What We Gain from a Good Bookstore
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I don't have any in walking distance from where I live right now, but I'm moving to NYC soon and will aim to correct that. (Shouldn't be too hard, right?)
> Think of what’s happened at the Strand, where a coffee shop recently joined some ground-floor bookshelves and where you can’t adjust your glasses without hitting some Strand-branded merch.
I did notice that when I was there in May. They place was overstuffed and too commercial. I also didn't get a sense of what Deutsch calls the "slow time of the browse" because I was too caught up keeping polite distance from the too-crowded aisles.
In NY, I’d say take a look at Left Bank books (rare, old literature, photography, art books - some are even early editions of classics), Codex (little used shop with a fantastic selection), Mercer St Books and Records (basement hole in the wall), Westsider Rare and Used books (an UWS classic), Unnameable Books (good events and a literary selection).
For new books, McNally Jackson is the preferred one for the reading public. Their staff selections are useful and they have a dedicated poetry and chapbook section.
The last time I was in NYC, I was really hurting because of not one but two bad hamstrings cause by hockey. I could barely walk--which is not a great combination with NYC. I had some time and took a Circle Line cruise. It was delightful and I hadn't done it since I was a child!
I just tried browsing Goodreads and it slapped me in the face with a gigantic Please Login Right Now You Terrible Person modal. Not very browsing friendly either, I guess.
There is a charm to browsing a small bookstore. 2nd hand or otherwise. You dawdle in the aisles, meander between sections you'd never think to look at, catch your eye on interesting covers, try the heft of a book, see which ones are long and which are short, the design and the font give you a sense of character, tell you a little about what this book is like to read. You turn it around, read the back to learn more ... there is a spatial component to your search. When you stumble into a book that draws your attention, you're likely surrounded by similar books you might also enjoy.
The experience is distinctly inefficient. Good for when you don't know what you want. Might not even realize what you're in the mood for until you find it.
And somehow you never walk out with fewer than 3 books.
Then you should broaden your imagination.
Amazon and Goodreads have barely a fraction of one percent of the books that were published. And that's just in English.
It's like saying "Anything worth watching is on streaming," even though less than 5% of the world's video content ever made the translation from film to VHS to DVD to streaming. Or paper to records to tape to CD to streaming.
There's a whole vast world of content out there beyond the internet. Once you discover this, it's like taking a pill in The Matrix.
(My metaphor might be off there, as I've never seen The Matrix, but from what I understand from other people's conversations, that should work.)
Additionally those are very good points about English and streaming. There are books out there which are not translated and not digitized, which are absolutely worth reading, and will not be found anywhere besides private collections, used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales. Some of these books were originally purchased long ago and/or far away, just because they are not popular enough to be easily found does not mean they are not worh finding.
Source?
I'd be curious how this compares with LibGen / ZLibrary (about 4--5 million titles).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604033
Keep in mind that a largish municipal library is on the order of 250-500k items.
The Library of Congress includes ~40 million catalogued books, of which ~360k circulate annually.
Again, the question is what Amazon offers.
Computers can fill some, but not all of this role. We are social animals. We are hard wired to feel good when we are in community with other humans, and to (in cases) develop psychosis when deprived of that contact[1].
The price of a book is trivially easy to compare, while the value of social interaction is hard to quantify. Replacing in-person commerce with online shopping because it is less expensive or more convenient may not be as good a deal as it seems.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8131183/#abs000...
I think if I had “fuck you money” and were to give up tech this would be the perfect hobby business for me.
Also I think is faster to evaluate the book if you have it in your hands, you can immediately notice if the quality is bad or good, if the fonts are maybe too small so it would be hard to read, if the content feels padded with tons of irrelevant stuff, if you like the art style or language of the author. Is the same like when you want to buy a phone or monitor, if you have it in your face you can imediatly spot things you don't like and see the real dimensions where if you have just some pictures and numbers in your face it is harder.(I bought a watch as gift for someone and when it arrived I was shocked how small it is in reality, there were numbers in the description but numbers felt ok for me at that time)
Also I’d suggest checking out a good local bookstore, it’s a whole different and IMO a more wholesome and relaxing experience.
Besides being an experience in and of themselves (used bookstores are often very unique and individual, sometimes operated by interesting people who do it out of a love of books or history), you can find some real gems and sometimes even terrible unbelievable books of decades past that would never be something you could find in a regular commercial/corporate book shop selling for profit and catering to whatever is on the bestseller list, what critics recommend, and what publishers want to sell.
