The pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for bookstores. Exactly how good is a little hard to measure. For all sorts of reasons, the data on book sales, bookstores, and most things bookish are notoriously inexact. Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book.
If I self-publish a book and sell it on my Web site, is that a real book? And am I a bookstore? If we think that, to be “real,” a book must have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), we are faced with the fact that the ISBN of a hardcover book is different from the ISBNs of the paperback, audio, and digital editions of the same book. Are these all counted separately? The Bible is a book. So are “Pickleball for Dummies,” “Spanking Zelda,” “Pat the Bunny,” and “The Big Book of Sudoku.” When we ask how many Americans read books, are those the kinds of books we have in mind?
According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”
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The explanation for the second bump, however, is not so obvious. Before COVID, physical bookstores seemed to be pretty high on the endangered-species list. Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business. Yet, somehow, the bookstore outlived the pandemic. Why? Two new books, Evan Friss’s “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore” (Viking) and “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading” (Little, Brown), compiled by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, suggest a few reasons.
Neither book is quite as advertised. “The Bookshop” is not a comprehensive history of bookselling. It’s a series of thirteen mini-profiles of notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his printing shop in the early eighteenth century to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s brick-and-mortar stores today. Friss does not get very deep into the economic nitty-gritty of the business. He is mainly interested in capturing the bookstore vibe.
James Patterson is, yes, James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors ever. (Matt Eversmann, a former Army Ranger, was a central character in Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” and is a best-selling author himself.) When the pandemic started, Patterson launched a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, to help such businesses survive. He pledged half a million dollars, and, with the support of the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, the campaign ended up raising $1,239,595 from more than eighteen hundred donors.
Patterson and Eversmann’s “Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians” is being promoted with the line “Their stories are better than the bestsellers.” Better than “Spanking Zelda”? I don’t think so. Readers hoping for scandalous revelations will have to be satisfied with heartfelt testimonials from some sixty or so North American bookstore people and librarians, who talk about how they got their jobs and why they love them. A number of them have nice things to say about James Patterson, as well they should. Still, the situation these books are addressing is a very old one.
The United States has had a bookstore problem since before the nation’s founding. There have never been enough. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, books were sold mostly by printers, like Franklin, whose store was in Philadelphia, or publishers, such as Ticknor & Fields, which operated the Old Corner Bookstore, in Boston. (Ticknor & Fields later became part of Houghton Mifflin.) Because there were few places for customers to get books, some entrepreneurs figured out ways to get books to them. There was a book barge on the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century, for example, and there were book caravans—vehicles outfitted to display books for sale—until well into the twentieth century.
Even after the distribution of books improved, it was not easy to get your hands on new ones unless you lived in a major city or a college town. In 1939, about a hundred and eighty million books were produced, in one estimate, but only twenty-eight hundred stores sold them. Books were also sold in gift shops that stocked a few titles or department stores that offered discounted books as a loss leader to attract a tonier class of customer.
Americans could buy books by mail directly from publishers, and they could subscribe to book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, or its rival, the Literary Guild, founded in 1927 and once owned by Doubleday. (Those clubs still exist. They print their own editions, which they sell for well below the publisher’s retail price.) But most people had no way to browse new books.
One reason for the distribution problem is that each book is a unique good. It is handcrafted by a writer and a postproduction team of editors and designers. Even in 1939, there were too many new titles for a small shop to stock—an estimated 10,640, and that doesn’t include perennial sellers, like Bibles and dictionaries, or classics.
And, unless you are a “just looking for something to read on the beach” kind of customer, there are usually no acceptable substitutes. When you go to a supermarket, the store may carry two brands of milk or ten. It doesn’t matter. You just want milk. But book buying doesn’t work that way. You want the book you want. If the choice was between doing without and mailing a check to a publisher in New York City (publishers, stupidly, did not have warehouses in the middle of the country), many people probably chose to do without. This was not a sensible way to run a business.
The problem got bigger after the Second World War, when, thanks in part to a huge increase in the number of college students, who had to buy books for their courses, and the relaxation of obscenity laws, which made books more attractive to grownups, the publishing industry boomed. In 1950, eleven thousand new titles appeared, according to Publishers Weekly; in 1970, the number was thirty-six thousand, a threefold increase. Local bookshops tended to be low-margin affairs. They couldn’t afford the rent for large retail spaces, and the load of new books was too heavy for them to carry. Publishers needed more places where people could shop for their product. The market responded with the chain store.
The first major bookstore chains were B. Dalton, which opened a store in 1966 and by 1978 had outlets in forty-three states, and Waldenbooks, which began in the nineteen-thirties as a book-rental company, opened its first retail store in 1962, and by 1981 had seven hundred and thirty-five outlets. Chain stores were big spaces. They could carry many titles, and they were usually embedded in department stores and malls. Like supermarkets, they were basically self-service. Their staff were generally not trained to make reading recommendations. But the chains offered two things the independent-bookstore ecosystem lacked: convenience and inventory. By 1982, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton made about twenty-four per cent of all book sales in the United States.
It was still not enough. The industry kept growing, and the chain stores gave way to the superstores. These were enormous freestanding retail spaces, averaging almost thirty-six thousand square feet and carrying a hundred and twenty-five thousand titles, plus other leisure goods, such as CDs and DVDs. The big players were Borders, which opened in 1971 and began to expand in the nineteen-eighties, and Barnes & Noble, an old New York store, situated on lower Fifth Avenue, which Leonard Riggio bought in 1971.
Riggio adopted the strategy of selling New York Times best-sellers at a forty-per-cent discount. He made the brand famous for these discounts, and people would travel out of their way to a Barnes & Noble store just for the savings. It was an aggressive move when best-sellers were what kept many small bookstores above water.
