Shop Local, y'all!

Shop Independent Durham Week, when we celebrate and support our town’s fabulous locally-owned, independent businesses, is coming up November 30th-December 8^th. To make sure folks are ready for this momentous occasion, I've put together a little quiz. (Hint: all the questions have the same answer).

--What can you do to strengthen our local economy?

--What can you do to help create new jobs here in Durham?

--What can you do to make sure Durham isn't bland and boring but has real character?

--What can you do to make Durham a place where people vote, participate in community reform efforts, and pay attention to local affairs?

The answer to all these questions? Shop at locally-owned, independent businesses!

When you patronize a locally-owned independent business, 3 to 4 times more of your money stays in our local economy, compared to spending that money at a national chain. And when you shop on-line, you are in effect loading all of your money onto a plane at RDU, with a one-way ticket out of here.

The economic advantage of shopping local is so strong that studies of other cities show that if everyone in Durham shifted just 10% of their purchases to local independent businesses, it would create 800 to 1,000 new jobs in our home town. And as for character? Well we've all seen towns with pretty much just national chain shops and restaurants.  Enough said...about North Raleigh.

And cities that have more locally-owned businesses have higher levels of civic engagement., which just makes sense when you think about it. Local businesses help create a culture of real community.

OK, now that everyone has passed the shop local quiz, its time to move on to the fun part—participating in Shop Independent Durham Week. Shop Independent Durham Week has been put together by Sustain-a-Bull, Durham's locally-owned, independent business organization. During this 8 day week that starts the Saturday after Thanksgiving, dozens of shops and restaurants around town will be having special sales, contests, raffles, and events. See www.sustainabull.net for all the details. The idea is to make it easy and fun to shop local.

At The Regulator we'll be kicking things off on Saturday the 30^th with the help of 10 local authors, who have volunteered to be “booksellers for a day.” Working two hour shifts, these local literary luminaries will be recommending books to our customers, for their own reading and for gift giving. See http://regulatorbookshop.com/event/local-authors-become-booksellers-dayfor a complete schedule. All through the week we'll be having stacks of our best books on sale, and we'll be raffling off an incredibly beautiful new facsimile edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, which sells for $350.00.

To bring the local emphasis of this full circle, we'll also be featuring some of the great new books by local writers and new books about our local area. Marvelous new works of fiction by Wilton Barnhardt, Allan Gurganus and Lee Smith. Jennifer Farley’s fascinating new book on the “Duke Homestead and the American Tobacco Company.” William Ferris’ “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists,” which includes a CD and a DVD of  interviews of folks like Eudora Welty and Pete Seeger. And Lawrence Earley’s “The Workboats of Core Sound: Stories and Photographs of a Changing World.”

To mention but a few.

So this holiday season give your old hometown a present too. Shop Independent Durham! We thank you.
Tom Campbell

(a version of this article appeared in the Durham News section of the News and Observer today)

 

"Take a Moment to Replenish with the Written Word"

"As we head into the upcoming, very busy holiday season, as booksellers we like to remind ourselves why we first stepped into a bookstore. We are lovers of stories. We are sharers of tales. We finish a good book and we are pressing it into the hands of a like-minded friend. The more we read, the more we discover new favorites to pass on to family to begin a new conversation with them. The shelves are brimming with opportunities to rekindle a spark, to refresh a tired spirit or to reconfigure a new phase in life. With all of the bustling, take a moment to replenish with the written word. 

"We look forward to making recommendations and helping you find just the right book to give this holiday season."

--From the e-newsletter sent yesterday by Books & Company, Oconomowoc, Wis.

Why Place Still Matters: A Localist Agenda

We couldn't have said it any better ourselves. The importance of places like Ninth Street, from our friend and customer Reyn Bowman.

Read all about it on Reyn's blog: http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2013/11/while-place-still-matters-localist.html#.UooScfRCvHJ.gmail

Who Needs a Bookstore?

The internet, amazon, e-books. Who needs a bookstore these days?

At least once a week people walk into The Regulator and tell us how surprised (and usually how pleased) they are to see that a shop like ours is still in business. But as the long time co-owner of Durham's independent bookstore, I'm not all that surprised that bookstores like ours are still doing well. In part that's because I am privileged to see, on a daily basis, the many ways that people need and appreciate a good bookstore. Here’s a look at a few of the folks that still seem to need a bookstore:

--The two boys, ages about 5 and 7, who burst through our front door on the run the other day, calling out in excitement as they sprinted toward the children's section at the back of the store. They knew they were going to get to look through dozens of books and then pick one or two really special books to take home with them; books that would live with them, in their rooms, from that day on.

--All the grown-ups who enjoy a leisurely browse through our shelves, our displays, and our recommended books. Even with all the information available on-line, studies show that people mostly find out about the books they read from browsing in bookstores or talking with friends. And for many of us book-huggers,, there's nothing quite like the feeling of browsing through shelf after shelf of current and classic books, each one carefully chosen by someone working right in that store.

