Bookstore blues

By Andrew McNamara May

The bookstore is a cool place on the Oakland Campus. Being a somewhat local and commuter university, it is rather hard to find good Oakland merch anywhere.

I found an Oakland basketball hoodie at Great Lakes Crossing Outlets, but it was on a blue moon. There might have been an alignment of Mercury and Jupiter that day too.

But those are the kind of days that make someone want to play blackjack. It just feels like your luck stat is ten.

There is a seedy underbelly to the shrine to school spirit, however. Its bookstore is a demi-bookstore of sorts. It mostly operates as a merch store.

Sorry Mario, the bookstore is in another castle.

No section of commonly needed books exists to just peruse. Aside from the bare minimum in terms of stationery, it simply does not feel like a bookstore.

It really isn’t. In the universities on words, it is a storefront for the online bookstore provided by eCampus.

Students these days might not even know it, but there’s a ghost in the Oakland Center.

Tucked away in the basement once lived a store like Barnes & Noble.

Recently, a series of decisions resulted in it being stripped of almost all its bookish inventory and moved upstairs.

Almost everyone must walk past the bookstore on their way into the center now.

But no one must go there to buy a book. No one gets to stand in a line that looks like it belongs at Cedar Point for the book buyback periods.

Yes. Barnes & Noble would buy your books back. You would stand in line with your friends and make friends.

Today’s students go to their bookstore online, maintain their relationships with friends and family online, research online, date online, go outside online and do pretty much everything else online. It is a tragedy, then, when the school removes the reason to go outside and to have to get together.

Unfortunately, students do not look to greener pastures on this front after donning a grad cap.

The death of the third space is well documented. It has itself been beaten half to death by every commentator, video blogger, senate-hopeful, late-night host and white-wine aunts.

Barnes & Noble outside of campus is an endangered species as well. Bookstores more broadly have been one of the biggest losers of the 21st-century shift to e-commerce.

But the Starbucks next to it is laid out to favor transient traffic. Overworked employees and gig workers, coming and going like a tide. Gone is the fireplace to sit by the squad and talk about who’s dating whom and what project is giving whoever the greatest wallop at that time.

In a world that runs a little bit closer to personal pods out of The Matrix every day, Oakland’s campus still represents one of the peak third spaces its students will encounter throughout their lives.

It is a waste of money not to lightly loiter by the clock tower, not to use the recreation center and not to eat a meal dug into the habitat somewhere like a tick.

Even if you can’t buy and sell your books there.