I don't recall if it played before intermission — when the organist emerged, gracefully arising on his bench, lifted pneumatically from an orchestra pit — or after intermission, when the organist disappeared and the house lights dimmed again for the second feature of the evening. In either case, I do vaguely remember watching The Shop Around the Corner with my sister and her friends at Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre.

The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 black-and-white MGM movie that was remade in the late '90s with Jimmy Stewart replaced by Tom Hanks, Margaret Sullavan replaced by Meg Ryan, and a leather-goods shop in Budapest replaced by bookstores in New York City. (Wikipedia reminds me, as perhaps my dad will also remind me, that the 1940 American-made movie is itself an adaptation of a Hungarian stage play from the '30s.) The villain of Nora Ephron's 1998 version is the chain bookstore: a barely disguised Barnes & Noble.

Now, the Tom Hanks character's conglomerate is coming to Alameda:

New York (September 3, 2025) – Barnes & Noble announces that it is to acquire Books Inc., the longtime Bay Area brick-and-mortar bookseller. Books Inc. has filed a motion asking the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California to allow the sale of its assets to BI Acquisition Co., LLC, an affiliate of Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Inc., for $3.25 million.

If the acquisition is approved, the 174-year-old Books Inc. will preserve its independent identity. Books Inc. will continue to trade under its brand name, preserving the company’s seven neighborhood store locations, together with two stores operated at San Francisco International Airport.

And yet with the passage of time, is the villain still the villain?

Per the bullet-pointed access-journalists at Axios in 2023:

B&N managers apparently now have more discretion to stock their stores as they see fit to serve their local customers. Publishers no longer buy shelf placement, in the same manner as soda pop and potato chip conglomerates pay Safeway to have their products placed at eye level. What used to be a predictably large expanse of discount coffee table books about World War II for "dad" and stacks of self-help books for "mom" now has some of the range and character more typically associated with independent booksellers.

In addition to their existing big box outlets, B&N has also recently started opening smaller format stores. This blog previously joked about how sadly representative of "SiliValley" it was when Books Inc. in downtown Burlingame was replaced with an upscale botox and liposuction clinic. And yet more recently, a small format B&N store has opened nearby on Burlingame Ave. It's actually fine. Not as good as a 20th century independent bookstore. Nor as good as a Borders (my preferred of those two chains). Still, that small-format B&N store in Burlingame is certainly a reasonable place to read the blurbs on the back of adult fiction; to read a chapter and a half of adult trade non-fiction to decide if it's actually engaging or merely a magazine article bloated into a book; to buy a present to take to a birthday party; or to let your own kid pick out something ("Up to 15 dollars. Any book you want. No toys! O.K., O.K., up to 20 dollars. Umm, yeah, you didn't factor in tax... but it's time to get going... so I guess I'm just going to buy that for you now...") to take home for themselves.

The future of bookselling across the Bay Area and in Alameda may not be as expansively broad and niche-filled as it was in the past. (R.I.P. Stacey's, A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, Printers Inc, the Stanford Bookstore technical annex, Computer Literacy, Cody's, University Press Books, Virgin Megastore, Alexander Book Co, etc., etc. While we're at it, R.I.P to Fry's Electronics as well, since among their many money-losing decisions that I vaguely recall was to add a book section at one point as well. No doubt others will recall even more Bay Area bookstores long gone.) And yet perhaps almost like a Hungarian play from the '30s continuing its life as a '90s Hollywood movie, booksellers in the Bay Area and Alameda may change their outward appearances and ownership structures, while continuing to entertain and serve their local customers. (I'd joke that it's about time for the Nora Ephron rom-coms to be rebooted, but I wouldn't even know which TikTok influencers of today would be cast as Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Would a YouTube podcaster be tapped to play Billy Crystal?)

Should this acquisition move ahead, hopefully the Alameda branch of "Books & Noble" will employ the same faces behind the counter, roll over my spouse's stash of loyalty points, and — especially when our daughter eventually decides to cash in her hoard of gift cards — sell us all some more books.