Books Sold Here
4th August 2024
The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life.
Note please I write “bookshops,” not “bookstores.” A store you enter knowing what it is you want—groceries, hardware, pharmaceuticals—you purchase it, and depart. In a shop you browse, you engage in conversation with the owner or salespeople, you make discoveries you hadn’t previously known existed, you meet people with interests similar to your own, you hang out. In “The Bookshop in America,” an essay of 1963, Edward Shils wrote: “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”
The problem just now is that they, bookshops, are in danger of going under. In his In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch notes that in 1994 there were roughly 7,000 bookshops in America, though by 2019 that number had been reduced to roughly 2,500. The reduction is owing, among other things, to the rise of Amazon.com as the principal purveyor of books, the spread of digital culture with its many distractions, and the reduction of reading generally in a country that has never harbored a vast readership.