I’m apt to dwell on things. I spout off, sure, but it's all in service of a loudly mulling over. I munch on ideas publicly and loudly. Perhaps not the most graceful or decorous way to go about such, but alas!
To that end, I thought I’d air some thoughts about Jeff Deutsch’s In Praise of Good Bookstores.
First and foremost, Deutsch’s book is an absolute pleasure to read. It's well-read and erudite, and it is brimming with the sort of passion that he (and a good many others) identify at the root of bookselling as a trade worth doing. The fundamental question is whether and to what responsible extent it can be a proper profession.
His is an optimistic vision, but not naive, which makes it fertile for thought, elaboration, agreement and disagreement, in no particular order or emphasis. In a book littered with literary reference, I was delighted by the presence of Elias Canetti a couple of times in the book, but was also struck by the absence of one of my favorite bits from Auto-da-Fe -- when the protagonist's enormous library is styled as a wayward army he cannot control . . . ideas prone to mob mentality. That he is ultimately overwhelmed by a mob, well, it's not an optimistic book, now is it?
This difference in disposition between Jeff & me is perhaps what most motivated my wrestling with the book in the first place. My central question revolves around the question, "What is a good bookstore?" It’s actually sort of hard to pin down Jeff on this question. Reading his book, I got the impression he was definitely not saying all bookstores are good -- and even cites things that make a store adequate at best. In public talks, he seems to go to great lengths to assure all in attendance their bookstores are great. Socially, I understand the tonal difference, but it still hangs in the air of my thinking about what’s going on with the book itself.
My concern is the coverage his book argument potentially gives to stores that have no apparent desire to be good -- i.e., the deck is stacked against anything but the mundane and mediocre, so why be anything but mundane or mediocre? This is apparently is opposed to hist point, but the landscape is dotted by so many instances of that very thing.
Along these lines, I'm not entirely convinced by the divide he wants to position between the gift & trade economies. Call it the Derridean in me -- the potential of one, in my eyes, is wound into the structure of the other. This renders them not so much fluid, which is just boring relativism, but definitely should keep us on our toes. For me, the divide he describe is most importantly played out in terms of a bookstore's labor environment. Again, he is not naive in this regard, and by all accounts wants booksellers to be paid well and treated with dignity. But my stubborn worry is that overly privileging the gift economy, freed from the consequences of vulgar trade, risks labor abuse -- both to oneself, if it's a single-person bookstore, or as an employer.
I struggled to find where a store like mine fits into the spectrum of adequate-to-good bookstore. On the one hand, we pretty publicly celebrate not selling "just books" (a phrase he repeats rhythmically). On the other hand, the percentage of inventory stationery comprises at our shop is well below the 20% threshold he cites as a symptom of the current bookstore industry’s malaise. We also pay well above minimum wage, and for five years straight we've been profitable enough to raise wages.
Economic circumstances are, of course, contextual. We are, after all, nestled in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood, but it’s far too simplistic to say that the beginning and end of the issue. Contexts exert and receive force — the pressure points are abundant and layered and in motion. In other words, context is at minimum two-ways — a store is party to and subject to it. For our part, I think we've landed on (or had occasion to embrace) a scale of operations that works and allows us freedom to be experimental. But it's like that jazz motto, "Freedom is, freedom ain't" -- its freedom that emerges from (and may either blow or revert to) its structure.
I’m risking a lot of pride here for the sake of an example, but I guess all this is to suggest maybe good bookstores, in addition to all the passion and ideals, know (or at least are in a state of creating) who they are, rather than grasping for what they aren't.
Anyway .. I'm rambling. I found In Praise of Good Bookstores valuable to read, and I hope others are thinking about it in terms of their stores, whether they shop or work there. The most boring books like these are the ones we agree with every step of the way.