January 10, 2022
Deutsch, director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, reflects on the importance of bookselling in his moving debut. In contemporary society, Deutsch laments, there are “few spaces for conversation and meaningful encounter.” Bookstores, though, are one of the only spaces left that provides a forum for “explicit and tacit public conversation” in the form of dialogues between the bookseller and store patrons, among customers, or at literary readings. Bookstores, Deutsch writes, are an anomalous institution in an age of profit-driven capitalism, and they offer unique spaces for cultivating other values, such as friendship and community. Deutsch draws on literature, as well, bringing up insights from 19th-century art critic John Ruskin to critique Amazon’s model for bookselling, which Deutsch calls “false, unnatural, and destructive,” and readers will learn that poet James Russell Lowell used the word browse about reading for the first time in 1870 (before that, it meant to chew cud). Plenty of time is dedicated to Deutsch’s touching reflections on the Co-op, too: it “seemed as close to a spiritual home as one could hope to find.” A resonant elegy to a changing business, this will hit the spot for literature lovers.
January 15, 2022
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.
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Starred review from March 15, 2022
Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, offers an eloquent and inspiring paean to the community bookstore. He is a philosophical ambassador for this embattled cultural institution, a veteran of the book business who clearly understands the stark realities of profit margins and the compromises that bookstores must make to stay afloat, such as selling coffee and other ephemera. A deeply read and engaging guide, Deutsch presents the bookstore as "a necessary part of the habitat of a lively intelligence in touch with the world" and observes that a good bookstore must not only understand the many needs of its customers but must also provide the conditions for discovery. "French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy understands the bookseller to be a transcendental reader: she provides her clients with the conditions of possibility for reading," because "no one ever entered a bookstore without having in his soul some fertilizable granule of human possibility." Deutsch identifies various types of browsers, naming the flaneur, sandpiper, town crier, pilgrim, devotee, penitent, and stargazer, each in hope of unearthing some heretofore unknown treasure. The bookseller, Deutsch argues, performs a sort of alchemy, organizing the space to facilitate seemingly serendipitous discovery, similar to the alchemy leading a reader to discover unexpected treasures within oneself. Give this a prime spot on that Front Table.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.