Rebecca Rosner: Not your typical corner bookstore

The little bookstore around the corner from my house was called Wit and Wisdom. Whenever I went in for a new book, the storeowners smiled and called me by name. They knew what I liked to read, and they usually had a book or two already in mind for me to try. I received a wooden token with every book, and when I had 10 tokens saved up, I got to select a free book. They had book signings and discussions with some of my favorite authors.

I was 10 when the big, bad Borders came to town and out went Wit and Wisdom. Since then, I've held a grudge toward massive chain bookstores that have put the little guy out of business. When I go book shopping, I don't need a literature Mecca; I just want a quiet place to find a new novel to savor.

The Penn Bookstore is not exactly the quaint environment I had hoped for. I can't completely discredit them: it's awfully convenient to buy your sweatshirts, highlighters and shower caddies all in one location. Call it rooting for the underdog, call it nostalgia, but what happened to the bookstores that only sold books?

Many of my liberal arts professors apparently share this same mentality, and that's why every semester they send me to the Penn Book Center or A House of Our Own to purchase my course materials. It's a great idea. Together, all the liberal arts students and professors of Penn will unite in protest against Barnes and Noble by refusing to financially support the Penn Bookstore. We do our part to keep the small non-chain stores thriving with each purchase of Norton's Complete Shakespeare Anthology and The Quran and Woman.

But every semester, the Penn Book Center and A House of Our Own are filled with angry students who aren't thinking about any of this. We are not angry because we feel we are missing out on a second-floor coffee shop or free holiday gift-wrapping. We are upset because we are waiting in long lines for expensive books. Because if we don't wait in these lines, the books might sell out, and it could be a while before more are shipped, causing us to get behind in our reading. And because if for some reason we want to return the book to the Penn Book Center, we need an official University drop slip for the course.

The problem is not that professors are asking their students to patronize these stores, but that these stores are not living up to their customer service-oriented image. They are supposed to be personal and intimate, owned by people who care about their customers' concerns. In University City, these customers are students. Students who need their books immediately, so that they can read them and study for impending exams. Students who sometimes decide to change courses... and then change back again later that week. Students who never would have purchased the book in the first place if they had known it was "optional" reading.

A bookstore that is sometimes out of stock, isn't open on Sundays and won't accept returns without an official University drop slip (and who even knows how to get one of those?) isn't providing the intimate, considerate atmosphere we seek to patronize.

I understand that it is extraordinarily difficult for a small bookstore to stay afloat in a sea of Borders and Barnes & Nobles, and that it might seem that the only way to stay in business is to create this environment of red-tape book purchasing.

But every year, when I head over to the Penn Book Center, I don't think about helping out the little guy. I think about how much easier it would be to be a math major, with the simpler task of buying books from the Penn Bookstore: one-stop shopping, student-friendly hours and no-questions-asked returns.

Because the Penn Book Center and A House of Our Own make things so difficult, they're the last places I would think to go for non-course books. Why would I want to spend my time or money in a place that causes such a hassle for so many of us at the beginning of every semester?

I want to help out the little corner bookstores of the world, I really do. I would just appreciate it if they would make it a little easier for me to help them. I'm not asking for poetry readings or cappuccino bars, just a sign that they're actually in tune with their customers and are trying to create that inviting bookstore atmosphere we choose to support.

Rebecca Rosner is a senior English major from Lawrenceville, N.J.

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