Borders R.I.P.

The death knell sounds for Borders today. Read the article from the Wall Street Journal, and reported in this morning’s Shelf Awareness.

Once upon a time, there was a lovely chain of independent bookstores based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The small chain was owned by two brothers and the stores were called Borders. Borders was special. It was different. It had standards. And it had expectations of its employees. In order to work at Border’s one had to take (and pass!) a somewhat stringent literary quiz. It just made sense. Then, in 1992, the brothers decided to take their company public, and along came K-Mart, the parent company of Waldenbooks. Suddenly…