get out your handkerchiefs

Another independent bookstore folds. While copping to the fact that “Independent bookstores, of course, have been under siege for nearly two decades by the megachains and the Web retailers, and have been steadily dropping away, one by one,” the New York Times can’t help but mourn, yet again, the tragic death of culture now that Logan Fox, owner of Princeton’s Micawber Books, is giving up his downtown store:

Logan Fox can’t quite pinpoint the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work.

{{Let’s see… Could it have been in the 1970s, when all those lib’rul book lovers on the Upper West Side couldn’t get enough of Kojak; or the 1980s, when they couldn’t get enough of Hill Street Blues; or perhaps the 2000s, when they couldn’t get enough of The West Wing and The Sopranos? Just asking. –ed}}

Mr. Fox, son of the late great Random House editor Joe Fox (who, famously, died in his office), just cannot get over the fact that the wonderful world of literature and culture he grew up with is gone, gone, gone.

Mr. Fox is proudly from the old school of bookselling. He says he has only been inside a Barnes & Noble store three times. (“I can’t do it,” he said, grimacing.)

Maybe he’s losing his business because he hasn’t kept his eye on the competition? Nah.

[H]e blames a change in American culture, in the quickening pace of people’s lives, in the shrinking willingness to linger. During the 1980s, in the store’s early days, customers would come in and stay all afternoon, carefully inspecting the books that were packed tightly together, spine to spine.

No longer. “The driving force of all of this is the acceleration of our culture,” Mr. Fox said.

Oh yes: he blames publishers, too. They’ve stopped nurturing writers through their failed efforts and are too impatient for hits—all they care about is the bottom line, of course. And then there’s the terrible quality of the books.

What’s a poor middle-aged guy to do?

Get over yourself and your risible pretensions, you charmless asshole. That’s what.