deborah writes “The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston is closing, and they post a long list of people they blame, reprinted from John Usher’s The Hound. One of them is “Librarians–once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead–for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.” Their list doesn’t include the fact that most locals thought they’d closed two years ago.”
Librarians are by no means the only group castigated by Mr. Usher. Writers, reviewers, publishers, teachers, and the general public are all stained with his rag of opprobrium.
Clueless, that is why they went out of business
Blame everyone but yourself. You kept your business model from 1947 and you wonder why you get whipped in 2004. If you are so smart why aren’t you in business anymore?
To blame libraries is a joke. It has been a very long time since libraries have been buying substantial amounts from small independent bookstores. The problem is that you never figured that out.
Rejecting a bookshop’s supporters.q =edwin+w.+meyer attempted to help the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop.
Proprieter Vincent McCaffrey rejected the best people who offered to help. Edwin W. Meyer http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&
Other supporters as well were rejected out of hand.
Re:Clueless, that is why they went out of business
Well, not from 1947; more like 1975, in Vince McCaffrey’s case. Avenue Victor Hugo is only 29 years old. He gives only a passing mention to “changing shopping patterns on Newbury Street”, but, for those who aren’t local and don’t know the area, the change has been huge. The high-end shopping district that used to be limited to lower Newbury Street has up towards the intersection with Mass. Ave., and AVH is no longer located in a relatively low-rent area with budget-constricted students from MIT and BU as the major foot traffic.
It’s no longer a good area for a store that caters to customers who want to crawl around the narrow and dim aisles of a used bookstore looking for an out-of-print paperback treasure. Vince’s old customers have moved out far enough that AVH is hard to get to; he hasn’t attracted new customers from the very different crowd that frequents the area now. And the used bookstores, other than AVH, that cater to the used-book buyers rather than the rare-book buyers, have moved out to the cheaper suburbs.
Except, of course, Vince McCaffrey and AVH.
It’s sad, but it’s not the librarians, or the corporations, or the death literacy that have killed AVH.