A bit of news before the show: since my last post, I’ve opened up a second page on my Substack profile for shorter, less focused blog posts. Mostly, these are links and sources that I find useful or worthwhile and want to think through by writing about them. These will mostly be bookish, but also follow my other interests (education, philosophy, Russia, visual art, music). The blog is called Musement. These won’t go out as emails, but they will appear on my main page. If you have a Substack account or an RSS reader (both good things to have), you can also subscribe to them there. I will also post a roundup of my blog posts at the end of my regular Bibliophilia essays. If those are all you want, you don’t have to change anything about your subscription.
As always, thank you for reading.
A Tale of Two Bookshops
When I first moved to my neighborhood three years ago, it felt like a stroke of unbelievable luck that there were two independent bookstores within five blocks of my apartment.1 For most Americans anymore, the closest brick-and-mortar bookseller is usually a strip-mall Barnes & Noble thirty minutes’ drive down the interstate. Walking to any small business is rare in the United States, and yet there they were, Fox Bookshop and Shakespeare & Co. (no relation to the famous Parisian store where Joyce & Hemingway hung out). Funnily enough, both of them were only a few blocks away from a Barnes & Noble, the indie bookstore’s natural predator, lurking unusually far from its natural suburban habitat in the middle of downtown. It seemed too good to last, and it was. In less than six months, Fox and Shakespeare both shut down, and now we’re back to just Barnes & Noble like everybody else.
The way the two indie shops ended, though, was very different: one died a slow, drawn-out death, failing to pay its mounting back rent and vigorously denying that their property was listed for sale months before admitting that yes, they were vacating the premises, eliciting not much more from the neighborhood than a sad nod; the other ended with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the whole community, with city bigwigs and a state senator publicly expressing their dismay, swarms of loyal customers coming in as soon as they heard the news to make final, commemorative purchase. Unlike the first shop, the owners were leaving on good terms and high spirits—the business wasn’t making enough to justify passing it on, what with Covid-19 in the air, Barnes & Noble down the street, and Amazon everywhere else, but the owners had made enough for a comfortable, well-earned retirement. All this is to say that I didn’t really bother trying to get to Shakespeare & Co. when it closed down, but I left work early to get in some final browsing at Fox Bookshop.
What was the difference between these two bookshops? The two stores were only a few blocks apart, serving the same downtown mix of locals, commuters, and tourists. Why was one beloved and the other only tolerated? I thought about these questions as I read Jeff Deutsch’s new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores. Deutsch has been the manager of Chicago’s legendary Seminary Co-Op since the 1990s, and if the store’s continued success is a testament to his skills as a businessman, his book shows him to be an even better bookman. While he does occasionally get into the details of finance, pricing, cataloging, and pricing that a bookshop manager has to do, much more of the book is about how Deutsch takes a reader-focused (not just customer-focused) view of stores. He’s read a lot about reading and readers, about bookstores and how they work, about sorting and presenting merchandise—Deutsch has read a lot in general, inheriting a love of learning from his Orthodox Jewish family.
Great bookstores, he figures, aren’t really run like conventional businesses. Not there isn’t a conventional model for bookshops: back in the 1980s, a pair of researchers at the Harvard Business School took a long look at American bookstores and came up with these four commandments for the profit-seeking bookseller, as quoted by Deutsch:
Nearly 20 percent of a bookstore’s inventory must consist of products that are not books.
The books that are carried must be mostly purchased from major presses that offer higher gross margins than small, independent, and scholarly presses.
Bookstores must leave books on their shelves no longer than four months.
Bookstores must pay booksellers the wages of an entry-level retail clerk.
As you might have guessed, Seminary Co-Op doesn’t follow these rules. They don’t sell any Harry Potter socks, most of their stock comes from academic presses (the store mostly serves students and teachers at the University of Chicago), their average shelf-to-sale time is eight months, and clerks are paid well over the minimum wage because they are expected to know far more about the store’s contents and literature in general than, say, a Target clerk who only needs to know what aisle the toothpaste is on. I can think of several other great independent stores that flout these rules to some extent, though few of them are as austere as Seminary Co-Op—even mighty Powell’s Books in Portland makes a great deal of hay through T-shirts and branded merchandise.
I can’t speak for the wages at Shakespeare & Co.—the staff was unfailingly kind and informative every time I visited—but they were enthusiastic sellers of literary paraphernalia—postcards, magnets, journals, and so on. They even had a cafe, though it was always too expensive for me. Their stock was almost entirely drawn from major presses, with only a few breakout successes from indie, foreign, and genre publishers and no academic works of any kind. Front displays changed frequently to make room for buzzy new books. It was a good place to go if you were looking for that new book you heard about on NPR or The Daily Show, looking for some popular classic like Pride & Prejudice, or getting your nephew a copy of The Hunger Games for Christmas—but so was Barnes & Noble, only three blocks away, with three times as much inventory and a much bigger selection of Harry Potter socks. Amazon, which everybody now carries in their pocket, has even more, and it’s even cheaper.
