Letters to the Editor

Defending the little guy

To the Editor:

I am slightly confused and, on behalf of my friends at the Penn Book Center and A House of Our Own, a little offended by Rebecca Rosner's column about independent booksellers in West Philadelphia ("Not your typical corner bookstore," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/3/03).

Miss Rosner seems to believe that supporting small bookstores means nothing but shopping there. Obviously, it means a great deal more.

Supporting small bookstores means understanding that they operate under different conditions than large ones. It means recognizing that they may not be able to provide instant gratification to every customer all of the time. And so it means that every customer has an opportunity not only to get something from a small bookstore but also to give something back -- like patience, courtesy, gratitude and tact.

Supporting small bookstores means believing that "customer service" is as much the responsibility of customers as sellers. Therefore, to criticize those bookstores and their dedicated employees now, just when they are doing their utmost to facilitate the start of the school year, strikes me as petulant, gratuitous and cruel. At a time when large corporations like Barnes & Noble are making it so much harder to find books and magazines that fall outside the mass market and the mainstream, we should not to be asking what the Penn Book Center or A House of Our Own can do for us, but what we can do for them. We might start by saying "thank you."

Sean Keilen English professor

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To the Editor:

Rebecca Rosner's column regarding Penn's two non-affiliated bookstores has highlighted pervasive misconceptions about those bookstores and their function in Penn's community.

Waiting in line for expensive books is not a pleasant experience, but it is not exclusive to any bookstore (or type thereof) on our campus. Rosner's frustration is misplaced. Prices are set by publishers, which is why primarily academic publishers such as Oxford and Chicago are more expensive than Penguin Putnam's mass markets. In any case, professors make reading lists, not bookstores.

Return policies that ask for official drop slips are not ludicrous in the face of publishers themselves not accepting those books returned. The reason return policies are different between stores often has to do with the extent to which bookstores must order through those publishers. Nevertheless, buying books for a class in which you are not enrolled is never wise (advice those bookstores readily give in the name of real customer service).

More bewildering is Rosner's archetype of small bookstores as places where customer service means the sellers know all customers' names and preferences (even to the point of premonition!). How Rosner imagines that this "personal and intimate" environment is possible on Sept. 4 as thousands of students descend daily on those stores is confounding.

The two non-affiliated bookstores do indeed serve as "personal and intimate" environments in which one can spend hours browsing books and discussing them with the staff. However, in order to provide and ensure the existence of such environments, it is necessary that they function as University bookstores as well. This means taking course lists and enrollment figures from professors and supplying their requested product.

Maybe if the Wit and Wisdom were located near a university, it could have survived. Then again, Rosner probably would have stopped patronizing them for the remaining 50 weeks of the year as a result of a temporal transformation arguably necessary to its survival.

Dillon Kuehn College '05

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