The first I knew of it was when I walked in to the 3 storey Cambridge store to find the place stripped. 80% of the popular stock & 50% of the rest is gone. Everything is discounted by between 20 & 50%.

And that rather explains their disappearance. Even so discounted, everything I wanted was cheaper on Amazon, so I added it to my wishlist instead of buying it instore.

Borders has, to me, always been a fancy library with a coffeeshop and a till for me to pay an “i want it now” premium.

And even then Waterstones had better coffee and a more library-like feel.

They couldn’t keep up their original low prices & they didn’t have great coffee, stock or atmosphere. In fact, the only irreplaceable facet was their superb collection of periodicals…

So, goodbye Borders. You’ll be missed, but you were hardly a Fopp.