Good and musty

Powell's City of Books and the need for curation

Walking from the Rose into the Gold room at Powell’s City of Books in Portland smells like literature to me. Like the hope of writing something folks might care to read. You are surrounded by slowly and quietly decaying sheets of wood pulp glued into colorful cardboard covers and stacked on high wooden shelves. Shelves tall enough to require stools to reach up where the overstock resides. Rolling step stools scattered around each room also make for good impromptu reading spots. Some of the books are used, but most are new these days. More books than any human could read are shelved in the “Rose” room alone, and there are eight more rooms in this store, five of them larger than the Rose. None of their walls are painted for their names. The color coded maps are classic souvenirs for the noobs.

Before Powell’s storewide seismic retrofit and remodelling fifteen or so years ago, the scent of paper decay was stronger. The ratio of used to new was higher. There were less tchotchkes crowding the checkout lines. In the earlier decades of my forty years of browsing at Powell’s -- a glorious way for book nerds to kill an evening or lazy afternoon -- for many titles you could had a "pick your price" experience on nearly every shelf in the store. Would you like the tatty 70s paperback for a couple of bucks or the snappy trade paperback recently reissued for much more, by some publisher working to squeeze a bit more juice from their back catalog?

What factors drive your own book-buying? How do you curate your choices, when choices must be made? The money in your wallet? The size of the book print? The cover art? Hard versus paperback? Available shelf and table space? The publisher? The date or number of the edition, if you are addicted to firsts or rareities? Whether it is clean of marks or includes some mystery scribbles here and there? Or, maybe you no longer read books.

Powell’s began adapting to survive eBay, Amazon, and Abebooks over twenty years ago. Culling began. The best of the old gems quickly vanished from the shelves to pop up for larger or more niche markets online, or a bit later in Powell’s own “rare books” room. Prices on remaining used titles were raised and new labels printed. Then raised and reprinted again. And again. I can recall books with price labels three and four deep. Easier to just slap a price increase on top than peel off the cheaper ones. Space was eventually cleared by the main entry for artfully displayed rounds of whatever the dominant publishers were pushing this month. I remember when downtown Portland's skankiest men's room was where tote bags and coffee mugs now flood the rearranged checkout lines. Eyes wander while waiting in line and commerce has a use for every eyeball.

Culminating efforts begun in 1991, in 1998 Powell’s workers unionized under the International Longshore Workers to declare war on managers who once nurtured a depth of book knowledge now deemed optional at best out on the selling floor. The fight tore up the Portland press and literary world, and changed Powell’s culture forever. A notoriously half-baked online shopping sytem soon entered its first of many revisions.

Still, to this day, you can still smell wood pulp in a few corners. The bookish mustiness wafts around between the totes and calendars, reminding folks there are things humanity knows and feels but may forget to remember.

Watching forty years of a bookstore's evolution seeds thoughts for me about passive vs. active cultural engagement. I owned my first computer more than a decade before the internet was invented. It was designed for hobbyist hand-coded programming, not books, much less streaming media on demand or hosting globally sprawled video meetups. I typed game programs into it line by line and carefully saved them onto 5.25 inch floppy disks. I had spent two years of paper route earnings to buy this Apple ][+ and its floppy drive. Hard drives did not yet exist for this device, much less prebuilt inside storage. A typical music video would have taken far more floppy disks to save than I ever owned.

Learning to read at all once required page-turning and book-marking, both slower processes that allow for memory retention and mental digestion. Human evolution did not prepare us to offload our organizational recall into calendars and contact lists, nor to rapidly scroll through image feeds while parked in front of an ice cream bowl. We just adopt convenient pleasures and develop dependence as a result.

There is nothing new, of course, to commenting on the risks of our digital future. My personal musings while tapping keystrokes here are on what choices I could personally make, and sustain, to improve the organic human qualities of my life. Can I live without social media? I did for most of my life, because it did not exist, so it apparently can be done. Is there any way for me to effectively limit my use? Social media is quite literally addictive — each pretty picture delivers a tiny hit of dopmaine to my limbic system, just enough to make me want more — and the tech industry knows it. So, but but but, how else will I keep up with my friends? With the news? If I went offline, would anyone ever give me a call? Send me a letter? Or, would I need to keep “some” digital resources available, just not others. But, which? A flip phone? Email? Text? The endless sinkhole of the web which nonetheless puts movie theater schedules in my cinema-nerdy hand, and lets me know if my checking account has been hacked? Do I really just need some apps but not others? Again, which? What technology would be more appropriate for me and better balanced with my life?

We once wrote letters to communicate with small groups, and newspapers to communicate with large ones. Invoices were sent in the mail and you had thirty days to pay by social default. There are now so many ways to communicate and transfer funds that there is no longer any common denominator for each. No common ground. No town square. Each digital platform is a culture unto itself.

So, my desire to escape digital addiction is laced with fears of abandonment. If I choose A and not B then who do I lose? I do not want to be left alone. Or, rather, I only want to be left alone when I want to be alone, during those days or minutes or weeks between letters from a friend. Between those moments spent enjoying some worthwhile story or video (er, "reel?") that somehow came my way.

If I stepped away from the media stream, would I even know how to drink if I later changed my mind? I have never used TikTok and barely used TwiXtter before it morphed into a right-wing poopshow. I am not pretty enough for Instagram, but have a long history on the Faceplace. Bluesky feels like too much work for too little depth. Mastodon is technically interesting but quiet. There are simply too many channels and too much worthless “content” to bother. I would rather rebuild my capacity to hold focus on something of quality. Yet, how do I find anything of quality when my focus feels ready for it?

Curation feels like the key even if I have not yet found it. I like to imagine a web of human curators serving as trusted sources for sorting. Each recommendation nestled among enough choices to balance the inherent censorship of expressing a preference with some range and variety. Served up by human voices with no surrounding crust of twitchy clickbait.

Trusted sources. Webs of trust. Authentic voices. We have had, and still do have, all these in limited ways. I just want … enough, and not too much. Because, I do not feel capable of sitting in the midst of the modern media stream without being degraded into precisely the consuming monster it prefers.