Today I'm honored to present to you thefirst ever guest post on Pleasant Family Shopping! It’s written by Kendra Bird,a native of Bangor, Maine, anthropology student, avid retail history fan and a friendof this site from almost the very beginning. For those from or familiar with Maine (especially the Bangor area),this will be of particular interest, but Kendra writes about something so manyof us can relate to, regardless of location– the closing of a lifelong favoritestore and the decline of the local mall. Shown above are some photos, vintage ads and articles she provided for this post. Enjoy!
I wentto say goodbye to my childhood bookstore today, but by the time I arrived, itwas too late. The lights were off and the shelves, once bursting with books,magazines, gifts, stuffed animals and other items, were bare; some of them hadeven already been removed from the store’s now-lifeless confines.
Thiswasn’t the first trip that I’d made to Mr. Paperback, located in Bangor,Maine’s 42-year-old Airport Mall, in the last week. Prior to today’s pilgrimage,I had wandered in a handful of times, purchasing various discounted items fromthe dwindling stock on its shelves. I had also been fortunate to acquire somememorabilia from the store itself; now in my possession are a number of rescuedwooden signs that, for as long as I can recall, stood atop the variousbookshelves, advertising the type of offerings present in each section.“SPORTS,” “HISTORY,” “CHILDREN 8-12,” some of them declare to no one inparticular. Others, whimsically, show their age: “TIQUES & COLLECTIBLE,”one reads, while another proclaims, “ILDING CONSTRUCTIO.” One, perhapspoignantly, using hand-cut blue adhesive letters, reads simply: “MAINE.”
Mr.Paperback was not just a bookstore…it was a local, independent bookstore, basedhere in Maine, with several locations around the state. At one time, its reachhad been even more widespread, but some of the stores in the chain shuttered asthe decades passed. The company had its origins in a downtown Bangor location,half a century ago, and the location to which I personally have such anattachment has been operational since its host mall opened its doors in 1970.Over the years, the mall saw each and every original tenant go out of business,or relocate -- some of them moving across town to the larger Bangor Mall, whichopened in 1978 -- aside from Mr. Paperback, Radio Shack, and Doug’s Shop ’nSave; the latter is technically still in operation today as a state-of-the-artHannaford supermarket, which is now the flagship anchor of the entire shoppingcenter.
Even in1990, according to a supplement to the Bangor Daily News issue of April 26thof that year, “only a few stores remain[ed] from the stores that [had] openedin the mall” twenty years earlier. Original anchors Freese’s and Woolco, both departmentstores (the first local to Bangor, the second a nationally-known discounter),were long gone, as were many of the mall’s interior names. Nevertheless, Mr.Paperback stayed in business, first absorbing the space belonging to Spencer’sGifts, which had relocated to the Bangor Mall, and then part of an adjacentrestaurant, the remainder of which is now a Rent-a-Center.
Duringthe same year that the Airport Mall was celebrating its twentieth birthday, Iwas eight years old going on nine, and starting to purchase my own books andmagazines with my allowance money. There were only two places that I regularlydid this: Mr. Paperback, and the B. Dalton store that was in the Bangor Mall(astute followers of the ebbs and flows of retail will note that the B. Daltonchain has also met its demise). I vividly remember the day that I purchased myfirst issue of Disney Adventures magazine at the Airport Mall Mr.Paperback. I remember seeing it on the shelf, finding out that it had a TaleSpin comic in the back of it (back then, we didn’t use the terms “fangirl”or anything like that, but I totally was one in regard to that particularcartoon), and insisting to my parents that I purchase it. This was in the fallof 1990, and I was only nine years old, yet this memory is still etchedprominently in my mind over two decades later.
Untiltoday, the children’s magazines and comic books still filled that same sectionof shelving on the back wall, and, despite no longer belonging to thatdemographic, I would always wander by there whenever I stopped by the store.The shelves were the same, the carpet was the same (though it seemed to be heldtogether with mailing tape in progressively more places over the years), the(I‘m assuming) anti-shoplifting mirrors that ran above the shelving along theback of the store were the same. I only knew one other store that had mirrorslike that, predating the fancy cameras and whatnot that stores boast today: theBangor Mall CVS, which is also no longer in operation.
