If you haven’t thought about it too deeply, perhaps your idea of bookselling is of a nerdish person leaning on a counter, nose buried in a book, occasionally helping a customer find a novel whose title the customer can’t remember, but that he heard on the radio yesterday and the cover, he thinks, is blue. Or maybe green.
That last bit isn’t entirely wrong. But the notion of a leisurely shift spent reading isn’t quite right. Bookselling is a really, really fun job (like, 90 percent of the time), but it can be really, really hard work, too. Almost to a person, though, booksellers love their jobs. Booksellers never shy away from a challenge, whether finding a title based on scant information, recommending the perfect book reader who have no idea what they actually want, or defeating the existential threat imposed by a certain large website.
Because bookselling is hard but interesting work and because indie bookstores face unique obstacles, a spate of books written by booksellers or bookstore owners has emerged in recent years endeavoring to demystify bookselling and the business of bookstores. The commonality in these books is that they do a wonderful job explaining why brick and mortar bookstores are so important. Here is a short list of five of these great books.
In Praise of Good Bookstores
By Jeff Deutsch
Princeton University Press
Jeff Deutsch, the Director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores (and winner of the 2022 Adam Morgan Literary Leadership Award from the Chicago Review of Books), writes about how bookstores are vital to healthy communities, why independent bookstores specifically perform necessary functions beyond just selling books, and simply why reading is so important in these trying times. This book does a wonderful job of reminding us how lucky we truly are to have bookstores. Never take that for granted.
The Art of Libromancy
By Josh Cook
Biblioasis
If you want to really dive deeply into the world of bookselling, this is the exact book for you. Cook, co-owner and longtime bookseller at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes readers through a series of essays designed to illuminate everything from discount rate to handselling strategies to how writers can and should make friends with booksellers.
How To Resist Amazon and Why: The Fight for Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future
By Danny Caine
Microcosm Publishing
This book about why indies do bookselling better made a HUGE splash when it was published 2019. Caine, a published poet and the co-owner of The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, lays out the case for why consumers should spend locally instead of propping up behemoths that sell books as a loss leader. As a result of this book’s success, Caine is penning a whole series, including 50 Ways to Protect Bookstores, and the latest, How To Protect Bookstores and Why.
\Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale
By Paul Yamazak
Ode Books
Yamazaki is a bookselling legend, a “superhero” according to a Colson Whitehead blurb for this forthcoming book. Yamazaki is the long-time buyer at City Lights in San Francisco, and this book, published by Ode Books, a new Chicago imprint, is positioned as a “love letter to the work of bookselling and an engaged life of the mind.” Look for a review in CHIRB in April near the publication date.
Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores
By Jen Campbell
Harry N. Abrams
Pure fun! This book delivers exactly what its title promises. Every bookseller has about a million similar stories to the ones written here. You truly won’t believe how weird customers in bookstores truly can be. Campbell is a UK-based writer and former bookseller started this book as a blog.
Honorable Mention:
The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading
By James Patterson and Matt Eversmann
Little Brown and Company
Yes, THAT James Patterson, the purveyor of the Alex Cross series of thrillers. No, James Patterson is not a bookseller, but James Patterson IS a champion of booksellers, each year giving out more than a quarter million dollars in “bookseller holiday bonuses” to indie bookstore workers across the country. This book is positioned thusly: “Meet the smart and talented people who live between the pages — and who can’t wait to help you find your next favorite book.”
