IN PRAISE OF GOOD BOOKSTORES

The director of Chicago’s renowned Seminary Co-op Bookstore ponders the ingredients that make a bookstore worth visiting.

“We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books,” writes Deutsch. “In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient and inconvenient way to buy books in the twenty-first century.” That is, of course, because we have Amazon, with its long tail and ability to stock every one of the millions of books on the market. That does not mean, writes the author, that we should surrender to Leviathan and abandon those inefficient bookstores. Amazon’s dominance comes at a cost to literate culture, including the loss of the ability to browse the shelves and consult a bookseller who knows the stock. “What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!” Deutsch exults. A brick-and-mortar bookstore allows plenty of room for such browsing within the bounds of a curated collection, for it can’t hold everything. Deutsch notes that his bookstore sold 28,000 titles in 2019, and almost 17,000 of those were single copies. The single copy speaks to the single reader, and the author sagely allows that the principal work of the bookseller is to anticipate the needs and moods of the solitary browser. It’s thanks to online competition, rising costs, a clogged supply chain, and many other such matters that physical bookstores have to carry things like coffee and greeting cards, but these are essential to the bottom line, much as purists may scoff at them. By Deutsch’s accounting, sidelines comprise about a fifth of a bookstore’s income. Bookstores are more than mere sites of commerce, of course: They’re places of community, and, as the author memorably closes his argument, the books they sell are “exceptional tools to cultivate our own interior landscape, which, after all, is our portable and permanent homeland.”

A pleasant bibliophilic excursion, as books about books usually are.