binding…) Would I have any recourse? If I showed up to class next week, guiltily admitting I couldn’t find the book, would I have to wear a dunce cap? Seriously, is “I couldn’t find it” even a valid excuse these days?

I might have spent several hours calling other, farther away bookstores, until I found one that actually had it in stock—just like the old Yellow Pages ad recommended. More likely, I would have ordered it from Amazon, paying a ridiculous amount for 2-day shipping. Let’s face it, Amazon wins this round.

Luck was (finally) on my side. The library had the book. And if I didn’t have this silly fetish for plunking down a wad of cash for a pile of brand new books—not to mention an internet-fueled misconception that even brick and mortar bookstores have Narnia-sized warehouses hidden behind those doors marked “employees only”—I would have started there in the first place, and spent the next two hours reading the book instead of driving all over the place hunting it down. Lesson learned.

.

*The other three are Saturday by Ian McEwan, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and When I Forgot
by Elina Hirvonen. It’s a class about 9/11 fiction.

**I’m really not as scholarly/literary as this blog is making me sound. The reading and the first day of class just happened to fall one day after the other. As for why I didn’t buy the books when I was at Book Passage last night, refer to paragraph #4 above.