Besides the experience and obscure books, used bookstores often are the best places to meet interesting people. Some people, myself included, love the atmisphere of these shops- the smell of old books, the piles of otherwise discarded tomes, shelves where you can find books that were once part of collections curated by bibliophiles- some of these books have annotations on them, some of them are on very niche subjects not easily found elsewhere, some so old if you look for information online you won't find anything. I've had and heard some really fascinating conversations in second hand bookshops I don't think I would ever have experienced otherwise. Some of these shops are a place of community, where people post business cards and event posters for things you wouldn't readily find out about easily- some host events in the store itself (discussion groups, games, book clubs, etc). Some have very comfortable atmosphere and welcome people coming to just hang out, no pressure to spend money. Additionally there is the possibility there for you to build a bond with the owners/keepers, who sometimes will bring out books they keep off the shelves just for you.
Some old book shops are absolutely packed with everything from textbooks to catalogues to literature- unsorted treasures waiting to be found. Books with no ISBN, no online presence whatsoever, items that cannot be found otherwise (unless you were looking for them specifically, and even then they would be really difficult to procure). There is a charm to be found in these shops that just cannot be replicated in common bookstores.
Also, the second hand bookstore isn't maintaining a secret police file on every micro-action and momentary impulse you exhibit while inside their property.
Browsing a second-hand book store is just one surprise after another. I've found books I never knew existed, but instantly fell in love with. I whiled away many hours in second hand bookshops when I visited Edinburgh.
When it comes to new books, making a purchase at a local book store can really make a difference. Last year, I wanted to upgrade my ebooks of The Art Of Programming to the print editions. I could buy it from Amazon, but asking my local book store to order in the items was a wonderful experience on so many levels. The cost was a little, but not a significant amount, higher, but it allowed for some great interactions in the shop. Now, I pop in every couple of weeks, have a chat with the owner and get fantastic recommendations.
Unfortunately, Fox Books put all the small, independent stores out of business.
George Whitman, who founded the current Paris bookstore, and Sylvia Beach, who founded the original, were very close friends. She even toyed with reopening her original shop with him, again under the name Shakespeare and Company. Two years after she died, he renamed his bookstore (Le Mistral) to Shakespeare and Company in her memory in 1964, as he thought that's what she would have liked. He also named his only daughter after her. As it happens, the second Shakespeare and Company also became a hub for authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and many of the Beats. It's the sister shop of City Lights in San Francisco, with a similar author history. Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His daughter now runs the store.
So in Paris there were two Shakespeare and Company bookstores, both extremely famous at different critical times in literary history, whose respective owners were very close, and which were both basically set up the same way. I think it's reasonable to say that they're both the "real" Shakespeare and Company. That's a far cry from the NYC situation.
Great second-hand book stores are riddled with wormholes into past civilizations and cultures, maybe just a few decades old, that no one ever bothered to name or remember, outside the wormhole of the book. So I guess they make the past more discoverable. And by discovering those lost cultures we can understand the trajectory of our culture, its effervescence and loose ends and lost causes. Which is great for understanding our own time.
Rant: American culture seems fascinated with time travel and alien intelligence, as though they were things just out of reach, when in fact, we're surrounded with time travel and alien intelligence that we manage to ignore. The books are the time travel. The ravens/dolphins/dogs/elephants are the alien intelligence.
Whereas books and libraries have none of that cruft. If you want to learn something the library (or bookstore) is a much better place - the books don’t come with dynamic ads and affiliate links to encourage you to buy something.
The Internet is much bigger than google.com, and there are a lot of ways to use it outside of that experience.
Borders opened a huge store directly over the street from Readings' flagship store and tried to wage a price war, whilst Readings kept its prices up and redoubled its efforts at providing a great experience to customers.
Since Borders shut down in Australia in 2011, Readings has continued to expand and thrive, now operating seven stores in key locations around Melbourne, but still retaining its small-business, community-focused charm, and still just selling good books to book lovers, as it did when it first opened in the late 1960s.
[1] https://rosshoneywill.com/articles/how-mark-rubbo-killed-bor...
