Once upon a time in New Orleans, there was a stately Beaux-Arts funeral home. The Bultman Mortuary Service ushered citizens off in style from 1883 until 2005, when Hurricane Katrina badly damaged the building and the business never recovered. In 2008, following a $9 million renovation, it reopened as the city’s sole bookstore chain: Borders. It lived a short life, just three years. Today it’s a grocery store.
Small still looms large here. New Orleans has roughly 500,000 residents—though that figure nearly doubles during the two weeks of Jazz Fest each April— yet it remains a place where independent bookstores can flourish, while big-box chains falter. Shakespeare & Co. may be gone from New York, as are smaller outfits such as Williamsburg’s Book Thug Nation, and the Lower East Side’s radical-chic Bluestockings Cooperative. But in the city that was once home to Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, and Sherwood Anderson, old literary nooks are expanding and new ones keep opening.
