one of the largest book outlets in the country."

Other department stores followed. Through the middle of the 20th century, they controlled as much as half the book trade. Small book chains like Brentano's and Doubleday also appeared. Then, as now, independent booksellers grumbled about sweetheart deals and the chains resolutely middlebrow taste. Additional competition from discount stores and grocers hardly helped. "[T]he ordinary book outlet must now compete with everything from delicatessens to whore houses," Miller quotes one miffed observer from 1954.

"Bookselling is essentially a consignment business," points out Andrew Laties, VP of the Brooklyn bookstore Vox Pop, in his recent memoir-cum-manifesto Rebel Bookseller (Vox Pop). In that innocuous statement resides the predicament of independent bookselling. Prodded by the Depression, in the 1930s publisher Alfred Knopf let bookstoresbooks. It was a boom time for publishersat least, until that unsold "wallpaper" got returned.

Secondly, a 1979 Supreme Court ruling (Thor Power Tool Company
v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue) changed inventory accounting, encouraging retailers to dump unsold goods before the end of their fiscal year. A huge market in remaindered books was born, and chains now had a surefire promotional item to load up their display tables. It's the most profoundly unnoticed trend of literary culture in the last two decades. "I feel like I've been trapped in the publisher's model of featuring new books," says Sarah McNally, whose 2004 founding of a successful new Manhattan book- store, McNally Robinson, is a most notable exception to the trend of bookstore closings. "A publisher's P&L [profit and loss statement] means