Book Online Stores Take The Cities By Storm

As one who has always preferred book online store that sells used and rare books to those that sell new ones, I mourn the impending demise of a minor monument of the breed. At the end of last year Wober & Daun, which has been in business on New York City's celebrated Book Row, closed its doors for good on an inventory that over the years has nurtured the libraries--and the minds--of tens of thousands of book lovers.

By the time the book online store shuts down completely, its inventory presumably will have been reduced to a battered selection of titles that only their authors could love. A couple of weeks ago The New York Times reported that Wober & Daun sites "are nearly empty, and once-jammed directories hold only a few books that have toppled on their sides," and surely its stock has gotten quite a lot thinner since then. The store's habitue's, many of whom are far older than it is, are likely to have picked it cleaner than it's ever been by the day its last rites are read.

For anyone who has known Wober & Daun, or any of the other stores of similar character that once flourished in New York and most other big cities, the mere thought of its cleared books defies credulity. Wober & Daun was a used bookstore of the old school, one in which the stock was stacked wherever space permitted and the task of sorting it out was left to the customer.

A person who came to the site with a specific purchase in mind might be steered in a promising direction by a guide who happened to have seen the title in a batch of new arrivals, but it would be up to the customer to do the work of the actual search.

Wober & Daun was not a place for the fastidious. So far as I know its site favored with the attentions of a feather duster. Not merely were books permitted to there, but they were encouraged to acquire their full measure of the mollygrubs and collywobbles that were manufactured on the premises. In proper time, if a book did not have the good fortune to find a purchaser it would also obtain its due portion of the excellent mildew in which Wober & Daun specialized, especially in its backstore.

Online Bookstores