Bye-bye, Borders

The news that Borders bookstores everywhere are closing down in a matter of weeks feels like an end to a chapter in my family’s life.

Of course we feel a particular affinity for the location closest to us, , even though we liked the layout better before it moved from its old Towson Commons location several years ago.

The Towson store was a place where my husband and I spent many hours, browsing and buying books and CDs in the late 1990s, when we were living a double-income, no kids, twenty-something life in Towson. Borders was a go-to place for us to visit on hot summer nights after work when our tiny Southerly Road apartment, equipped with just one window air conditioning unit, was so stuffy and warm that we always escaped for a few hours to chilly stores with central air conditioning. Sometimes we went to the Towson Town Centre, but more often than not, we chose Borders.

About the time the store moved from its multilevel location in Towson Commons to Lutherville, we also moved further north to Hunt Valley, and a couple years after that, our family grew. Borders became a place where we could take the whole family to escape the four walls of our house for a while for a little retail therapy. Like her parents, our pre-school aged daughter loved to browse the books there and pretty much never left the store empty-handed, even if the prize was a small board book or a less than $5 sticker book from the mark-down section. The table with the beaded wire maze was always a favorite of hers where she would play with one of parent while the other looked around – a parental version of our old Towson Borders date nights of yore.

My son, who turned 1 in May, won’t remember Borders at all, which makes me sad. Will my kids ever really shop in a real, brick and mortar bookstore again? Of course that’s a melodramatic statement because there is still Barnes & Noble, but that has never really been my favorite store. It just didn’t find that place in my heart that Borders has always held, and I doubt it will replace it now that Amazon.com has made it so easy to buy the same items for less money and oftentimes free shipping.

I realize that my patronage (along with everyone else’s) of Amazon.com is a contributing factor in the demise of Borders, which couldn’t figure out a way to survive in a world of online ordering and e-books. So I feel bad that I’m a small part of the reason that our beloved bookstore, a place that was there for the formative years of our family, will no longer be a part of our lives.