Jeff Deutsch - In Praise of Good Bookstores

From a devoted reader and lifelong bookseller, an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of bookstores

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutschthe director of Chicagos Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the worldpays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predictsperhaps audaciouslya future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations.

In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutschs arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsingsince, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection.

In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them.

In this charming work, a revered bookseller puts into words the strong but often inarticulate feeling that many booklovers have about the importance of bookstores. Deutsch makes an eloquent case for the way bookstores educate readers as no classroom or library can. His wide-ranging reflections teach us to value the bookstore as a site not of goods but of experiences.

LEAH PRICE, author of What We Talk about When We Talk about Books

A compendium of delights for the thoughtful reader. Deutsch, a gifted writer and riveting storyteller, has written a concisely elegant topography of the good bookstore that also illuminates the seemingly opaque craft of bookselling. This book is bound to be the fulcrum of discussionsamong readers, booksellers, editors, and publishersabout the meaning and role of bookstores.

PAUL YAMAZAKI, City Lights Bookstore

A promiscuously erudite love letter to bookstores, books, readers, writers, and the unique community that they constitute, Deutschs hypnotic book is generously laced with memorable and often hilarious quotations, and offers the exquisite pleasures of browsing through the book-lined mind of an omnivorously literate reader and bookseller.

WENDY DONIGER, author of The Hindus

Maintaining an open society requires educated citizens, book culture, and bookstores, one of the few truly democratic institutions, open to all. Infused with a deep love of his profession, bookselling, Jeff Deutschs reflection on reading, learning, and well-run bookstores is breathtaking. Read and share this compelling and engaging book.

HAKI R. MADHUBUTI, founder of Third World Press and author of Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language

IN PRAISE OF GOOD BOOKSTORES

In Praise of Good Bookstores

JEFF DEUTSCH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2022 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Deutsch, Jeff, [Date] author.

Title: In praise of good bookstores / Jeff Deutsch. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021040299 (print) | LCCN 2021040300 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691207766 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691229669 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Booksellers and booksellingUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Booksellers and booksellingUnited StatesHistory21st century. | BookstoresSocial aspects. | Books and readingSocial aspects. | Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Inc. | Deutsch, Jeff, [Date] | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC Z473 .D48 2022 (print) | LCC Z473 (ebook) | DDC 341/.4500209730904dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040299

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040300

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Text and Cover Design: Chris Ferrante

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Maria Whelan and Kate Farquhar-Thomson

Copyeditor: Cynthia Buck

Cover and endpaper illustrations by Aimee David

To the booksellers past, present, and future who humbly and quietly distinguish this profession

To Linda, Haskell, and Erica, whose bookishness and love provided the model

To May, that brilliant bookseller, whose love is the greatest gift I ever received from bookselling

And similarly we all have ready to our access in the bookshop, one of the greatest instruments of civilization; and yet none of usneither publishers, booksellers, nor customershave yet learned more than an inkling of what that place can accomplish.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

No man, therefore, can serve both books and Mammon.

RICHARD DE BURY

You already belong to your time.

LYDIA DAVIS

IN PRAISE OF GOOD BOOKSTORES

AN INTRODUCTION

Let Your enormous Library be justified.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Library of Babel

The sociologist Edward Shils wrote, It may well be that we live in an epoch in which the bookshop is an institution suspended between the dying old society and the society struggling to be born. Would that we were living in an epoch in which the bookshop itself was so clearly the given, as it was in Shilss.

Throughout the centuries, we booksellers have looked back on a more genteel or refined era, when the business of selling quality books to serious general readers was viable. But our nostalgia, like much nostalgia, is likely fictive, or at least imprecise; good bookstores have never made good business sense. We know from Shilss 1963 essay The Bookshop in America that the difficulty of maintaining good bookstores isnt new, but in our time it has become ever more acute, as the society struggling to be born might well leave the bookstores behind altogether if we dont develop a model that supports what is best in them.

Shils was a particularly eloquent practitioner of a genre: the lamentation of the state of bookselling in our time. Speaking to the newly formed Booksellers League in 1895, its president, Charles T. Dillingham, remarked upon the gradual decrease in the number of retail booksellers as a distinct class, noting that there are few left of the species outside the large cities.

We dont need another lamentation of the state of bookselling in our time, but I do think that, before its too late, we would be wise to consider a certain ideal of booksellingthat we imagine a future in which bookstores not only endure but realize their highest aspirations.