I have been a regular subscriber to the weekly news
magazine, Time, for at least thirty years, before I moved to
Norway and since I moved here. I’ve looked forward each week to Time's news
summaries and articles, film, book, music and theater reviews, and interesting
tidbits that they toss in from time to time. You might think that it would be a
problem to experience regular weekly delivery of Time; I can tell
you that it’s been a pleasure to be a subscriber. Not once, I repeat, not once,
have I ever had a problem with a missed issue or late delivery. I haven’t had
to contact customer service for any problem whatsoever, except to renew my
subscription, and that is also a problem-free experience, unlike other magazine
and newspaper subscriptions that I have had since I moved to Oslo. That by
itself is a miracle in this day and age—a magazine that manages to be timely,
punctual, and service-minded.
What bothers me lately is that I’ve noticed that with each
issue I receive in the mail, especially during the past half year, the magazine
is shrinking. Each issue is thinner than the previous week’s issue. Given the
fact that its competitor, Newsweek, stopped publishing the paper
edition of its magazine at the end of last year (I refer you to Wikipedia
for a more-detailed update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek),
I have begun to wonder if Time is moving in the same
direction. I hope this is not the case, but I have a gut
feeling that it is. The end of the paper editions of these magazines doesn’t
mean their total demise; in the case of Newsweek, they decided to
focus their energies on an all-digital format, meaning that the internet has
claimed yet another victim, in one sense. I don’t have a problem with internet;
if used well and if you can filter through the morass of information that is
available at every turn, you can in fact obtain a lot of useful information in
the blink of an eye. I need only think of Wikipedia as I write this—useful,
informative, updated, with mostly correct information (and they are honest
about the ‘holes’ in their summaries, about what is lacking, and that’s a good
thing). But there is something about opening the print issue of a magazine like Time when
I get it, sitting down on the couch with a cup of coffee and reading it from
cover to cover. I enjoy that very much; it’s not the same sitting down with my
Kindle for iPad and reading the issue that way, even though I read books that
I’ve downloaded on my Kindle for iPad from time to time. It’s just that I don’t
want to see the end of all print publications, be they books or magazines.
And that brings me to my final point; with fewer books and
magazines printed, there will be more bookstores that will go belly-up. One of
the major American book retailers, Barnes and Noble, is struggling and on the
verge of collapse, according to a recent article from Slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/14/barnes_noble_collapsing.html),
and that makes me sad to read. Very sad. I have fond memories of the many hours
spent in their bookstores; starting when I worked part-time as a stocker for a
company on West 13th Street in lower Manhattan during my
graduate school days, and would spend my lunch hours perusing the bookshelves
of the Barnes and Noble bookstore at 122 Fifth Avenue between 17th and 18th
streets. I bought many a Christmas present there as I remember. And then later
on, during the mid-1980s, when I would drive up from the Bronx where I lived at
that time, to their bookstore on Central Avenue in Yonkers and wander around
there for a few hours on a summer evening, looking at photo books of Princess
Diana (who was all the rage then), or skimming books on why women are afraid of
success in the business world, how to make your relationship better, or the
meaning of dreams, in the self-help section. Those were weekly trips that I
looked forward to, and I always left the store with one or two new books that I
couldn’t wait to dive into. In later years, when I have visited my sister in
upstate New York during the summer, we have had some fun driving to the Barnes
and Noble bookstore in Poughkeepsie, where we would start off our visit with
cappuccinos in the little café at the back of the bookstore. We would sit and
chat for a while, and then wander the aisles in search of a book that would
catch our eye. It was always fun to compare our current literary interests,
talk about the books we had read or were reading, check out the different games
and puzzles for sale, and so on. Sometimes my husband would call me from Norway
while we were wandering around the store; we would be laughing at some silly
thing, and he would get a chance to join in on the fun. Simple stuff, but
simple stuff is the stuff of memories. Bookstores generally, and Barnes and
Noble specifically, have been and are a large part of my life. I cannot imagine
life without them. As Joni Mitchell sings ‘Don’t it always seem to go, that you
don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. But sometimes even when you do
know, things disappear anyway, replaced by newer things, but in some cases,
more sterile things. I will never be attached to a computer the way I have been
attached to my books. And that’s not likely to change in my lifetime.