--People who like “real” books. E-books may be convenient (and we sell them, along with Kobo e-readers), but e-books are probably not the best choice for people who want to dive deeply into their reading. Studies have shown that most of the people who buy e-books also buy print books—and that they finish their print books far more often than they finish their e-books. A Scientific American article this spring titled “Do e-readers inhibit reading comprehension?” concluded that “Research suggests that the devices can prevent readers from wholly absorbing longer texts.” The article also indicated that long-term memory of what a person has read is less when it has been read on a screen. 

Who else needs a bookstore? People who enjoy being part of a community of readers. People who like spending time in a place where everyone is there because they love reading and books. People who want to support their local community, economically and culturally, through their purchases. People who feel it might be important to disconnect, slow down and concentrate for a while in the midst of our distracted digital days.
To quote from a marvelous new book, “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age” by David Mikics: “Slowness and concentration are needed to learn to do anything well that is worth doing well, from fly-fishing to electrical engineering to playing the violin.”

In other words, if you really want to get down to it with most anything, you need to slow down and pay attention. That's what reading a book is all about, and bookstores remain wonderful portals to that experience.
"Who Needs a Bookstore" was initially published in The Durham News section of the News and Observer on October  16th
--Tom Campbell 

Support Free Parking on Ninth Street!

Please send the mayor and city council a brief email (to council@durhamNC.gov) asking them to keep free parking on Ninth Street and in the Ninth Street lot. City staff is recommending to the council that the city begin charging for parking on Ninth Street, to pay for expenses associated with the new development on the west side of the street. But the new development is bringing the city plenty of new revenue to pay for these expenses—and to keep the parking free.

Paid parking will discourage people from shopping on Ninth Street, it will create the need for guards to be posted on the sea of free parking just about to open between the new Harris Teeter and Ninth Street, and it will discriminate against people who shop during the daytime, since parking will be free after 6:00 p.m. So you will be able to park for free to come to Ninth Street to drink late at night, but you will have to pay to park if you want to buy books at The Regulator during the day.

If none of this makes much sense to you, please send an email telling the city council that you support keeping parking on Ninth Street free.

Thank you!

From The Regulator and the other independent locally owned businesses on Ninth Street.

Franzen on Bezos: 'One of the Four Horseman'

"In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?"

--Jonathan Franzen in a Guardian essay called "What's Wrong with the Modern World"

 

(We recommend printing out the full article if you want to really get down into it--its 15 pages long!) 

Bruce! The Winning Story

We had a fine time last Friday, hearing from  Christopher Phillips, editor of the new book Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen. Also in attendance that evening was Michele Lynn, who penned the winning story in our "Tell Us Your Favorite Springsteen Story" contest. As you can see from her story, Michele qualifies as a hard core Springsteen fan, having attended almost 50 of his live concerts. (But hey, there were people here Friday night who have been to over 100!). 

Here's Michele's story, which centers around the first concert she went to:

Growing up in a suburb of New York City, spending summer days at the Jersey Shore, I was a prime candidate to become a Springsteen fan.  I am happy to say that I fulfilled that destiny. 

During my senior year of high school, I had a crush on a boy who worshiped Bruce. So off I went to Korvette’s, a lower-rent cousin of Macy’s and Gimbel’s, to buy a Springsteen album.  I planned to play it nonstop so that when the aforementioned boy called on the phone, the background soundtrack could happen to be Springsteen. 

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” had recently been released so that record, featuring a tough-looking Bruce on its cover, was the one that accompanied me home.  And a funny thing happened – after playing the record a time or two, I was no longer keeping it on my turntable to impress a boy. I was listening to it because Bruce’s passion, music, and lyrics and the band’s musicianship touched something deep inside of me. 

A few years later, during my junior year of college in New York City, Springsteen brought “The River” tour to the Big Apple.  I knew that I had to go to the show with my best friends—identical twins with whom I had spent many hours listening to Bruce, deciding which one of us would marry him, and visiting the holy shrines of Madam Marie’s and the Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

But tickets sold quickly and we were shut out. Not to be deterred, on the opening night of the stand, we took the number 1 train down to Penn Station and walked over to the venue. Students with limited incomes, we found that the scalpers’ prices were out of our league. 

But we were determined. So we flashed our cutest college coed smiles at a hulking ticket taker and asked if we couldn’t just go in and stand for the show.  Our smiles weren’t enough but the $10 we each palmed to him did the trick.  A few minutes later, we found ourselves climbing  to the top of Madison Square Garden and waiting what seemed like an eternity until Bruce and the band came out on stage and ripped into “Born to Run.”

Nearly 33 years later, I still get chills when I remember the power and passion and unlimited promise that song heralded for me, Maddy, and Stephanie.  We stood and sang and danced together for the four hours of that concert and throughout many more Bruce concerts over the years. And every time I hear “Born to Run” in concert—and I have probably heard it live close to 50 times—I am still 19 years old, ready to take on life with all of its joys and adventures.

Oh, and the Springsteen fan who was the original reason I started to listen to Bruce?  He and I dated for some months and even attended our senior prom together. But while my romantic relationship with him is ancient history, my love affair with Bruce continues to this day.

--Michele Lynn