With Borders looking like it’s inevitably heading toward liquidation, questions arise regarding the effect the former giant’s departure from bookselling will have on the industry, the most troubling of which, perhaps, is whether Borders’ liquidation is just an early sign that bookselling is moving toward an exclusively digital model.

But there’s one possible solution toward keeping a measure of bookstores’ physical presence–and, strangely, it coincides with Borders’ demise: what if pop-up bookstores filled old Borders stores?

First things first: pop-up bookstores, retail venues that open for a limited time, are a new idea, and they’re certainly not going to be the idea that saves brick-and-mortar.

But the most recent pop-up, Word Up in Washington Heights, just announced that it will be open for two more months.

And earlier this year, a pop-up already moved into an old Borders. For one month, Fleeting Pages filled a Pittsburgh Borders store with a mission to showcase “independent & self-published work of all kinds, book arts, workshops, events…All revolving around written self-expression.” The project held at least one event every day and resulted in the sale of 2,700 items–roughly 100 a day. According to Jodi Morrison, the brains behind Fleeting Pages, some titles sold out and she had to request more from the authors.

So while these are certainly modest beginnings, they’re still some sort of beginning. And either way, it’s nice to think that instead of letting a 24,000 square foot space sit vacant and fall apart after a bookselling giant leaves, that it could be filled with books from smaller presses and self-published books? That in the husk of Borders the physical presence of bookstores could totally shift away from the corporate to the grassroots level?

Veronica Liu, editor of Seven Stories Press and creator of Word Up, says she needs all the help she can get. On the store’s website, she’s asking for a computer, toilet paper, and towels. How can you not support that?

Photo credit: iffita