From: "David P. Dillard" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 08:14:14 -0500

If we turn the clock back, way back, in Philadelphia and go to 9th Street between Market and Chestnut, surrounded by the Gimbels Department Store, was Leary's Book Store.  We can see a much different way of marketing and selling books. All transactions on the selling floor were actually by the accounting department which received and returned the transacions viw pneumatic tubes.

Google Images

https://tinyurl.com/yd4lwomj

Mixed in with lots of other irrelevant images, one can find some interesting things here, and one can click on images of interest and go to the link for VIEW to see the complete document the image came from.

Here is some more about this treasured place that is no more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leary%27s_book_store

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=%22Leary%27s+book+store%22

https://tinyurl.com/ycoz9me4

https://tinyurl.com/y9v7cmvn

https://tinyurl.com/y9ze63to

https://tinyurl.com/y7sx2t7u

https://tinyurl.com/y83p74tr

Leary's had everything from used magazines to rare books and if I remember correctly, the prices of merchandise increased as the number of the floor increased.

Four blocks away was the Wanamaker's Department Store with an excellent book department of its own and a source of recordings as this store has the world's only store pipe organ which is also the world'd largest.

https://tinyurl.com/y7hh4uza

https://tinyurl.com/y77osftp

https://tinyurl.com/y77osftp

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22wanamaker%27s+organ%22

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22wanamaker%27s%22

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=%22wanamaker%27s%22

https://tinyurl.com/yb94rclj

Oh and before you leave downtown, do not forget to have a meal or a cup of coffee at a Horn and Hardarts retaurant or automat.

https://tinyurl.com/y6wz4y46

https://tinyurl.com/y9rzo8xh

But now it is time to go to the reading terminal to take the train home.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22reading+terminal%22

OR the subway

https://tinyurl.com/yc9xrldl


Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
[log in to unmask]



On Sun, 14 Jan 2018, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2018 16:45:14 -0700

I'm a book person, but I realized today that I haven't been in a Barnes and Noble in . .
. six months?  a year?  So I stopped at the one in Tempe AZ, bustling on Sunday
afternoon.  

Of course I noticed that most of the store was taken up by merchandising and
merchandise.  It's a good thing that a quarter of the store is designed to get children
reading, and not bad that there's a large DVD section.  Lots of tables beckon me with
deals and remainders and "must reads" (I could make no sense out of that table at all). 
I settled down to look for new releases and to check a few favorite sections.

Sections first:  I counted shelves for "History", "Fiction and Literature", and then
separately shelves for the other genres of fiction (Mystery, Romance, Manga, Graphic,
Teen, Sci-FI, etc.).  History was a bit masculine and presentist for my taste (1/3 US,
1/3 "War", 1/3 "World", heavily emphasizing politics, empires, statesmen), but for every
one book on the history shelves, there were five on the rather less distressing "Fiction
and Literature" shelves.  (Jane Austen had a whole shelf, there were half a dozen
well-chosen Nabokov titles, but no Proust.)  But the surprise was that the *other*
fiction shelves comprised twice as many volumes as the supposedly main section.  So for
every history book, there were five "Fiction and Literature", and ten more fiction of
genre fiction.

And new releases?  I know I'm idiosyncratic and old and crotchety, but nothing, and I
mean nothing, appealed to me or spoke of itself as an interesting new book that a body
should at least know *about*.  Familiar brands, superficial topics, scandal, sensation,
and the like.  So I made a point of asking about one title, a new book by an old friend,
Patrick Deneen, *Why Liberalism Failed*, just out from Yale Press, 200 pages, a very
provocative and interesting argument about the way our 'conservatives' and 'liberals' all
represent a modern liberal strain of political thought that has led us to inequality,
populism, and worse.  Not everybody's cup of tea, but a remarkable success for being
taken up in the last couple of days separately by both David Brooks and Ross Douthat on
the op-ed pages of the NY Times, so much so that the hardcover is out of stock on Amazon
and listed as #214 best-selling overall there.  Not only was it not in stock at B&N (in a
state of the union where one might expect at least a few readers to find the title
immediately agreeable), but it had never been in stock in print and at this moment isn't
expected to be.  They could get an e-version.

I draw no conclusions:  just reporting.

Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University