Fox Bookshop, on the other hand, was playing a completely different game of their own. They sold a few fancy notebooks, but otherwise the whole space was packed with books from floor to ceiling, with carousels clogging the middle and a tiny clerk’s counter in the middle. The whole space probably had half the square footage of the Shakespeare. Even with all the books crammed into the space, Fox probably only had two-thirds as much inventory, and much of it was given over to heavy art books and works from tiny, obscure indie presses. The New Books shelf by the counter wasn’t especially prominent, and their window displays were usually more about expressing an idea or theme (e.g., books about autumn) than showing off Penguin-Random House’s newest marketing materials.
Despite all that, Fox did alright for itself financially, and had fanatically loyal customers. I imagine the Fox family knew something that Deutsch emphasizes in his book: “The good bookstore sells books,” he writes, “but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience.” Browsing is the key. You can get any individual book you want on the internet, delivered straight to you and well under MSRP. Any bookstore that only sells customers what they already want is doomed from the start. What the internet still can’t do very well, though, is browsing for new books. Even with all the information-processing power and customer data profiles at its disposal, Amazon is still a lousy place for book recommendations, with its Related Items and Customers Also Bought widgets cluttered with irrelevancies, advertisements, and self-published crap. At best, it can sometimes recommend a great book that you already know about or own. Strolling through the shelves of a good bookstore, though, builds up ideas and associations, encourages lingering and curiosity. It’s generative. And you still can’t get that online.
What made Fox Bookshop so great for browsing? There’s nothing magic about it: the answer, Deutsch would say, is on the shelves. Fox had great shelves, stocked with care, taste, and deliberation. This involved a certain amount of discrimination: as the owner once told The Inquirer, “We don’t have self-help books, we don’t have books on computers, and we don’t have much popular fiction.” There weren’t any comics or manga (the lifeblood of Barnes & Noble these days), no sections for travel or test-prep, and only few shelves for philosophy, religion, and psychology. Because they had such little space, they had fewer books than the other stores in the neighborhood. What little they did have, though, was well-curated: any random book from Fox was significantly more likely to be worth reading than any random book from Barnes & Noble, in the same way that a wise, well-read friend’s shelves is bound to be more interesting and revealing than a random shelf at the public library. The Harvard report said that small, independent presses are a big no-go for the profit-oriented bookseller; Fox Bookshop had entire sections dedicated to New Directions, Pushkin Press, Archipelago, and other great publishing houses. They had a whole wall decorated with the striking, rainbow-colored spines of New York Review Classics.
This seems like such a small thing, but telling apart indie publishers is what dedicated, discerning readers do, and it’s why so many of us became loyal customers: Fox had the best books and the most browse-worthy shelves. You found good books there, ones you’d never heard about before but had to read. Looking back on the store, the owner said that the worst complaint he received was usually “We can’t leave without buying something else.” He might have heard it from me.
Blog Roll
Here are my posts on the Musement Blog since my last newsletter:
Musement: The Blog. What the blog is all about.
A token for participating. Web3 community structures aren’t inherently good! The fact they’re all monetized also leads to terrible incentive structures. I know this isn’t news, but it’s worth shouting about every week or so.
Self-Destructing Tractors and a Universal Remote for Killing People: Cory Doctorow on a viral story out of Ukraine. Very much worth your time.
Reading Warrior Retreats: Lucy Calkins, who has been consistently and overwhelming wrong about reading reforms for decades while raking in millions in curriculum sales and consultancy, is finally easing up on her terrible programs. How did so many schools let themselves be fooled by this crap?
Planet of Bots: Even if you’re not in the market for a PlayStation 5, it’s worth reading about the terrifying economy of automated buying programs.
WAFFEE: DALL-E text-to-image software is very good at images. It is very bad at text. Ask it to draw the Waffle House logo, and chaos ensues.
Thirty Million Manuscripts: A new ecological study of lost medieval texts comparing England, Ireland, and Iceland. England, for reasons described inside, lost a lot more books than its neighbors—and it’s not just Henry VIII destroying the monasteries!
Happy reading!
To be clear, I’m talking about stores that sell new books. Center City West still has several excellent used bookstores: Neighborhood Books on South Street will even order new books for you and are very much worth your time. Book Corner, by the Parkway Central Library, is an excellent place to browse for very cheap (like, five bucks cheap) used books. Bookhaven on Fairmount is a bit of a hike from City Hall, but is invariably worth it for their outstanding collection. Buy used books!