Tonight, we’re pleased to present a new column about bookstores, written by Chicago’s own Franny the Bookstore Cat. Franny’s worked in bookstores for nearly twenty cat years, so you know she knows her stuff. Below, the first installment — stay tuned for another early next month.

In this column, I’ll be speaking regularly about the state of bookstores, primarily the independents.  More than ever, it seems, the literary world is in a state of flux.  Online magazines and news coverage are replacing newspapers and glossies as we know them.  Kindles allow you to carry a whole library in your bag. Big box stores and websites are offering bestsellers at less than half their cover-price.

With the fall of big publishing, though, comes a renaissance of small presses, handmade zines, limited edition art books.  I’m excited about the immediacy of the internet, too; don’t get me wrong.  I like that people can hit a button after they read a story I wrote, and tell me how much they liked it.  Ron Silliman gets the bipolarity of the current moment: “we’re simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old.”

I would argue that we’re not mourning yet, because nothing’s been lost.  We’re rehashing, reconsidering, and even reviving.  Certainly, some things are falling by the wayside, and this moment could feel like a dark age of sorts, but only if one is strictly taking into account the merging of major publishing houses to a paltry seven, or the fact that the most dismal statistics report 80% fewer independent bookstores than existed 20 years ago.  In reality, we’re just figuring things out, enjoying the options, not nixing the old to usher in the new.

I’m going to talk about why bookstores still have a place in this world; how they’re a mini-revolution, already in action; how they are still exciting and necessary and sometimes boring and regular in the most wonderful way.  I’m also going to tell you about the things that are threatening bookstores, and make suggestions about how you can have your cake and eat it, too.

First, let me just list a few things that bookstores can do that Amazon cannot:

#1: You can attend live readings with authors where you can ask questions and touch the human skin, probably uninvited, of the writer you so admire.

#2: You can ask booksellers a question, and they will give you impromptu answers they might be basing on the vibe they get from you, or the enthusiasm level in your responses to their suggestions. Sometimes those booksellers smell nice and you develop crushes on them.

#3: You can accidentally find books that you aren’t looking for but absolutely need.  At a website, they might recommend a book in a genre similar to the book you are buying or by the same author, but in a bookstore your eye can catch on that vegan soul food cookbook across the room and only you see it as the perfect companion to Lorrie Moore’s Self Help.

This is just the start. Shall we?