A Central Valley Bookshop Tour: Visiting Barnes and Noble

From the Editor’s Desk

To go into Barnes & Noble is a quick trip into the well-known and familiar.

Barnes & Noble opened in Modesto in the 1990s, with massive discount books offered in bulk with an adjacent Starbucks, tables and chairs of plenty to invite people to sit and stay, along with gifts and lots and lots of books. As an avid reader, my father took me to Yesterday's Books and Barnes & Noble and bought me the selections I asked for. At the time, it was all about British literature.

In seventh grade, he took me to poetry readings at Barnes & Noble, where I started out attending wearing all black, thinking I was fulfilling my imaginary version of what this meant. The old man reciting his poems wearing a Hawaiian shirt fit a different vision altogether, a vision I now recognize as people who write, who have learned to some degree at least how to be themselves. We went to Barnes & Noble on Thursday nights. I read from the Everyman’s Library Pocket Edition of Emily Bronte poems. That was seventh grade.

By high school and college, Barnes & Noble was a date destination where we grabbed our coffee and perused the stacks. It was a place to meet friends. It was a place to study or run into friends who were studying and inevitably be distracted the entire time chatting at our too-tall tables with our grande lattes. This was before the unicorn drinks.

After that, it was the place to get upset about big box corporations driving out smaller locally owned shops. Little did we expect our ire at such stores would have to move on to the cloud because, for a time, even Barnes & Noble could not compete with Amazon.

But things are changing, they say, as news came out that the current CEO, James Daunt, wants to bring Barnes & Noble back to its basics: reduce the amount of clutter of gift items in place of books, dispense with giving prime retail space to books publishers pay them to highlight, allow employees to have a say in what books end up on the stacks and maybe even represent their recommendations.

I walked in quickly with my batch of readers and headed straight for the children's section. This was not a section I frequented in seventh grade when I went through my highbrow stage of reading classics.

Now, knowing what I do as a mother and home educator, my world is one of children’s classics, both new and old.

I was pleased with the selections.

My eyes fell on both old and new and the children's section. We wandered and got lost in it, heading towards the register.

The path at least resistance to the children's section is littered with gift items, games, calendars, all kinds of things that are not books before you hit some travel and some other random items before you get to the children's section. The way back down the center of the aisle takes you past some stacks that should feel familiar and yet do not… quite.

There are so many books at Barnes & Noble that the general fiction section is largely unrecognizable to me. I only vaguely know current hits. I do not recognize these shelves.

I pause at the poetry for a quick glance, but seeing nothing recognizable, I allow the children to pull me on their way, and we check out.

I found what I was looking for.

The day before we visited, I called the store and ascertained which books by Jan Brett they had in stock, made the plan to buy them, drove to Modesto the next day, and made the purchase. I needed the book quickly, and unfortunately, the local shops, whose inventory is conveniently online, did not have what I was looking for. We can't have everything, but in the current climate, having more than one bookstore and distinct bookstores with distinct personalities is a boon for everyone.

Originally published in the January 21 edition of the Hughson Chronicle & Denair Dispatch. Reprinted with permission. An annual subscription of the print-only newspaper is $89. To subscribe, call 209-358-5311.