In Praise of Good Bookstores

Jeff Deutsch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780691229652
  9780691207766
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691229669
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

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 Deutsch—the former director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world—pays 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 predicts—perhaps audaciously—a 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 Deutsch’s arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing—since, 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.

CHAPTER ONE

Space

Let attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it.

—MONTAIGNE, “Of Books,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 296

UNPURSUED APPOSITION

In a virtual age, the corporeality of the Seminary Co-op matters, even if, like many a legend, it has transcended its corporeal state. The Seminary Co-op is an idea, but it began in a place. It was a cooperative in the basement of a seminary. It is no longer a cooperative, and it is no longer in the basement of a seminary. Today the Seminary Co-op is housed in one of the least remarkable buildings in the architecturally rich Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Perhaps this setting might one day be part of its charm, just as exposed pipes, low ceilings, and a decidedly humble portal became part of its charm during its first half-century.

Moving a fifty-year-old bookstore, already established as one of the finest serious bookstores in the world, presented an opportunity to rebuild deliberately what had first developed organically in response to the limits of space more than through intentional design. While few would deny the old space its magical quality, we patrons remember its impracticalities well: the treacherous stairwell, the menacing low pipes, the dreadful stuffiness, and the bag check necessitated by the cramped aisles (although many remember the clothespin markers with fondness). We would do well to remember that while the Seminary building is majestic, the basement itself has always been plain.

Gaston Bachelard, the French topoanalyst, in his stirring book The Poetics of Space, investigated the imagined values of what he called “felicitous space.” Seeking to determine the value of “the space we love,” he writes, “Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in … with all the partiality of the imagination.”¹

When it became clear that the Seminary Co-op needed to move out of the Chicago Theological Seminary, Cella and the Co-op’s community pondered the qualities necessary for housing a world-class serious bookstore. They knew it needed to be a space devoted to books only. They knew that browsing was the primary activity the space would be meant to support and that the browsers’ ability to lose themselves would be of paramount importance.

In designing the new Seminary Co-op, the architect Stanley Tigerman was responsible for solving these twin problems. Tigerman, recognizing the power of disorientation in browsing, attempted to re-create deliberately the original store’s accidental architecture, built as it was in a space that no architect or interior designer (or fire marshal, for that matter) would ever imagine into a bookstore. To hear him tell it, the idea of the Co-op necessitated conditions that would confuse patrons and cause them to get lost in the stacks.

There was an uncertainty and an imperfection present in the old Co-op, reflective of the uncertainty and imperfection of the human condition, that Tigerman intentionally replicated. A few years before his death in 2019, he said that, in building the new home for the Co-op, he was trying to create “something that wasn’t perfect, that would … never be finished.”² He could well have used these ideas to develop a blueprint for any good bookstore.

Tigerman, who considered architecture an ethical pursuit, joined the Co-op in 1991. He understood that the good bookstore is about interiority. Deep in the browse, many of us move through the space as though we were inside the Mind itself—of the universe or God, depending on one’s fancy. And many of us turn inward as we do so, finding the space especially conducive to self-reflection.

---

The journalist and Co-op enthusiast Jamie Kalven has suggested that the shape of the bookstore operates as something akin to a literary form.³ The bookstore offers insight through what the genre-defying writer Mary Cappello calls, in reference to the form of the lecture, “un-pursued apposition,”⁴ and “the necessity of getting lost in the shape of one’s lostness.”⁵ What other literary forms might the bookstore resemble?

Perhaps the bookstore is like an encyclopedia, containing all of our knowledge in one place. Or like the Huainanzi, a second-century emperor’s manual of sorts, a compilation of everything that was known about the way of the world—the celestial bodies, the natural world, time, space, human consciousness, the principles of self-cultivation, characteristics of the sage, and the practicalities of governance. The wise emperor, well read in their Huainanzi, would be capable of concentrating on something as small as “the tip of an Autumn hair and something as vast as the totality of space and time.”⁶

Perhaps it is like an anthology—a compendium of ideas, tales, mores—a bible for bibliophiles. Or perhaps it better resembles the essay, as Montaigne mastered it, an amble about, considering now this and now that, a wandering series of thoughts that hope to limn a question. Although the essay might literally mean an attempt, implying something unsuccessful, it is the asking, not the answering, that provides the essay its purchase. The essay trucks in many truths, not the achievement of one ultimate truth. Montaigne in his library: “I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.”⁷ In the bookstore-as-essay genre, these fragments are the books themselves.