Over theyears, I have bought fewer and fewer books, despite being a voracious reader asa child. This is largely due to simply being too busy to read for leisure;academic pursuits and gainful employment take up the majority of my time, andwhat little reading that I do manage to do is predominantly related to my areasof study. Despite this, I did pick up one book last week during Mr. Paperback’s“Going out of Business” sale; it was a graphic novel, which is not a literaryformat that I typically gravitate towards (though my husband is a big comicbook guy), but it looked appealing to me. I think back now to that day in thewaning weeks of fall 1990 -- it was not the potential intellectual merit of DisneyAdventures that leapt out at me; it was the comic in the back. So, too, wasthe root of my initial interest in Gene Luen Yang’s Level Up, which Iread cover-to-cover a couple days later and found greatly enjoyable. Will it,decades from now, hold as firm a place in my memories as that now dog-earedDisney magazine from days long past?
Thebrick-and-mortar bookstore is an endangered species, much like another belovedinstitution of mine, the brick-and-mortar record store. Both of these are beingreplaced by commerce centered around electronic books (ewww!) and mp3s (yuck!) inexchange for physical formats. While I jest somewhat -- these media formatsboth have their uses and their merits, and I have been known to utilize both atvarious times -- there is nothing like holding a physical book in your hand,and seeing the words come alive with the turning of each page, or carefullyplacing a record on a vintage turntable and hearing its music, crisp and cleanand warm, emanating from your speakers. That said, Mr. Paperback’s resiliencein a dying industry, especially within the confines of a mall that has teeteredon the precipice above “dead mall” status at least once or twice during itslengthy history, is nothing short of impressive. All good things do seem tofind their way to eventual endings, though, and it is into the annals ofhistory that the longstanding local book chain must now transition.
It isinto those same annals of history, too, for the memories of Mr. Paperback thatI hold so dear. All the bookstores that I frequented in my childhood are gone,as well as the stores at which I bought my first cassette tapes years ago. TheAirport Mall itself, too, bears little resemblance to the mall that I grew upwith, in which I went shopping with my mother, my grandmother, or otherrelatives. The closing of Mr. Paperback is almost the final death blow to themall that I knew. Rines, the local women’s clothing store that my mother usedto drag me into, despite my pleas to not have to endure another store full ofclothes and devoid of toys? It’s now the county DMV office, though it bearsmany architectural vestiges of its former self. Twin City Coin, where I boughtbaseball cards with my dad as a kid? It’s now a sketchy establishment hawking“For Tobacco Use Only” paraphernalia. Dream Machine, the arcade that my brotherand I used to take our report cards to in order to get free tokens for games?It’s now the “Maine Smoke Shop,” a considerably less-kid-friendly place.Freese’s Department Store? I bid farewell to that local legend back in the late1980s, when a much younger version of myself peered through a darkened doorwayinto a lifeless store, where countertops and registers were covered by whitecloths, almost like a room full of inanimate ghosts; this I vividly remember asthe moment that I became interested in retail history, and the lives and deathsof individual stores, an interest that, obviously, remains with me now.
As Mr.Paperback goes gentle into that good night (apologies to Dylan Thomas), I findmyself both regretful and relieved that work and academic obligations preventedme from getting to the store in time to say goodbye on this day, which I hadbeen informed would contain its final hours of operation. It felt like I was ina film as I walked hastily into the mall after driving over directly from myworkplace. I saw the darkness behind the plate-glass windows before I evenrounded the corner. I knew it was over, and I was greatly saddened, but I alsoknew that I had been spared the inevitable emotional awkwardness of sayinggoodbye to a space that was so crucial to my childhood.
Isnapped a few photos, peered wistfully through the glass into the darkenedinterior of the store, and walked back outside. I called my husband, told him Iwas at the Airport Mall, and said, “I didn’t make it in time.” He understood.
Somemight find it silly, the act of saying goodbye to a place. But sentimentalityis powerful, and while some are not burdened by it, others form greatattachments to those things which provoke feelings of nostalgia -- the sights,sounds, tastes of our pasts -- the “good old days” that were rarely actually asgood as we consider them to be in retrospect. I am in the latter camp, and Ifind no shame in that.
Sofarewell, Mr. Paperback. You will always have a place in my memories, andthose, I’m sure, of many other people as well.
Oh, andthanks for selling me that big computer desk for five dollars the other day,the one from the back room that had the cobwebs and price stickers from 1995 onit. It’s found a good home, I assure you.
Maybesomeday, I’ll even write a book on it.
Mr. Paperback closed on March 26, 2012. The first photo is from their now defunct website, the others were taken by Kendra.
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