Breaking down Borders
An exploration of Ann Arbor's shifting literary landscape and how to tell its story.
On the corner of State Street and North University Avenue—right outside that Walgreens door that really looks like it’s supposed to open the other way—is a small Ann Arbor Historical Marker titled “A Book Lover’s Town.” Often covered in the dirt and dust of State Street’s bustling mess, the plaque is remarkably easy to walk past without a second thought. It tells the age-old tale of Ann Arbor’s everchanging bookstore landscape: threads of buyouts and bankruptcies and growing e-commerce domination told in the warm disposition of a city obsessed with its own literary merit.
In 1906, State Street contained four bookstores. Hoping to take advantage of the cyclical need for textbooks in a university town, early 20th century local entrepreneurs and genuine bookworms alike laid the foundation for this extension of Michigan’s collective intellectual identity. When the 80 year old Wahr’s Bookstore—located in what is now Ann Arbor Roasting Company—closed in 1975, two recent University of Michigan graduates decided to buy out the store’s entire inventory. Setting up shop across the street from what is now Skeeps, Tom and Louis Borders began what would become a 500+ store operation in the wake of Ann Arbor’s latest shift towards literary modernity.
Before the age of universally identical chain bookstores, the original Borders bent towards the sun of Ann Arbor’s cultural specificity. Stocking books designed to appeal to a city of overeager young adult-adjacents and thoroughly hippie townies, the Borders brothers created a global franchise off the shoulders of a wholly local enterprise. With stores everywhere from Rogers, Arkansas to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Borders was the exact kind of octopus-like success the University of Michigan builds itself upon: a small pioneering idea that transcended itself to become a commercial mainstay of the everyday town, city and strip mall.
And yet, in 2011—just 15 years after Jeff Bezos first came up with the idea to sell books online—almost every Borders location would permanently shutter. The few that survived were bought out by larger, more competitive booksellers. Barnes and Noble, with its remarkable resilience through successive eras of technological threat, acquired Borders’ trademarks and customer list. The original Borders brand itself became mostly lost to a history of innovative beginnings and resistant, competitive demises.
Though I passed the State Street plaque summarizing this rise and fall hundreds of times throughout college, I never noticed it until one of my final weeks at school. Bitterly reminiscing on the sneaky complexity of my time in Ann Arbor, the plaque seemed to tell the story of how the sparkling city I thought I was entering at 18 became the place I felt quietly trapped in at 22.
The Ann Arbor the Borders brothers knew is at once identical to and vastly distant from the one I lived in. The original Borders faced a bar called Dooley’s—a Skeeps predecessor that shared the current bar’s penchant for comically unreasonable long lines. While its neighbor’s role in Ann Arbor has hardly changed for the past 50+ years, the Borders building is currently an eerily vacant former Aveda Salon. Seated ironically next to the University’s Center for Academic Innovation, the building that once basked in intellect is now, at most, a potential temporary site for Rick’s American Cafe during impending construction on its current location.
For as long as the University has existed, the mirage and promise of an intellectual oasis on the shores of earth-shattering innovation has been key to Ann Arbor’s appeal. To the tune of freshman year’s essential naivety, I was easily sold the idea that the city would eternally remain the type of place where Borders’ flagship store would thrive. Little did I know the era I was awaiting had ended nearly a decade before I duct-taped a fan to the edge of my South Quad Twin XL.
After three semesters of waiting to be eligible for Michigan’s (extremely limited) journalism classes, I eagerly signed up for Professor Anthony Collings’ Supreme Court News class in the winter of my sophomore year. Though my judiciary knowledge was limited to my AP U.S. History teacher’s single-day lesson about Brown vs. Board of Education, I was familiar with Professor Collings’ decades of success at CNN, the Associated Press and Newsweek. At a University mostly opposed to formal journalism education, Collings has committed to offering at least two journalism classes a semester since he first began teaching in 1997. One of my roommates, who took the class a semester after me, described Collings as the smartest and most teddy bear-like man she’d ever met.
A central tenet of Collings’ class was the belief that objectivity was an essentially impossible—and therefore fruitless—pursuit within a mid-20th century journalistic culture that believed the best news writing came from the complete elimination of the author. The news environment of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s orbited around succinct, no-frills copy from newswire services like the Associated Press and United Press International. Due to the limited space in print newspapers and accelerating speed of the daily news cycle, these wire services provided (and continue to provide) news writing for thousands of papers nationwide. Throughout the decades of Collings’ thriving journalism career, striving towards neutrality mimicked that of Sysiphus’s eternal uphill journey; for every attempt to separate journalism and journalist, there was a frequent lack of the context, interpretation and analysis that allows news writing to transcend the confines of its own medium.
