Shopping for Books in Waikiki

Hawai`i has never been known, to our knowledge, as a Mecca for book lovers in the way mainland locations such as the Boston and San Francisco areas are renowned. While there are good bookstores around the islands, it's safe to say that the tally is more like a small handful than a large grouping.

So, what then are the prospects in Waikiki for the tourist (or resident) who wants a couple of "beach" books, or maybe something more substantial, like some scholarly Hawaiiana, local fiction, tourist guides, and other varieties of reading matter?

Those prospects have varied over time, but they were never great, and as of this writing, we're only able to find a single dedicated bookstore in all of Waikiki, and that's the Borders Express in the Royal Hawaiian Center.

Borders Express used to be in the Waikiki Shopping Plaza; it was once a Waldenbooks before that chain was bought out and converted. It has since moved across the street and down the block. We'll give them credit; it's a relatively small store, but it has a nice collection of Hawaiiana, from tourist guides to books on the Hawaiian language, some very high quality histories and commentaries, and quite a lot more.

They have a few books about Waikiki (there aren't tons of these in print, and the store stocks some representative entries).

The store isn't necessarily easy to find if you don't know about it or aren't looking for it; you're not likely to just "run into" it by accident. This may leave some visitors with the unfortunate and mistaken impression that there are no bookstores in Waikiki.

Indeed, there are no others, and it's all a bit of a sad tale. While we don't have the complete history (and please let us know if you can add some detail), we've heard there was once a Christian book store in Waikiki. There have also been some used bookstores; a man named Summers ran one on the second floor of the location below, at Ka`iulani and Kuhio, a few years back. It lasted a year or so, as we recall.

More recently the same ill-fated location (first floor this time) housed The Recycled Bookstore. It changed owners and moved to the rather unappealing location shown below on Prince Edward Street, but didn't last long there either and closed in January, 2011.

Then there was a branch of the locally-owned and operated Bestsellers Books and Records. At one time, Bestsellers had multiple O`ahu locations, with their "flagship" store downtown and even a branch at Honolulu International Airport. Their Waikiki location was in a little shopping plaza in Hilton Hawaiian Village and was called The Ohana Reading Room and Library. It opened in September, 2007 and closed in January, 2010. Bestsellers has since gone completely out of business, island-wide.

And as the saying goes, "That's all, folks."

If you're still with us, you may ask us if this is really is an issue that merits so much column space. It's a reasonable question, so please stay with us just a little longer.

Our view is that this does indeed matter, even though we'd be the first ones to admit that a hypothetical row of book stalls and shops along Kalakaua Avenue, a la the Seine in Paris, won't bring in droves of tourists seeking the latest Hawaiian history books.

But it still matters because we don't want Waikiki (and by extension, Hawai`i in general) to be viewed as a lowest-common-denominator tourist market, a sort of mindless Disneyland of popularized, inaccurate and sometimes demeaning representations of Hawai`i and Hawaiian culture. The presence of intellectually-oriented establishments, such as bookstores, goes a long way toward avoiding such an all-too easily acquired impression.

We believe, perhaps naively, that it is possible to appeal to a wide range of visitors and residents without compromise and without reducing our culture to pre-digested pap. In fact, we believe that striving for a higher intellectual level will add to our appeal, not reduce it.

The failure of one bookstore after another seems on the face of things to argue against our position. But bookstore failures are a nation-wide problem these days; even Borders itself has filed for bankruptcy and will be closing many stores (no O`ahu locations are scheduled for shuttering, but the neighbor islands stand to lose a couple of stores).

What we'd really like to see, and what we think would stand a good chance at success, is for a serious-minded Hawaiian operator, such as we see in Ward Centers at Native Books and Beautiful Things (who themselves once had a small shop at Hilton Hawaiian Village which, alas, did not sell books) take the chance with a Waikiki location. We think it would have great appeal and beneficial effect. Any takers out there?