Too funny! Michael Jennings at Samizdata visits his local Books. Etc. (Borders to us yanks) and despairs at the employee picks of John Pilger and Noam Chomsky. So he makes some of his own and returns to the store -- great fun.

On a more serious side, he links to a great article in The Atlantic, "Two--Make That Three--Cheers for the Chain Bookstores" by Brooke Allen. I have always liked Borders and Banes & Noble and received great disapprobation from my friends.

"The book business was an elitist, standoffish institution," Len Riggio told BusinessWeek in 1998. "I liberated it from that." Riggio's critics have mocked his populist pose, but it should be taken seriously. Before the appearance of the chains, a relatively highbrow, urban clientele shopped at the independents, and a relatively lowbrow, largely regional one bought mass-market titles at supermarkets, price clubs, and drugstores. Now, thanks to the chains and to Internet sales, the vast territory between the two extremes has been bridged. Elitists may carp, but the truth is that they are no longer quite so elite. These days shoppers in Buford, Georgia, and Rapid City, South Dakota, can pick up important titles such as Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages, Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, and Andrew Motion's biography of John Keats—titles that are neither "popular" nor newly published—at their local Borders. (None of these books were available at the venerated independent Manhattan bookstores St. Marks Bookshop and Three Lives, or at Los Angeles's hip and highbrow Book Soup, when I called.)