I’ll admit that at times I’ve responded to news of random indie-bookstore shutterings as I do to news of catastrophes in faraway lands: with a pang of concern that soon settles into a vague sense of unease about the world and the problem of human existence. But I’ve always suspected that, should the war come home (namely to the shops I frequent: The Strand, Westsider, powerHouse, BookCourt, McNally Jackson, Shakespeare & Co., WORD, Longitude, Bluestockings, Housing Works, or St. Marks), I’d feel differently. And indeed, when news reached me Friday that a link to a petition to save St. Marks books was going around the Internet, I got that queasy, vertiginous feeling you get when you’ve been dumped, fired, evicted, or told that your kitten’s been run over. St. Marks is one of my bookstores, I screamed at the Internet: who thought they had the right to take it away?

The answer, according to the petition, is indirectly New York City and its sky-high rents and less indirectly Cooper Union, the target of the petition and the owner of the building St. Marks books occupies. The bookstore would like Cooper Union to kindly lower its rent:

The St. Mark’s Bookshop has a long tradition in the Lower East Side and serves an admirable and increasingly rare function. St. Mark’s is struggling to pay the market rent that Cooper Union is charging them at 31 3rd Ave. A significant rent concession by Cooper Union could save this irreplaceable neighborhood institution.

I had a friend once who would go on and on and on about rent control and how it unbalanced the rental market for the rest of New York, arguments I found mostly convincing. Imagining the apoplexy that would seize him if he read the petition, I hesitated for a moment before signing. But the thing is that I really don’t want St. Marks books to close, and by hook or by crook (since it obviously won’t happen by book), I want it to be saved. My stance is entirely based in emotion: I have an emotional attachment to a certain vision of New York, and that vision includes a good indie bookstore on the L.E.S.

I was explaining all this over e-mail to a colleague, who replied, “I know bookstores are supposed to be good things, but we don’t have video stores anymore, and maybe we need to get used to the new order instead of lamenting the old.” This is what I’d say to his point: it totally sucks that there are no more video stores. I spent long nights hanging out at Kim’s in college, deliberating for hours over which random German film from the nineteen-seventies to take home with me. I actually watched stuff like that all the way through then, maybe since I’d spent so much time and energy looking for it. I even miss Blockbuster: when I was a kid, the Friday-night trip to the video store to pick out a movie was the most exciting event of the week. How I watch a video now is: I browse on Netflix for a while, start watching something, get about five minutes in, wonder if I’ve made the right decision, and start the process over. It’s ridiculous, and yet I can’t…stop…clicking…

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My point is that I wish we had been able to save the video store. I know the young citizens of the new order don’t miss it, but kids don’t miss anything: they’re kids. And since we haven’t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to. Going into bookstores to browse, to attend readings, to interact with the staff, to see the selection they’ve curated—all these things excite me and entice me to read. If my book-buying experience becomes simply me sitting alone on the couch click, click, clicking, I don’t know what I’ll become (I’ll probably forget I’m looking for books and jump over to Netflix).

Still, my colleague has a point: chaos and destruction are a part of life, and their consequences, impossible to foretell, are not always negative. St. Marks books hasn’t always sat on the corner of Third and Stuyvesant, after all; it sprouted up amid the ruins of thousands of other bookstores that once graced the city. Though I wish I’d been able to peek inside Frank Shay’s Greenwich Village shop, which lived briefly in the early nineteen-twenties, I’m O.K. with the idea that it was of its time and only of its time. My fondest hope is that, should the bookstores still standing now fall, a new type of store, somehow able to survive in the digital era while retaining what’s special about print, would emerge.

Do I want to save my favorite indie bookstores? Indeed I do. Should we save them (must we save them)? I throw that question to the ether.