One of life's necessities; a bookstore with personality.

When I was a lonely, strange adolescent (is there any other kind?), a few things saved me. One was the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, a respected but still underappreciated writer. His Winesburg, Ohio showed that there were stories all around me in a middle-sized Midwestern town. Life wasn't only elsewhere, after all. Art mattered deeply, too; I bought any books and magazines I could that reproduced the works of surrealist and abstract expressionist painters. And poetry: My parents were friends with a few poets, and I was astonished at the illuminating and beautiful work that could come from such, ordinary-seeming adults.

But none of this would have been possible, and my adolescent life certainly would have been a paler and more depleted time, without Shadid's Bookstore.

Shadid's opened when I was about twelve - right in time. Mitch Shadid and his brother Woody had operated newsstands for years (I bought my first copy of Astounding Science Fiction at one of them), but Mitch really came into his own when they opened Shadid's. The only other bookstores in town were a Catholic shop (run by my father, which was a sort of front for his Templegate Publishers), a Protestant shop (run by a local Baptist church), and a stationery store with a corner devoted to best sellers, dictionaries, and atlases.

Shadid's brought to Springfield, Illinois, a concentration of literary quarterlies, art journals, quality paperbacks, and modern poetry, in addition to the usual range of best sellers, science fiction, detective stories, and other bookstore staples. It even carried some theology: I bought John Meyendorff's The Orthodox Church there. (Mitch was an Arab-American member of the Anti-ochian Orthodox church and always wanted to have one or two books about Orthodoxy available.) Shadid's was arguably the best bookstore north of Saint Louis and south of Chicago.

There were some nicely eccentric touches about Shadid's. Once books had been broken into the broadest categories - popular fiction, drama, poetry, etc. - they were divided not alphabetically, by author, but by publisher.

Since I came from a publishing family this made perfect sense to me, and I quickly learned the difference between the style of graphic design favored by Grove Press and the style favored by Viking. It also made for fruitful browsing. Grove published many Kerouac titles, but Shadid's arrangement placed his books near Samuel Beckett, which is how I came to read him. I remember once that when someone told Mitch he could probably pull in more revenue if he devoted less space to the slower-moving quality paperbacks and books of poetry, he said firmly, "This town deserves a good bookstore."

Bookstores are essential to book lovers. I know you can buy books on the internet, or over the phone, but every serious book lover finds a pleasure unlike any other in browsing through a good bookstore.

There is a legitimate worry that book chains of the Barnes and Noble/Borders sort will kill off good independent stores, and it seems to be happening all over. It happened to Shadid's. Mitch retired, Woody took over, and then sold the store. Its quality declined, and with the advent of a Barnes and Noble store it folded.

It's paradoxical that a phenomenon that has hurt small bookstores has benefited small publishers. The chains buy from small presses in volume, and while there is always the chance that copies will flood back before the deadline for returns has passed, there is more exposure, and consequently more sales, for small presses.

And for book-lovers the chains can also be a good thing. A Borders store not far from me has a great selection, the salespeople are pretty knowledgeable (this isn't true of most chain stores), and I enjoy spending time there. But there is a danger that even more book publishers will begin publishing with a look only at the bottom line, and they are already looking at the large chains for guidance on what to publish. This isn't encouraging. A rude Barnes and Noble executive, speaking at a recent symposium on the current state of publishing, made a point of citing Cynthia Ozick's meager sales at his chain. The rudeness came from the fact that Ozick was present.

I am not entirely pessimistic. Good books continue to be published, and a look at the best-seller lists of fifty years ago shows that we haven't fallen from any heights. But the dwindling number of independent bookstores is a real cultural loss. Mitch Shadid loved the book business and did a wonderful job of serving a public who loved the Shadid family and the store they ran together. Much as I appreciate the selection at the Borders I go to, I miss the personal-aspect of browsing in a good small shop run by a handful of people I know. I can't think of many commercial enterprises for which I feel lifelong gratitude, but I do feel that way about Shadid's Bookstore, and miss it.