Dhe Amazon bashing comes quite early, namely in the introductory remarks. And it is by no means limited to this one scolding. For Jeff Deutsch, the online mail order company is something like the biggest conceivable boss, a company that offers books at junk prices in order to lure customers who are then supposed to buy more expensive products. The frustration is understandable, especially in an essay entitled “In Praise of Good Bookstores”, which is by no means a farewell.
There are reasons to be pessimistic. In 1994 there were seven thousand independent bookstores in the United States; In 2019 there were still around two thousand five hundred. This is not a coincidence, because today someone looking for useful reading no longer has to go into a shop to find what they are looking for. In fact, that would be rather cumbersome. At the same time, according to Deutsch, it never made sense from a financial point of view to open a bookstore: Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert already included the note in their “Encyclopédie” that the book industry is no longer doing too well.
Jeff Deutsch: “In Praise of Good Bookstores”.
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Image: Princeton University Press
Deutsch is director of the Seminary Cooperative Bookstores, a cooperative founded in 1961 with two bookstores in Chicago. What must such shops offer? It’s not about getting rid of the available titles as quickly as possible, but rather giving visitors a space to browse. The resulting self-reflection is only a matter of time. Deutsch even speaks of the “art of browsing and leafing through” here, lists various types of this activity with verve and enthusiasm and, as with every aspect discussed, gets help from an unmanageable team of keywords whose quotations repeatedly slow down the flow of reading: Dante and Aristotle, Gaston Bachelard and William Blake, Machiavelli and Aby Warburg.
From the mathematician SR Ranganathan, Deutsch borrows the Five Laws of Library Science to apply, slightly modified, to the sale of books: Books are for use; every book its reader; every reader his book; save the reader’s time; a library is a growing organism. The author thinks intelligently about categories such as time, space or community, only to often forget his actual subject – customer talks, sales, turnover – in the particularly academic and pathos-heavy passages. After all, if a bookshop is to survive, it has to be more than just a place to rummage and browse. With all of this, the question arises as to whether Deutsch isn’t already knocking down open doors. Those who consult his essay probably no longer need to be convinced of his theses.
Jeff Deutsch: “In Praise of Good Bookstores”. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2022. 208 pp., hardcover, €19.50.