Collings encouraged us to strive not for total objectivity, but instead for balance. He used the example of a story about climate change: if 99% of scientists believe climate change is real and human-influenced, it would make no sense to feature one scientist who agrees and one who does not. While covering both sides of the coin maps onto our conventional understanding of “balance,” Collings argued a truly balanced story is one that reflects the proportions of our shared reality. Though his methods still expect reporters to maintain critical distance from a subject, working towards balance makes room for journalism’s human core while adhering to ethical standards. In Collings’ world, the pursuit is in getting as close to the ground as possible, rather than trying to circle it from above.
Though likely not intended to surpass the walls of our basement classroom in North Quad, this reclaiming of balance—of the permanent relevance of our humanity—became a way to simplify my own inevitable ups and downs. If 80% of my undergraduate days were spent basking in the Ann Arbor sun no matter the season, Collings’ advice postulates that 80% of the story I tell myself about this place should reflect that joy. But I reflexively grow towards the uglier 20%’s fertility for dissection, feeling my roots shrivel and rot in the process. That dimly lit instinct is a reminder of how easy it is to slide into the underworld of the 20%, towards the familiar scheme of political pundits and digital outrage that postulate its importance all day, every day. It’s the daily manifestation of torschlusspanik—German for “the fear of the gate closing”—as I prepared to leave behind a city and life stage I had still not yet cracked the code to.
Our daily lives give way to a narrative flexibility that journalism, by trade, cannot. We are as much what actually happens as the stories we write; about ourselves, our experiences, our world. The human mind’s natural appetite for storytelling means we need context, interpretation and analysis too. The truth may lie not in trying to escape ourselves, but in bringing ourselves back down to the very earth that we are, as per that 99% consensus, responsible for.
The story of Borders could be one of disintegration and turmoil; the beginning of the end for a city that had until then managed to remain unscathed by the primal bloom of massive corporate digitization. I could spend the rest of my life lamenting that loss and what it stands for. I could, as is my first instinct to do, forever live in Ann Arbor and me’s shared 20%: of bookstores that become empty craters, of nights spent waiting in the freezing cold for a bar that lives in the shell of a former funeral home, staring across the street missing what I never saw. But that wouldn’t be the whole story; it never really is.
As Wahr’s, Borders and their shuttered siblings waned in and out, alternative pockets of Ann Arbor’s commitment to bookishness remain defiant in the face of constant high rise construction and community distress. Dawn Treader Bookshop, which opened its lovely creaky doors in 1976, seems permanently filled with new generations of students first discovering the indescribable feeling of walking between well-worn shelves. Down the sloping hill towards Main Street, West Side Book Shop’s eccentric antiquity will soon celebrate its 136th anniversary—holding on tight to its reigning championship as the oldest bookstore in the city. And two years after Borders’ imminent closure, a brave, book-loving couple sought a localized antidote to Ann Arbor’s lack of new-title bookstores and opened the now thriving Literati. Literati’s website notes their tendency to hire experienced booksellers, particularly with those who worked previously at establishments including, but not limited to, Borders.
Despite years of utter defeat against the e-commerce behemoth, bookstores have rediscovered their place in mainstream culture alongside the rise of digital book culture. 2021 set the sales record for Barnes and Noble, which opened 30 new stores that year—including reopenings of stores in communities that had slowly become literary deserts. Literati’s owners say they hope to spend at least 30 years serving Ann Arbor’s feverishly bookish population. Dawn Treader seems permanently stopped in time, an eternal safe haven covered in autographed comic books and hand printed music posters. As I traverse my new home in Washington D.C., I carry my bright blue Dawn Treader bag everywhere I go.
The story, it seems, is as balanced as we’re willing to let it be. There is the story of the massive rise and fall of a company birthed by the University’s literary appetite. There is the story of the up-and-comers who saw a community gap and committed their lives to poetry readings and typewriter-patterned computer stickers. There is the story of a girl who had a relatively turbulent collegiate life and one who will always remember the feeling of knowing she could walk down the street, outside of her mind and into a place filled with worlds completely imaginary and yet entirely real. There is our perpetual 80 and 20%. There is also the way we tell their tale.