Reimagining Bookstores in the Age of Digitization
James Torgerson / V Mag at UVA
In an almost Nietzschean declaration, the internet has proclaimed print media dead.
Newspapers are all but obsolete, magazines newsstands extinct and video rentals defunct, all disappeared under the weight of digital convenience. But as we move deeper and deeper into the digital age, a quiet counterrevolution is unfolding — people do want physical evidence of their interests, hobbies, etc. Although many industries are falling prey to digitization, younger generations are reviving seemingly archaic methods of documentation for the sole purpose of their material comfort. Call it materialism, call it consumerism — but there is something undeniably comforting about having a physical copy of your favorite book or album. The tangible charm of the things we love is irreplaceable. And this is where the charm of a bookstore comes alive: as a space that invites lingering, reflection and conversation, it transforms books from objects into shared experiences.
Bookstores are quintessential to college towns — and Charlottesville is no exception. A wide array of these shops pepper our town, each with their own character and story. Fittingly located in the heart of the University’s campus is Heartwood Books, tucked away on Elliewood Avenue. The store was recently acquired by third-year College student Max Fleisher, and fourth-year College student Molly Canipe, who have a unique vision for the future of the store and provided valuable insight into the life and history of Heartwood.
Heartwood has a diverse audience. Thanks to its location on the Corner, it of course draws in students — especially undergraduates who spend much of their free time dining and strolling on University Avenue. A large contingent of Heartwood’s clientele are not undergraduates, but actually older members of the greater Charlottesville community, faculty and professors who have been loyal regulars while cycles of students arrive and graduate over the years. They have close ties with the store, its history and each other – all enchanted by its character and atmosphere. However, it is not only by their patronage that these community members keep Heartwood alive.
Used bookstores are unique in that their inventories are directly correlative to the materials that come to them – no two used bookstores curate the same audience. For Heartwood, much of its inventory is composed of the books that its loyal patrons sell back to the store. Although this creates wonderfully strong ties between the store and its customers, it also makes the nature of the stock self-selecting. This, in turn, creates gaps in genres that fill its shelves.
The new owners of Heartwood Books plan to bring more diverse selections of books into the stacks in an effort to bring more students to its doors. Fleisher described a vision for the store in which students — along with Heartwood’s existing patrons — also participate in the resale of their used, already-read books, thereby adding their own tastes and interests back to the shelves. Through this sale and resale, Fleisher and Canipe hope that Heartwood can provide books and materials to all of its customers.
“The content and stuff that you … choose to create your shop’s identity around very much corresponds to the community,” Fleisher said. “There’s a lot of intentionality” in making this decision, he asserts. For a used bookstore — especially one that acquires much of its inventory from its patronage — this is an especially pertinent idea.
We often think of bookstores as neutral institutions — where you come to find new ideas, evidence to then form opinions on, etc. But in this digital world, where you can find whatever you desire to read online, in a PDF, or on a Kindle, we should begin to re-conceptualize what it means to be a bookstore is — or rather, what it could be.
Molly Canipe presents this existing philosophy of bookstores as “[providing] the fodder for intellectual discourse to happen somewhere else. And [hoping] that it will happen.” She describes how the bookstore “hopes that you go and read a book. But it doesn’t really know a lot of times. It has no way of finding out. Like you say, I sold X amount of books, hopefully they were read, hopefully this narrative, this information made people think about the world in a different way.”
Canipe and Fleisher said their vision for Heartwood is that of community and conversation. They intend to bridge not only the gap between the reader and the book through retail, but between the reader and the discourse through physical space. The bookstore will encourage buying books, as well as reading them, discussing them and bringing that discourse to life.
There has been a bookstore on the Corner since 1876, and this year marks Heartwood’s 50th birthday. For the professors and community members who have grown with Heartwood over the years, “It’s intuitive…why there needs to be a bookstore on the Corner–and why we need to defend that,” asserted Fleisher. But it can and should mean just as much to the students, and this is exactly the future of Heartwood that the new owners envision: a living, breathing, ever-changing reflection of the lives and interests that make up our university and town.
“There’s going to be a version of it that will open next semester,” Fleisher said. “I hope that it’s different in six months. I hope it’s different in a year. I hope that it continues to evolve.”
With this philosophy in mind, Fleisher and Canipe said they hope to create a Heartwood on the Corner that is not only a mosaic of the intellectual interests of this incredible and diverse community, but also as a place where those ideas come to life.