to the online pages of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop.
Our Brick and Mortar Store is now closed
After nearly 30 years in business our brick and mortar bookshop is now closed. We thank all of those who supported us through the years.
Avenue Victor Hugo continues to exist in its online form. We have no plans to reopen another store, and as much as we enjoyed our customers through the years, we have no capacity to accept browsers at our new quarters in Abington, Massachusetts, but please checkout our website and do not hesitate to contact us with your requests or suggestions.
Our current stock of over 10,000 books covering almost every subject catagory includes a newly added collection in the fields of math and physics.
As always, our selection of fiction in all genres is especially large, but we have added much in various areas of history over the past year, and have now begun to add selected periodicals which have been too long in storage.
Please accept our apologies for parts of the website which do not function as they should. We are booksellers, not computer software experts so functional problems may not be solved as soon as we would like.
If you have difficulty searching our stock on the Avenue Victor Hugo site, please try our bookshop listing on-line at abe.com or biblio.com.
At present, credit card payments can only be accepted through paypal.com or the abe.com site.
For those unfamiliar with our rant at the time we were forced to close our shop, or those who might be provoked to think about what is being lost as the "bookshop" of the past is replaced by the "media marketing tool" of the present, we have left that statement for your consideration.
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The Crepuscule
Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores
Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them--offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.
1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)--a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware--for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.
2. Publishers--marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future of their industry, ignoring the art of typography, the craft of binding, and needs of editing, all to make a cheapened product of glue and glitz--for being careless of a 500 year heritage with devastating result.
3. Book buyers--those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who buy books according to price instead of content, and prefer what is popular over what is good--for creating a mass market of the cheap, the loud, and the shiny.
4. Writers--who sell their souls to be published, write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake, opt to feed the demands of editors rather than do their own best work, place style over substance, and bear no standards--for boring their readers unto television.
5. Booksellers--who supply the artificial demand created by marketing departments for the short term gain, accept second class treatment from publishers, push what is ‘hot’ instead of developing the long term interest of the reader--for failing to promote quality of content and excellence in book making.
6. Government (local, state and federal)--which taxes commercial property to the maximum, driving out the smaller and marginal businesses which are both the seed of future enterprise and the tradition of the past, while giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city--for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love.
7. Librarians--once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead--for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.
8. Book collectors--who have metamorphosed from book worms to moths attracted only to the bright; once the sentinels of a favorite author’s work, now mere speculators on the ephemeral product of celebrity--for putting books on the same level with beanie babies.
9. Teachers--assigning books because of topical appeal, or because of their own lazy familiarity, instead of choosing what is best; thus a tale about the teenage angst of a World War Two era prep school boy is pushed at students who do not know when World War Two took place--for failing to pass the torch of civilization to the next generation.
10. Editors--who have forgotten the editorial craft--for servicing the marketing department, pursuing fast results and name recognition over quality of content and offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats.
11. Reviewers--for promoting what is being advertised, puffing the famous to gain attention, being petty and personal, and praising the obscure with priestly authority--all the while being paid by the word.
12. The Public--those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization--for not caring about consequences.
Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge--and stare into the cold abyss of night.
John Usher
From THE HOUND by John Usher, copyright 2004.
Permission to reproduce is granted to all upon request with proper attribution.
