Biblioracle: My 5 favorite books about bookstores
Amazon has conquered a lot of aspects of our cultural and consumer world, but when it came to bricks-and-mortar bookstores, they biffed, big time. Every single physical location closed back in 2022.
In Kyle Chayka’s terrific new book, “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” he uses the failure of Amazon’s bookstores as an illustration to show the limited meaning algorithmic aggregation (like ratings) can provide. For example, Amazon stores had sections dedicated to books that were rated “4.5 and above,” a metric that’s meaningless independent of other information about the books. We don’t look for books with a certain rating. We look for books that are about things we’re interested in, or that convey stories that grip our attention. In “Filterworld,” Chayka argues for the embrace of “curation” over aggregation as a way to bring yourself into better contact with the media and experiences you’ll find most meaningful.
I agree with Chayka’s premise, which is why in honor of the failure of Amazon’s bookstores, and in the spirit of curation, I’m going to give you some of my favorite books about bookstores.
For a year, Paul Collins moved his family to Hay-on-Wye in rural Wales, a town with fewer than 2,000 residents, but with 40 bookstores. Once there, he secures lodging above a bookstore and gets busy exploring the innumerable oddball books and oddball people of the town while in the midst of writing his own book, which becomes the book you’re reading, “Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books.” A love letter to both the futility of thinking that your words will endure, and the awesome possibility that a book may be a bid for immortality.
“In Praise of Good Bookstores” by Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstores, is a series of ruminations on and explorations of what it truly means to collect a bunch of books under one roof through a series of individual acts of curation. In Deutsch’s view this results in the “good bookstore,” an indispensable part of the community in which is exists. I think patrons of the Seminary Co-Op Stores will agree with this sentiment.
Have you ever fantasized about moving to Tuscany and opening a small bookshop that’s doomed to failure, but manages to catch the fancy of people near and far and becomes a going concern that fills your life with the great joy of interacting with the store’s customers and volunteers, while being surrounded by books you love? Well, Alba Donati beat you to it and collected her experiences in the slim and charming “Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop.” Am I jealous of Donati? Yes.
The essays in Josh Cook’s “The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century” add up to a treatise on the ways commerce shapes what and how we read. Cook manages to simultaneously make you appreciate the romantic side of books and reading, while also recognizing the ways this romantic side may exclude some groups from being able to access the unique pleasures of books.
Finally, as an antidote to the romance of book selling, we have Shaun Bythell’s “The Diary of a Bookseller,” which describes what it is like to be both seduced and trapped by books as Bythell tries to make his used book shop in a small Scottish hamlet of Wigtown work without driving himself batty. The aged building is crumbling. The customers are difficult. The work is dirty and dusty. As the diary entries pile up, we get an intimate portrait of how close observation can render our ordinary lives, extraordinary.
Each bookstore unique. Each bookstore story, special.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Lost Man” by Jane Harper
2. “Flight Behavior” by Barbara Kingsolver
3. “Mating” by Norman Rush
4. “The Story of Bones” by Donna Cousins
5. “The Anomaly” by Hervé Le Tellier
— Donna V., Chicago
For Donna I want a satisfying novel that maybe also turns up a surprise or two. I’m going with Jim Crace’s “Being Dead,” which is both a murder mystery and not a murder mystery.
1. “The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul” by Scott W. Berg
2. “Killers of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” by David Grann
3. “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times” by H.W. Brands
4. “Stealing Lincoln’s Body” by Thomas J. Craughwell
5. “To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876″ by Bret Baier and Catherine Whitney
— Russ W., Naples, Florida
Clearly, I have to find some interesting work of history. How about “Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore” the full telling of the complicated story of that national landmark by John Taliaferro.
1. “Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul” by Jamie Ducharme
2. “The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession” by Michael Finkel
3. “The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World” by A.J. Baime
4. “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Egan
5. “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” by Candice Millard
— Peggy H., Woodstock, Illinois
Peggy needs a book that she can discuss with her reading companion, and while they lean toward history, they’re not exclusive about it. How about an all-time classic that gets underneath the story we all think we know well, but probably not as well as we think: “All the President’s Men” by Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
