Metro Bookstores
A giant hole exists in the heart of the Metro area. Between the Borders on the Northwest Expressway and Norman’s Barnes & Noble, a span of 26 miles that must be home to tens of thousands of book-reading, coffee-drinking, magazine-perusing Oklahomans, there are exactly zero big-box bookstores.
I have to admit that every time a construction project of a certain size starts going up on my benighted side of town, a tiny spark of hope flickers in my heart. Inevitably the building will turn out to be another 24-hour pharmacy, and I’ll wonder again if some sophisticated demographic study has led the corporate decision-makers to conclude that this massive stretch of urban real estate couldn’t support such an enterprise.
Maybe there are too many others like me who use these giant bookstores like libraries. I’ll read a magazine article or two if I can find a vacant overstuffed chair, and I’ll page through a few books that have caught my eye and write down the titles to look up later on the real library’s online catalog. This probably counts as some sort of intangible shoplifting since I’m not paying for the pleasure of reading these words-for-sale, but if they were that concerned I can’t believe they’d have made the chairs so comfortable.
Oklahoma City’s Black Hole of Big Bookstores has also happily left room for a few hardy, independent shops to fill the literary void.
My favorite is Book Beat & Co., which is exactly the kind of singular, ruggedly individualist bookstore that the giant chains would try to crush under their wheels. Book Beat & Co. has moved to several locations around the south side of Oklahoma City since it opened in 1997, and its current site at 1139 SW 59th Street features an amazing collection of art, music, and books that founder Shilo Brown describes as ”the rare and obscure, even the forbidden.”
The store’s “Electric Chair Gallery” of local artists is an Oklahoma City treasure in itself, and the well-tended shelves of great fiction, art, music, philosophy, and avant-garde books make Book Beat & Co. an unmissable destination for Metro book lovers. As the staff personally selects each title, they can almost always provide the best kind of personal insight from one book lover to another. Book Beat & Co. is also a hangout for Oklahoma writers and artists and stocks a great selection of locally-grown books, zines, CDs, and chapbooks.
Maybe the south side doesn’t needs its own soulless book super-stores after all.
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Comments
Don’t tease us with the whole Barnes & Noble on the the southside fantasy. I fear, sadly, that it will not happen in my lifetime. On the upside, the BookBeat is a great store as long as you don’t piss off the owner or his dog (whose name I believe is Shakespeare? Or did I make that up.)
[...] to question their identities and the value of their existence. I’ve already noted the criminal shortage of bookstores around here, for one [...]
This made me want to watch You’ve Got Mail again, but stop in the middle and re-write the ending so the Shop Around the Corner co-exists peacefully with Fox Books! Wouldn’t that be perfect? You could have both worlds – the huge selection of the chains or the personal attention of the mom and pop shop. I wonder if that’s possible in real life…