I too, recall Hanna’s with fondness as the scene of many afternoons of time stolen from lectures. As you may know, Hanna’s itself was bought out and ‘renovated’ into another Eason’s branch a few years ago.

Read’s next-door has just gone the same way, too, and Waterstone’s/Hodges&Figgis on Dawson Street are both actually owned by the same company. Some choice!

But I know that the world will get less and less suited to me, until I finally die crabbed, alone and cantankerous, probably crushed by a heap of my own battered paperbacks.

Which actually happened in France ; Pinault, owner of the FNAC chain, made it clear to a publishing company that theirs publishing a non-firendly biography about him would be a bad idea…

A conversation I overheard in Borders a couple of years ago:

He: “So, have you decided what you’re going to buy yet?”

She: “I’m not going to buy anything. I can’t, I haven’t got any money.”

He: “You’ve been dragging me around bookshops all afternoon when you didn’t have any money?”

She: “Oh, I never go into bookshops when I have money. I’d just spend it all.”

But then, I also think we’re moving back into the dark ages, with a small, literate upper tier and a vast bovine lower tier. Lords and vassals of the computer age. Wish I could live fifty more years to see how things pan out. Hey, send me a postcard . . . if you can still write.

A lot of the racks are still there, but as another commenter pointed out, they’re now stocked with a much narrower range of titles. The fact that the wholesalers who stock these racks have chosen to go this route is the biggest single reason that, as Arthur Hlavaty points out, so many fewer titles are published in cheap, small-format “mass market” editions these days.

How all this happened is a long and complicated story that actually has almost nothing to do with any change in Americans’ interest in buying and reading a diverse selection of books. It’s a classic case of market failure, of an industry responding more to its own institutional needs than to the desires of actual customers. The industry in question is magazine and paperback wholesaling, not book publishing. I really need to write this up.

Meanwhile, it’s almost certainly true that the chains impose some notable difficulties on smaller publishers; and yet the average chain superstore does a much better job than the average independent bookstore of making small-press material available to readers. (This assertion may seem hard to believe, but remember this: the average independent bookstore isn’t Tattered Cover, Powell’s, or Shakespeare & Co.) Indeed, as Slocum points out, the sheer size of the modern superstores forces them to stock stuff that’s a considerable distance down the long tail. Certainly the national B&N buyer I know best spends a great deal of time paying attention to small presses.

Finally, regarding comment #22, it needs to be said that matter of chains-versus-independents argument is completely different in Canada than in the US. Canadian bookselling labors under the particular catastrophe of being dominated by a single chain conglomerate, Chapters/Indigo, that has no serious competition whatsoever. Here in the US, we have Borders/Walden vs. B&N/Dalton, which makes quite a bit of difference.

Plus, while Chapters/Indigo has driven out many independent bookstores it is not (unlike some other countries) necessarily because it is a better business model. Chapters itself, despite 70% (I think) of the book trade and despite owning the biggest distributor, overinvested and had to sell out to the second-ranked Indigo, which has closed some of the stores and introduced more non-book items into the remainder (candles, CDs, cards etc).

I guess the point is just that there is not a single “chain vs. indie” bookstore story across the world. As the German comment already made clear.

In Brighton, England, near the station, there used to be a bookstore (big for a small one, if you see what I mean) that looked like a truck had deposited the books, huge toppling piles, unsorted new stock nearly blocking your way at every turn, etc. The owner was a man who, at whatever time of day, always looked like he’d had a couple of sharpeners in the pub next door. He had a red nose, and stood at the door – he faintly bowed as you came in, greeted everyone with grave politesse. He may or may not have worn a cravat. They wouldn’t even have let him in as a customer in B & N, let alone work there. The place was a treasure house. I haven’t been to Brighton in years; I’d be amazed if it were still there. I bet the Borders which replaced it has delicious coffee and very, very comfy couches.

If you want some insight into small bookstores as savage ecosystem, check out Iain Sinclair’s accounts of life with Driffield…
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20030817/ai_n12742229

“I had a bookstore clerk search the entire bookstore, yet there were no recently published books I had not yet read on the art of having hope at a societal level.”