My eyes are filled with gods

Jason’s post on how the closure of Borders affects Pagan publishers and the availability of metaphysical titles has me in a reflective mood today.

Back in the ’90s, I worked for a small nonfiction book publisher; we specialized in sports and sports psychology titles, and a typical print run was 1,000-2,5000 books per edition, depending on the title. We sold to distributors, bookstores, and individual customers (through catalog sales, and then later, the website).

Of the distributors, Borders was the perpetual thorn in our side; the orders that made us approach the mail or fax with trepidation, significantly more so than any other customer. Ingram had wrangled a much deeper discount, and Baker and Taylor was more scattershot and inconsistent with the titles and numbers they ordered, but Borders … Borders would order five or six cases of a title, distribute them to the stores, and then return the majority to us before their invoice was due 90 days later. And then they would immediately re-order the same title, sometimes before the return had landed in our warehouse. So we would take those same returned books, box them up, and ship them right back. Repeat until the books became unsellable from shipping wear and had to be remaindered.

Mind you, distributors, the big three, anyway, did not pay shipping, so that was our company footing the cost for shipping these titles back and forth every few months.

It was a recurring problem to get actual money out of Borders; they would attempt to write off almost all of their debts with the perpetual return-and-reorder machine. Sometimes they would double-claim return credits, or claim returns we’d never received. When the boss finally sold the company to a larger sports publisher, Borders owed us — if I remember correctly — something like $9,000 in actual funds. They insisted they had $12,000 of outstanding return credit (they did not). I ran the reports and provided all kinds of documentation to the accounts payable office at various levels — several times, in fact. They never once acknowledged receipt of the documentation, even though we had proof they’d received it. And still they refused to pay. I believe they were eventually written off as a bad debt once the company finally changed hands.

When I ran into my former boss a few years later, she said Borders was still sending her notices about twice a year, insisting that the old publishing house owed them that mysterious $12,000. Every time, she would photocopy the original reports and numbers, deny their claim, and insist that they pay the outstanding $9,000. Six months later, she’d receive another notice. We laughed, but it was an exasperated laugh, one punctuated with much eye-rolling.

So, my own feelings on the demise of Borders are a bit of a mixed bag. I loved the brick-and-mortar store. I hated the distributor side of the business. Which was more reflective of the company’s core business practices, I can’t say.

I’ll miss browsing the shelves of an actual bookstore, though, since I despise the new Barnes and Noble location — now that it’s been surgically attached to the patchwork monkey side of the mall, I can’t stand the place.  Granted, it’s probably doing well because it’s the only major bookstore left in the area, as far as I know. There are a few niche shops — a couple of Christian stores, gaming stores, and the like — but nothing like a good general bookstore. I wonder how long B & N’s fortune will last.