which leads to another generational note

Someone already posted on this in recent months, and it may have been Peter Gratton (though it may have been Levi as well; I don’t recall).

I’ve sometimes reflected on the strange role played in a generation’s intellectual development by the bookstore chain B. Dalton, whose last branches finally went out of business this January. (I was shocked to hear that, since I had assumed it folded years ago.)

In one sense, B. Dalton was a fairly awful bookstore. It was laughable compared with Barnes & Noble and Borders, let alone the great subterranean palaces like the University of Chicago Seminary Co-Op, or Blackwell’s in Oxford.

But at the time it was the best we could do. There was no internet, no superstores, and the independents were not always easy to reach for those of us who did not grow up in large cities or directly in university towns (though I lived reasonably close to Iowa City, which had Prairie Lights).

Still… You could walk into the tawdriest 1980’s mall in the middle of geographical nowhere, and at the B. Dalton you could find a scattering of life-changing books. The funniest example for me is that I bought my copy of Being and Time at a B. Dalton (the Iowa City branch did stock it, probably just because it was Iowa City). Also Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, and a few other memorable reads.

I suppose it was the proto-superstore in a way.