Maybe the bookstore is the commonplace book of the bookseller, who, like the reader compiling their commonplace book, considers a wide range of works and filters in an unquantifiable and unscientific manner, arranging according to the principles of taxonomy that bear a relative internal logic but are by no means definitive or final, ensuring that only the finest—measured on many a scale, but the finest nonetheless—are selected.

Or maybe the bookstore is like the zuihitsu—which can be literally translated as “following the brush”—that great pillow-book tradition begun by Sei Shōnagon in the eleventh century that, in the fourteenth century, in Kenkō’s hands, reached a form that resembles a bookstore. Kenkō knows that “it wakes you up to take a journey for a while, wherever it might be.”⁸ In his series of reflections and wanderings, he jots down “at random whatever nonsensical thoughts” enter his head. Not unlike the essay, the zuihitsu thrives on rumination, not solutions. “The most precious thing in life,” writes Kenkō, “is uncertainty.”⁹

Like Tigerman, Kenkō understands that uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, he writes,

and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, “Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.” In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophies of former times, there are also many missing chapters.¹⁰

If the zuihitsu is, as described by a nineteenth-century practitioner of the form, Ishiwara Masaakira, a record of what “one sees and hears, says and ponders, whether frivolous or serious, just as they come to mind,” perhaps the literary form that is the space of the bookstore consists of the thoughts that arise in the minds of the browsers—a mélange of references, idle thoughts, the index of personal memories, the poetic lines of others, the ephemera of sensation—and the attention that is diffuse and discursive, but still somehow focused, as these thoughts follow the brush, as it were. Steven Carter, the scholar of Japanese history who translated and edited an anthology of zuihitsu, writes that “books pass by like currents in a river, all jumbled together, which is only appropriate since so many books are themselves jumbles of things.”¹¹

THE ART OF BROWSING IN BOOKSTORES

The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience. Until 1870, when the poet and essayist James Russell Lowell used the word in reference to John Dryden’s reading habits, “browse” meant, primarily, to chew cud, to ruminate.

Here, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is one of the earliest written appearances of the word “browse” utilized in this context. “We thus get a glimpse of [Dryden] browsing, he was always a random reader—in his father’s library, and painfully culling here and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity.”¹² And later, Lowell writes of the German polymath G. E. Lessing, “Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished from mere scholars, he seems to have been always a rather indiscriminate reader, and to have been fond, as Johnson was, of ‘browsing’ in libraries.”¹³

One of the great benefits of the act of browsing is the rumination it evokes. To create a space that is intentional in its gathering of materials meant to provide intellectual and literary stimulation, a space wholly devoted to books, be it a bookstore, a library, or a personal collection, is to understand the fulfillment provided by the activity of rumination and reflection. We are, after all, “of the ruminating kind,” John Locke writes of the relationship of thinking to reading, “and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment.”¹⁴

To say it more directly, browsing is a form of rumination. Books, like the leaves and shrubs known as the browsage, provide ruminant-readers with their nutrients. What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud! The space of a bookstore must be conducive to unhurried rumination, if only to promote good digestion.

We booksellers mark the transformation as our patrons, upon entering the store, leave their everyday concerns at the door, as though stepping into a more thoughtful confine. We know it is our responsibility to create and enclose this space, allowing anyone to enter, but not any thing. It’s a place for books, just books, and for a certain kind of book whose presence alongside the rest of the collection is meant to create something of a pasture for The Hungry Mind—the name that the erstwhile booksellers gave to their legendary bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota.

---

There are many forms of browsing, and many types of browsers. A non-exhaustive list of those we see in our wilds would include the flaneur, who meanders through the stacks, observing, loitering, shuffling; the sandpiper, who sees the world in a grain of sand; the town crier, who heralds the latest news from the pages of the books on the front table; the ruminator, chewing their cud; the pilgrim, seeking wisdom, they know not what or where, but knowing that they must find it; the devotee, who prays daily, regardless of the season; the penitent, who has not lived as they ought and is now seeking redemption, or at least forgiveness; the palimpsest, who reads and rereads and knows that every reading leaves its inscrutable mark; the chef, who trusts their senses to help them identify...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• The Presence of Books: An Introduction
• Chapter One: Space
• Chapter Two: Abundance
• Chapter Three: Value
• Chapter Four: Community
• Chapter Five: Time
• The Good Bookstore: An Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index