A cosy, analog corner of a very online world

Adults love that our store hasn't changed since the 90s--but what do the kids think?

It’s easy to lose track of time in the used bookstore where I work. By that I mean it’s easy to spend much more time in here than you had planned on, but also, I mean that if you don’t look too closely at the books on display, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve stepped back into 1994. Maybe even 1984, if you also look past the (dial-up!) debit terminal next to our soviet era cash register.

Part of the store’s enduring appeal is what G calls “the nostalgia of it all.” A lot of our regulars are, like the two of us, old enough to remember 1994. These shoppers remember this time fondly, if perhaps inaccurately, as a simpler, happier time. They feel at ease in here because it is one comforting little corner of their world that has not changed much in the past few decades. They know their way around it.

But what about the people who don’t remember the 90s—or even the aughts—at all? They are also stepping back in time, when they walk through our door, but into an era they have not personally experienced. Into a store that is probably not at all like the bookstores of their childhood.

There’s no free wi-fi, no touch screens with searchable inventory, no shouty displays with hashtags on them, no tchotchkes, no toy department, no strawberry frappuccinos. There’s just….books. Books that are mostly like, old. As in no longer trending.

No one took any photos of me browsing in a bookstore when I was a teen in the early 90s, because they would have needed a proper camera and all that. But if they had, the result would have been very much like the above. Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

Because our store is near a high school (and also sandwiched between a pizza place and a Dairy Queen), we do get teenagers in the store. The majority come in groups of three or four, ostensibly to browse but mostly to yap and mock each other until it’s time to go back to class. The ones who come in to buy books, tend to come in solo or with one other friend. They are more few and far between, these kids, and they invariably get me thinking.

I was a teenager in the 90s. Consequently, I’m among a dwindling group of adults who can remember, in great detail, a time when choosing something to read was a purely analog process. All I had to go on, was the back cover of the book itself or else the recommendation of a friend, a family member, or a trusted adult, like a teacher or librarian. (As far as I can remember, I didn’t encounter print book reviews or lit mags until I was at university).

If I didn’t have a recommendation or a specific title in mind, my book selection procedure worked like this: I would wander aimlessly through the store or library until a book called out to me, and then I would pick it up and read a few pages. That’s it.

I probably couldn’t have told you why I was or wasn’t drawn to a book, back then. But I was confident in my ability to decide for myself, by myself, based on nothing but my reaction to the cover and a tiny fraction of the text. Sometimes I chose massive classic novels just because I was determined to read something I knew to be difficult or important, because I was that sort of kid. But just as often, I picked up books I had never heard of, simply because I thought they “looked good.”

I never searched up the title to see what everyone else on the planet ever thought about it, and then used that information to influence my decision, because that technology hadn’t been invented. I couldn’t find out in advance if the dog died, or there was a lot of sex in it. I never went into a store looking for a book that had been aggressively marketed to me, because that had never happened.

There no were no algorithms running my reading life, trying to ‘optimize’ it and thereby prevent me from (gasp) choosing a book I might not enjoy.

Consequently, I had loads of supposedly suboptimal reading experiences in my teen and tween years. I read books I didn’t like, books that bored me, books that I couldn’t fully understand, books I well knew were not meant for someone my age or gender, and books that were just plain awful.

Choosing something to read, and thereby developing my own particular taste in books, was a haphazard, imperfect, and inefficient process when I was a young teen. But on the plus side, it was also a largely private and self-guided process—no one really paid much attention to what I read, let alone inundated me with suggested titles—and that was a good thing, that freedom to just figure it out on my own, to trust my own instincts. It was a fairly rare thing, during that era of my life; other people, especially adults, were forever telling me what to do and how to do it and that they knew better.

Every time I greet the teenaged readers who walk into our store, I find myself thinking about how they can’t really have the exact same experience in here that I would have had at their age, even though the store basically hasn’t changed in the last thirty years.

And then I think maybe they can, but they would have to deliberately choose it—they would have to put their phones away, and allow their own curiosity to lead them from one book to another.

But to choose something by and for yourself in a world so determined to choose For You, to willingly limit the information you could use to make a decision, to follow your gut instead of Goodreads—these are pretty bold, counterintuitive moves, especially for someone who is growing up online. I would never dream of telling teenagers to do this. But.

When a couple of teenagers come into the store, I never, ever ask if they’re looking for something in particular, because I secretly hope that they are not. I hope that they are content to idly drift from one book to another, and find their own way.