Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores. The author has had enough of the romanticization of the warm fuzzy independent bookstore.

In a syrupy scene in You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan lovingly

introduces one of her child customers to Maud Hart Lovelace’s

classic Betsy-Tacy series. Now, I am a Betsy-Tacy fan myself, as

are my children, and only a few weeks before seeing the movie I

had gone searching for some of the later books in the series. My

first stop was Books of Wonder, the famous Manhattan children’s

bookshop on which You’ve Got Mail’s independent appears to

have been based. The clerk there had never heard of the series,

and when she looked it up in Books in Print, she proceeded to

confuse it with another venerable series, Carolyn Haywood’s

Betsy books. The store, in any case, didn’t carry them. At Barnes

& Noble, on the other hand, I hit pay dirt on the first try: after only

a moment’s thought, the young clerk led me right to the shelf

where almost every volume in the series was stocked. Borders,

too, I soon ascertained, carried the Betsy-Tacy books. The Atlantic