Oh OK so one of my roles now is to explain to you whippersnappers how we did things in the prehistoric days of the early 1990s

So before Amazon or even the Borders/Barnes&Noble boom we had to get books somewhere

Malls would usually have a Waldenbooks or something, but it would be a single or double standard storewidth on one floor, not the anchor or entrance spur jumbo. So it would have a pretty decent selection of recent stuff and classic staples (and, like, horse calendars) but not much depth.

We actually had 3 places to buy books in the downtown of our small town that grew into a center of development suburbia

• a children’s bookstore
• a used bookstore where you’d take the stuff you were done and exchange it for cash or let’s be real store credit
• at first a newsagent, which was like all sorts of magazines and out-of-region newspapers, but also books like more than a grocery or drugstore pulp genre aisle, maybe about the same breadth of range as an airport bookshop but not so business traveler-targeted
  
• later an independent (but not really indie) bookshop in the old County Linen location

There was also another used bookstore in the weird off-brand ‘70s shopping center a town or so over, and a Christian bookstore I had cause to go to once but can’t for the life of me remember why. And I guess the porn store out by the mall, and the comic book shop that opened in town in the mid-90s.

BUT

The best one of all, pretty much the best one you could get if you didn’t live in a city with The Strand or Powell’s or something, was this one, the Atlantic Book Warehouse

Which spun off from actual warehouse ops of this regional chain, Atlantic Books, they’d have just pallets or cardboard boxes of books hanging out on the floor at wholesale price, you could swoop in and collect a few months’ reading at once

(I realize now that “knowing the relative merits of retail outlets for any given type of goods in a 1-hour driving radius and efficiently scheduling their regular purchase” was a real, impressive, cultivated edge of my homemaker mother that I was undervaluing)

Also by the checkout lines there were bins of like 25¢ floppies, I def. remember seeing Wolfenstein 3D in there but by then like Doom II was out and you’d get CDs full of shareware games with every computer magazine