how the news of borders closing made my week.

 {despite countless internet searches, I couldn't find an original source for this photo. help?}

Have you heard?

Borders is shutting its doors, nationwide this time. A buyer for the brand backed out at the last minute, and now sources report that all of the chain’s stores will be closed by the end of September.

It feels a little bit like when The Shop Around the Corner closed, except this time, the roles are reversed, and the loser is big, bad Fox Books.

My fingers are crossed that this means good news for wannabe-Kathleen Kellys everywhere (though mainly, the one who resides in Tallahassee, Florida).

Sure, I’m sad. Borders was never my bookstore of choice — I’ve long been a Barnes and Noble girl — but our local store is close to my work, and I enjoy dropping in to browse the shelves. It doesn’t hurt that Borders distributes coupons like they’re going out of style, meaning I almost never purchased a book at full-price. (Part of their problem? Perhaps.)

I’m disappointed that many see the bookseller’s closings as death to paper, as a triumph for technology and the e-book. I’m afraid that my generation and the generations to come won’t know what joy reading can bring, that Google will, as is being reported, take over our brains, and the conversations at dinner parties will screech to a halt as iPhones get whipped out for a quick text or brief internet search.

There is a part of me, though, that has been giddy all week.

I first saw NPR’s report on Monday night, and my first thought was: It’s happening. The wheels are in motion for me to launch my dream.

Borders’ closing leaves two major bookstores in my town (not including the quirky used bookstores that allow cats to roam between the shelves). One store, I’m afraid, is not long for this world, due to its poor location in a dying shopping mall. The other… Well, the other, I refuse to even enter on moral grounds. (Okay, okay. It’s Books-a-Million. There’s nothing wrong with it per say, just your standard bookstore warehouse, with poor customer service and overbearing fluorescent lighting. I refuse to make a purchase there. A coworker of mine confided that she began a similar boycott over 10 years ago. So there you go.)

Where, you ask then, can Tallahasseeans go to buy a book? To mingle among the pages? To sit and quietly confer about which book to purchase and which book to leave behind?

It’s a good question, a question I keep asking myself as I drive by available storefronts and daydream about wood floors, comfy couches, and noisy espresso machines. As I say little bits of my dream out loud, I am, of course, discovering naysayers. Those people who believe opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop in this kind of economy, with Amazon.com as competition, is ludicrous.

But there are others who look excited, who realize the grand possibility that can come with having a local bookshop with an owner who genuinely cares about what she sells and how she sells it.

Yes, Borders is closing. But my dreams? They’re getting a little bit bigger every day.

(Now, just out of curiosity, where do you buy your books? Online? At a chain store? Do you have a local shop you frequent? What do you look for in a bookseller? Consider this market research.)