"Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores" by Brooke Allen, in The Atlantic Monthly (July/Aug. 2001), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.

The guardians of culture are up in arms about the rise of chain bookstores. Even Hollywood got into the act with Nora Ephron’s 1998 film You’ve Got Mail. The chains are killing off the independent shops that preserve literary culture, the critics cry, crowding out worthy books with calendars and junky bestsellers, and dumbing down America.

"Absurd," replies Allen, a writer and book critic. These "sumptuous emporia," as she calls them, "have made a wide variety of books more easily available, in more places and to more people, than ever before." Overstocked? The typical superstore carries about 150,000 titles, while an independent rarely stocks more than 20,000. At her local Barnes & Noble in New York City, Allen counted 196 feet of shelf space devoted to philosophy and 92 feet given over to military history. She visited that store and a local independent with a shopping list of five "midlist" titles—the kinds of quality books, such as The Music at Long Verney, by Sylvia Townshend Warner, that the critics say are being crowded out. The score: megastore 4, independent 2.

It’s true that the independent book stores have suffered, dropping in number from some 5,000 in the mid-1990s to about 3,000 today, but their numbers are now stabilizing. "Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)," Allen writes, "the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America’s smaller cities and suburbs." The chains have stepped in, measurably improving the quality of life. Books-A-Million, for example, has 202 stores concentrated in the Southeast, and Borders has shops in once underserved places such as Murray, Utah, and Hagerstown, Maryland. The stores stay open