One of my favorites, Leopold's, does have a small coffee shop that serves the best coffee in town. That's not what makes me love it, though: its small collection is arranged by country (or in some cases region), and it's exquisitely selected. Every time I go in, I find several books that I would never have noticed or thought to search for in a more traditionally-arranged bookstore: Turkish religious wisdom stories, a history of the Russian revolution, a volume of Sholom Aleichem's stories, the autobiography of a woman who lost her family to the Khmer Rouge — it's a treasure of a collection. I expect to keep going back there for a long time.
I wonder if other bookstores could stand out like that by structuring their collections in a way that helps their customers find interesting things they might not otherwise look for. I think — though I'm no expert — that most people go into a bookstore thinking not, "I need to find a copy of X," but "I hope I find something good to read!" A bookstore that solves the second problem connects better with actual customers.
A quibble with the article:
> “Browsing” itself is an agricultural term, he points out, in one of his book’s many divagations, often entertaining but sometimes a bit twee, on the culture and language of bibliophilia: it’s what cows do in a field, and only started to be used to describe reading habits in the nineteenth century.
Cows don't browse; they graze, evenly cutting the omnipresent grass. Goats are browsers, picking bits of what they believe are the tastiest, most nourishing plants, and leaving the ones they don't care for.
> “Books, like the leaves and shrubs known as the browsage, provide ruminant-readers with their nutrients,” Deutsch opines, at his purplest. “What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!”
During one of my meanderings, I found "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming" (SICP) lying under computer reference books on the top shelf. I got the old rickety foot stool, pulled the book down and found it was in decent shape, so I had to buy it. And yes, I know I can read it for free online.
If anyone is in the San Jose, CA area, check out the Recycle Bookstore. One of my favorites.
[0] https://publishingperspectives.com/2010/10/paris-seine-side-...
You get to have full and total anonymity (even if you're a regular, your path through the store will be yours and yours alone). You can browse the aisles and look at any old book's spine you please, pull it off the shelf and read the inside cover or maybe some employee notes on a card if there are any.
And the next time you come in, that book won't be in the front window since you touched it. You can start the whole process over again.
I wonder if this is a spiral to try to stave off eventual closure or the future where there will be one shelf of books and the rest “book culture.”
Nothing makes me happier than going into a book store and seeing a huge stack of outbound internet sales to be mailed out.
Anecdotally, I currently have an outstanding book order on Amazon for a title I'm convinced I wouldn't find anywhere in store. The title is 20+ years old and a little niche.
In the “old days“ before Amazon, you would place a custom order at the book store (Not a second-hand book store) and it’d arrive a while later.
Around a year later I got a call that my book was in and I could go pick it up. When I arrived, a pristine, new, old-stock copy was waiting for me as if it were still 1991. I still have that book proudly displayed - both the joy of its contents and its discovery will accompany it for the rest of my life.
eBay, Amazon, Shop Goodwill have made this process immensely easier, but I still find joy and thrill in the random second hand store finds.
I was interested in a book that went for $120 on Amazon; a local shop ordered for me at $80 instead. It took about a week, so maybe a hair longer than Amazon. Oddly, I found the link directly from the publisher.
In Chicago, and many other cities, larger library branches have a little room where the books the library doesn't want anymore end up.
In the case of Chicago, the Harold Washington Library has a room with a table and stacks of books. You grab what you want and put a suggested donation into the box on the wall. Usually about 25¢ a book.
In other cities, I've seen this expanded into entire miniature bookstores. But in those cases, they end up charging second-hand retail prices, which is a shame.
Do you ever ask a bookstore staffer for recommendations?
I've always preferred to just browse for myself, and maybe read the first few pages. Either I feel like reading it, or I don't. I don't trust someone else to predict which way I'll go.
However, writers of articles like this invariably mention the "knowledgeable staff." I was in a Tucson bookstore near the University and I tried an experiment: I asked for a fiction recommendation. She asked me what books I liked, we talked for a long time, and she came up with "The Orphan Master's Son."
OK, it's a good book, I'm not going to trash it at all. But I just didn't feel like finishing it.
Maybe if I went there all the time and bought a lot of books and they actually got to know me, it would be different.
I think as with everything... it depends ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the person behind the counter is just an employee who has zero or a passing interest in reading, they won't be able to help much.
If the person behind the counter loves reading but doesn't share your interests they may also not be of much help.
Perhaps it's worth asking for a recommendation in a more open-ended way, so that you don't feel awkward not buying it if the book sounds uninteresting.
