Things that Don’t Go Away – Death of a Bookstore by Sarah Zettel

I’m participating in the death of a bookstore. Shaman Drum which has been in business on State St. In Ann Arbor for twenty-nine years is closing down this month.

     Ann Arbor’s an odd place when it comes to books (all right, Ann Arbor’s just an odd place, but that’s beside the point). Something over twenty years ago, it held this place called Borders. This was not the mega-store found in every town and shopping mall. This was a big store, true, but it only carried books. In fact was a local legend for the breadth and variety of its inventory and for the fact that to be employed there you had to take a test to prove you knew enough about literature to become one of their clerks.

     Borders was so dominant and so good, the mass of little bookstores which usually crop up in university towns failed to appear. Oh, there were a few others, like The Community News Center, and Nicola’s Books, but there was not the fine, flourishing grove of them you get in towns like Madison, Wisconsin.

     Then, Borders went national and became the first of the modern book empires. They took over the old Jacobson’s Department Store, and continued to be the tallest tree in the Ann Arbor forest. Commie News folded, Nicola’s tried and failed to expand and at last had to move to the outskirts of town, a few used and antique stores have managed to find toe-holds, and we’ve got one GLBT focused store (which I hear is also in trouble) but for decades Ann Arbor has had the increasingly stressed Borders with its shrinking, standardized inventory, and it has had Shaman Drum.

     Shaman Drum was different from many modern bookstores. For one thing, it was small, completely without a coffee bar, and mostly without chotchkes. There was a library hush about the place, amid the old-fashioned polished wood shelves and floor. Everything was designed to create intimacy. The shelves were arranged in nooks and alcoves rather than aisles, so you were kept close to the books. There were very few face outs, very few signs. You had to go in there and explore to find what you were looking for, and what you wanted that you might not be looking for.

     Then there was the type of books it sold. Shaman Drum was right behind the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library when it came to places I would go for research materials. Over the span of two decades the small store yielded up dozens of books I never would have found anywhere else, and were immediately useful. But they were great for browsing as well. I’m a history junkie, and a biography junkie, and a science junkie, and a religion junkie. This comes with the territory when you’re a writer. You read widely, first because you have a perpetually thirsty brain and second because you know that any new piece of information might spark the next story, or enhance the story you’re currently working on. In Shaman Drum, in the old-fashioned library hush, I kept finding books that provided the kind of deep background necessary to make a story or a novel live and breathe. But I also found books to read for the pure enjoyment of them.

     In Shaman Drum I found an Anne Bronte novel, a genuine early feminist work that her more famous sister Charlotte had tried to stop from being published. I found a picture book I’d obsessed over when I was 8 years old, and had never seen in any other store or library. I found a biography of a 14th century noblewoman. I found The Good Women of China, a fascinating look at the modern country. I found Maritime histories and histories of the Space Age, culinary memoir and Patrick O’Brian novels.

     I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I am by this whole event. As everybody knows, Michigan has the worst economy in the country and if the Detroit 3 are ready to shut down, why should it shock me that a tiny, intellectually-snobby book store should be closing its doors?

     Because I thought Shaman Drum had a life line. It was a text book supplier for university literature courses. That was, in fact why I went in there the first time. They were the recommended source for Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston (remember, this was back when Amazon was either a mythical greek warrior or a river in South America). I saw the queues in September as reliably as the sparrows coming back to Capistrano. I assumed Shaman Drum was okay.

     I was wrong. The text book business went bust last year (down $510,00 according to published reports), and suddenly the store was in trouble, and there was no way out.

     The owners did what they could. They cut expenses, including payroll, but it wasn’t enough. The announcement was made and the Dutch auction that comes when a store closes has commenced almost at once.

     So, here I am playing the vulture. I’m hovering around the dying store with my tote bags and a kind of desperation to snatch up the books laid out on the shelves. These are going and they are not coming back. What do I need? What can I carry? What will I never happen across again? Can I have this too? Yes, surely we need this one as well…

     I won’t say I feel old, but I do feel decidedly strange, like I’m at the estate auction of an old friend rifling through their belongings. There’s something not quite decent about it, but I’m not going to stop, because I cannot shake the feeling that these books are about to evaporate from the world. It’s not true, I know, but if I can never find these books again because Shaman Drum isn’t there to set them out for me, isn’t that the same thing?

     I try not to be reflexively opposed to change, even in the world of books that I am so tightly tied to personally and professionally. I wrote my first manuscripts on a portable IBM Selectric typewriter and don’t miss it at all. It’s experience that makes the writer, not the tools. I don’t believe the howls that democracy will crumble because paper newspapers are dying (among other things to believe that newspapers are a bulwark of democracy is to severely misunderstand the history of newspapers). Via my website www.bookviewcafe.com I’m an active participant in the on-line reading and ebook revolution.

     But it’s the experience wandering between the shelves, idly trolling for whatever new bit of subject matter catches my fancy today that I haven’t been able to replicate on-line. The sense of immersion in a place for the obscure, the pompous, the antique, the academic, the wholly weird, where the people who ran the space not only knew what they had but were enthusiastic about it all and eager to share with their customers.

Rest in Peace, Shaman Drum. We will miss you.

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