Showing Some Spine

November 24, 2008

“It’s the 500-pound-gorilla factor,” Eness says. “Everybody agrees, the more competition the better, and there are all sorts of synergistic possibilities that the Borders and independent bookstores could feed to each other. But there’s also the fact of being able to undercut prices, just because of the sheer volume that Borders brings.”

Filed Under: Commerce

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Gambit Weekly

Showing Some Spine

Independent booksellers keep a wary eye on ‘the 500-pound-gorilla’ Borders opening on St. Charles Avenue.

By Noah Bonaparte Pais

On Saturday, Dec. 6, the site of the former Bultman Funeral Home on the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana avenues will be formally introduced as the newest addition to the Borders chain of bookstores.

The implied irony isn’t lost on Tom Lowenburg, owner of Octavia Books, located two miles farther Uptown. “(Last year) one of the funeral directors in town came up and grabbed my hand,” he says, grinning before turning mock-grim: “‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’”

Rather than hold a wake, Lowenburg chose to circle the wagons. Weeks before the Borders opening, on the evening of Nov. 12, he summoned a group of shopkeepers to Octavia for a potluck dinner and strategy session with what several attendees described as one central and collective focus: educating the public on the essential differences between a retail-minded bookstore and a community-minded bookseller.

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