The Reading Room, the only literary bookstore on the Strip, is closing at Mandalay Place. The closing date is likely to fall in March, though that has not been settled, nor has what will be taking the bookstore's place.
But according to Scott Voeller, vice president of hotel marketing at Mandalay Bay, the decision is final: "We are really looking at who our customers are and the mix of stores overall, and that is what this is about, part of a process of constant reevaluation."
Interestingly, literary life in Vegas has never been so high-profile with two new novels set here: "Beautiful Children" by Charles Bock and "The Delivery Man" by Joe McGinniss Jr. Both books have been embraced by locals, and the writers have given readings in town and been interviewed by the local public radio station. Both books have been excerpted by an alternative weekly. For Vegas, this is a lot of attention to give to literary fiction.
The list of masterpieces of Las Vegas fiction, in my opinion, has yet to lodge a single candidate. Obviously, there is one book that is considered a classic set in Vegas: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson. But the story is not told as fiction and, even then, Vegas is grotesquely caricatured by an author less interested in observing the Strip than in using Vegas as a stand-in for larger points about America.
But if you want to read books like these about Vegas while visiting, the Reading Room was the only place inside a Strip resort you'd be likely to find these titles. There is nothing on the Strip like the stock of books and magazines at the Reading Room, which boasts not just a strong contemporary fiction section, but also a poetry section, as well as odd specialty books and limited editions. Otherwise, unless you count the paperbacks you can buy in snack shops or the high-end first edition market, Strip resorts and their shopping malls do not have bookstores.
As with most of the cool things on the Strip, the Reading Room was originally a pet project of a Las Vegas executive, Glenn Schaeffer, once president of the Mandalay Resort Group. Schaeffer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he saw potential in an area most book retailers thought of as a literary dead zone. Unlike most of the other retail shops at Mandalay Place, the employees of the Reading Room are employees of the casino.