EDIT: if you're ever in that same bookstore again and see the same employee, you could remind her of the recommendation and mention how you felt about the book. She may have a different book to recommend in that case. Or I guess you could ask someone else - in the end you've learned that this book/type of book is not for you which is just as good to take into account when looking for recommendations ("I liked X, Y and Z but then didn't feel compelled to finish 'The Orphan Master's Son', do you know of a book that I might like?").
>Deutsch’s bookseller is a cross between a curator, rabbi (Deutsch comes from an Orthodox Jewish background), and gardener. “Our work is to select and assemble, making the discordant wilds of bookish inquiry manageable,” he writes.
In other words, a better link aggregator. What does it take to create that depth online?
For some folks, there also seems to be a slight shift from prioritizing destination to prioritizing journey, and from efficiency to experience.
These shifts may not be enough to make the business models work for most, but bookstores with good locations and experiences can sell plenty of high-margin food and beverages, and can possibly find new business model edges (subscription?, joint subscriptions w/ other businesses?, event hosting?, classes?).
There are many books and little time. So 1) most books worth reading will be remembered a decade or a century later, and will be talked and/or written about for a long time. 2) Buying a used book is a risk for the bookstore, and they vet each book that walks in to be sure it's likely to sell.
Most of the books I've read and held onto got past both those filters; I've heard about the book, am interested, and there's still a copy out there.
And so, the store which sells both new and old is the only game in town. Will I ever buy a book online? IFF the place sells used books. Else: interlibrary loan is a great service.
Could you name some interesting, non-fiction books you've discovered that would be impossible or hard to find in online bookstores?
It’s the weirdest experience because I want so badly for it to be like other shops I’ve browsed and loved. I’ve even considered opening my own bookshop down the street to fulfill my desire for a great used book shop in my city. Maybe someday.
... you can’t adjust your glasses without hitting some Strand-branded merch
I know many people who in actuality love and prefer a physical bookstore. This is evinced by many profitable bookstores in my area (both new and used).
I can't imagine why a person would either think, or write, this sentence. Most people are being honest when they say they enjoy a thing.
By portraying someone who doesn't think the way you do as a bad person (in this case, a liar), this person elevates themselves, in their own mind.
It's pretty much seventh-grade logic.
Some people (myself included) genuinely love bookstores in general and used bookstores specifically. It's not an exaggeration, if I lived near a good bookstore I would be there regularly.
The Harvard Coop was about the last good technical bookstore in my area, but it's been dumbed down, and now just mostly carries the pop science stuff, like other bookstores.
I haven't been in the MIT Coop since they moved for the second time. They used to be right in the middle of the campus.
Will report back later--it's hot out now!
E: it was Foulab, so looks like it still is.
It's basically solipsism-opium. Might be a bad trade.
Ultimately I think I spend too much time on these kinds of things anyway, and would rather spend time making something. I tend to find more enjoyment from actively creating rather than passively absorbing.
Everything isn't "me, me, me" with most of the Z's that I've observed.
They're more tolerant. Every disagreement doesn't boil down to "Stop liking things that I don't like." And they don't have as much of a persecution complex as the Millennials.
Gen Z and Gen X are very much alike. Just as Millennials and Boomers are pretty much the same people.
As it grew from a book seller to what it is now, Amazon took a huge amount of business away from both the small booksellers that this book discussed in this article is mostly talking about, and the larger chain bookstores that were crushing a lot of those small booksellers underfoot at the time.
Hence, the irony: the first link is to buy a copy of this book about the virtues of small bookstores on Amazon, the company that ate a huge percentage of American retail stores, starting with books.
the electronic format is superior in every way - full text search, fully customizable/accessible reading experience. ebooks cost nothing to "print", transfer and store, and they don't degrade.
a 500 GB SD card fits 25000 rather large 20 MB pdfs/epubs. a 16 TB HDD fits 800000.
it's over. and that's a good thing.
Doesn’t require power to operate
The tactile experience is top notch, and makes for fast seeking in the book
You can sell or lend the book without permission from someone else
Edit: also books don’t have dynamic tracking or affiliate links or scams for getting you to buy something - this is more apropos to websites. Still though, I hear people say that long form is dead and internet video/short form, or even blogs is the way real knowledge is passed on.
I can give you a copy of any book I own for free