What Are Bookstores For?

An existential question, maybe

Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

This week, we kick off a brief series on intellectually minded community-building institutions. What kinds of entities in this country exist to encourage the renewal of the mind (and perhaps the soul as well!) in the pursuit of public good? Today we begin with the brick-and-mortar bookstore.

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Several times a year, when the kids and I find ourselves in Mansfield, a bigger city about twenty minutes away from our home, we go to Barnes & Noble and spend a good hour or more meandering through the isles, perusing tables laid out with a rich feast of new books, and playing with the train table in the kids section—before finally selecting for purchase one new book each, and going over to the coffee shop section of the store to get a cookie for each junior bookworm and coffee for me. We then sit in the comfy deep armchairs by a window and enjoy our books and treats for a while in silence, before finally driving home with the satisfaction of an afternoon well spent.

If pressed to describe the good life, there is no question in my mind: books (and by implication bookstores) are a pillar of it. And yet, ever since the advent of the internet, and especially the Amazonification of the online shopping experience, brick-and-mortar bookstores have struggled to compete. Christian bookstores have been particularly hard hit; many have closed. Gone are the days when, as an older academic friend reminisced, he preordered a new book by historian Mark Noll at his local Christian bookstore and stopped by on release day to pick up his copy. Now this idea just sounds… quaint. Appropriately enough, the book in question was The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which turned thirty years old this year.

So why did the internet eviscerate the local bookstores with such savage ease? At an obvious level, the economy of scale is at work here and it’s difficult to argue with it. First, a small shop must stock a more limited inventory than a worldwide behemoth. There is simply no space to be all things to all people in a small local bookstore. Second, when it comes to prices, a local store that isn’t a chain can’t compete with the behemoth either. Even Barnes & Noble, large national chain that it is, cannot really compete with Amazon either. (At least it’s still around. Remember Borders?)

But here’s the thing. As historian Evan Friss shows in his fascinating new book The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, bookstores have never really been primarily or exclusively about the economic exchange of cash for a book. Yes, such transactions are obviously necessary for the stores to exist—such is the nature of trade in any goods; a business must remain in the black to be able to keep its doors open. And yet, there is something special, different about the trade in books—or, at least, the sort of trade in books that takes place in a physical bookstore. Bookstores are different from all other shops we frequent on a regular basis. But in what ways?

Perhaps this has to do with how we think and feel about books, as opposed to how we think and feel about broccoli. Books are goods, but they are a different sort of good from groceries or other essentials. Physically, we could live without books (but not without groceries), but what kind of a life would it be?

The nature of bookstores reflects their trade in goods that feed minds and souls, rather than bodies. And so, while bookstores are businesses, they’ve often struggled to operate as real for-profit businesses. Friss tells story after story, going back to Benjamin Franklin’s days of running a proto-bookshop/printing press, of booksellers living in the tension of wanting to cultivate ideas for the public good and needing to make money.

That is the overall theme that comes through in this book: The institution of bookstores in America may be a business, but it also is a valuable public good, and we should continue to think of it as such. Bookstores foster the community of ideas, push us to discover the new and the old, and surround us with their company, which elicits a rather different sort of feeling. You can’t quite describe the sensation of having four walls of books all around you, and yet you know that you feel different when there, better somehow, more relaxed.

But while all bookstores themselves have generally believed in the good of their aims, Friss also includes such warning tales as Communist and Nazi party-promoting bookstores of the 1930s. True, even in these cases, the nature of bookstores as community-builders is apparent. It’s just that (at least in hindsight) it seems clear that not every kind of community is beneficial to build in our country—not every community truly is a public good.

Such warning tales remind us of the power of bookstores, though, and why we shouldn’t give up on them quite so easily yet. For if they could on occasion in the past have been used for objectionable purposes, they mostly have been a remarkable good. In particular, they can be used now to assist the project of redeeming our culture and the public imagination—and our culture quite desperately needs redeeming and renewing! In Romans 12:2, Paul notes “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

The renewing of our mind begins with reading good books—this means first and foremost the Bible, but also so much more. As the Classical Christian education movement continues to grow and encourage students and educators to seek goodness, truth, and beauty as goals, I would love to see a rise of Christian bookstores that could support this vision, and perhaps operate as pillars for the society at large, in addition to supporting students. Just imagine—something that combines the Christian bookstores of old with literary classics (old and new), a solid history section, and hosts community-building events, poetry readings, epic read-alouds of Homer, etc. A few such bookstores exist, I know. I would love to see more.

Our souls crave beauty. Good books—and bookstores—are here to help us find it, even on the dreariest dark evenings of wintertime.

A question for you, dear reader!

Do you have a favorite local bookstore? I want to hear about it! What makes it special?

Next week: the public library!