In 1987, Riggio bought B. Dalton, and by 1997 Barnes & Noble and Borders were selling forty-three per cent of all books in the United States. By then, more than sixty thousand titles were coming out every year. The largest Barnes & Noble store carried upward of two hundred thousand, many of them marked twenty or thirty per cent off the list price. It was not a business model that small independent bookshops could adopt. They had to make a decent margin on every sale.
This was around when the term “independent bookstore” gained force. It was plainly deployed as a rallying cry. It couldn’t have been that the owners of the local store didn’t care about their bottom lines. But the term signals an old-fashioned virtue, and the independents versus the superstores got cast as a David-and-Goliath struggle, a version of the family-farm-versus-agribusiness rivalry that had got a lot of attention in the nineteen-eighties.
The big-little bookstore battle was covered so extensively by the media, in fact, that a film about it, “You’ve Got Mail,” directed by Nora Ephron, was one of the biggest hits of 1998. (Amusingly, the movie, ostensibly a criticism of corporate overreach, made Rolling Stone’s list of “Most Egregious Product Placements in Movie & TV History.” It is practically an advertisement for AOL, which would soon merge with Warner Bros., the film’s distributor.)
Meg Ryan’s character made out all right in “You’ve Got Mail,” but her store still closed. Nationally, the Davids were losing. After 1998, the mortality rate among independents shot up. By 2021, only about two thousand were still in business. The Goliaths were left to slug it out. In 2011, Riggio bought what was left of Borders, which had declared bankruptcy, and Barnes & Noble is now the only nationwide bookstore chain in the United States, with six hundred stores. (The original flagship store, on lower Fifth, which had become mainly a place for students to buy textbooks, closed in 2014.)
Still, the distribution problem was far from solved, because two hundred thousand books is nothing. Today, something like three million books are published every year, including self-published e-books that are available only on digital platforms. And the greater the number of books that come out and remain in print, the longer the publisher’s backlist. Developing a backlist is one of the ways publishers can afford to take gambles on big advances. No retail space can accommodate all that inventory.
This whole history explains why Amazon began, in 1995, as an online bookstore. Books were the only products it sold. Jeff Bezos must have looked at the publishing industry and judged it ripe for disruption—the classic tech move. Publishers had had two hundred years to figure out an efficient way of getting their products to consumers, and they were haggling over shelf placement (face out or spine?) and table space (front of the store or back?) in enormous stores where each book was competing for visibility with a hundred thousand other titles.
Amazon discounted books deeply from the start. It was happy to lose money, and its venture-capitalist backers didn’t mind, because they saw that what Bezos was investing in was a future in which people’s first instinct when they needed to buy something would be to go online. That future has arrived, and today Amazon is worth $1.8 trillion.
The company still discounts many titles, and you don’t have to go out of your way to take advantage of the savings. My office is across the street from Harvard Book Store, one of the best independent bookstores in the country for people like me. Even so, if I go there for a copy of “Middlemarch,” I’ll have to elbow my way through a gaggle of tourists to get to the literature section in the back, and there’s a chance that “Middlemarch” will be out of stock.
But I can order “Middlemarch” from Amazon in less than the two minutes it would take me to walk to the store. I will get a discount (currently thirteen per cent on a Penguin edition), and, if I have Amazon Prime (a sunk cost), the book will ship for free and appear in my mailbox tomorrow. Oh, and as long as I’m online, I’ll get a new grill brush, too. Harvard Book Store does not carry grill brushes.
Even though books make up a relatively small fraction of Amazon’s sales, they constitute more than half of all book purchases in the United States. Amazon is responsible for more than half of all e-book sales, and it dominates self-publishing with its Kindle Direct platform. (E-books are also a threat to the brick-and-mortar store, of course, though their sales peaked in 2013.) Most significant, Amazon offers something like thirty million different print titles. The company has deals with purveyors of used and remaindered books, who are linked to on the site. It owns AbeBooks, the leading site for rare and out-of-print books. And there are many other places online where you can buy books, including barnesandnoble.com. So why does the world need bookstores?
Both Friss’s book and Patterson and Eversmann’s book suggest some answers. One is the obvious benefit of being able to fondle the product. Printed books have, inescapably, a tactile dimension. They want to be held. “Browsing” online is just not the same experience. For that, you need non-virtual books in a non-virtual space.
The level of customer service is another benefit. Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” and “Products related to this item” can be useful, but these groupings work better for grill brushes than for books. Books are not just all cheaper or more expensive versions of the same thing.
You will probably soon be able to chat online about your book interests with a bot, but a bot is not a person with green hair, a tattoo, and a sense of humor who might have some offbeat suggestions for you. Salespeople today tend to be book lovers themselves (historically not always the case), and they can recommend a new book or help you find a book whose title you have forgotten. Amazon’s wisdom-of-crowds rating system and customer reviews aren’t quite substitutes for this individualized treatment. There is usually a reviewer who gives a book one star because of a delivery problem.
Then there is what the scholar Janice Radway, adapting Walter Benjamin, calls the “auratic” quality of physical books. People don’t regard books as ordinary commodities. Friss and the retailers in “The Secret Lives” see the small bookstore as a haven from commercialism, a place where books are not treated as mere merchandise.
Of course, selling books is as much a business as selling grill brushes. But the gross margins are small, and bookstore owners tend to be what the sociologist Laura Miller calls “reluctant capitalists.” The owners of Three Lives, in the West Village, which is Friss’s ideal bookstore, don’t like their business being referred to as a “store.” “Shop” is the preferred designation. In the West Village, that’s probably smart marketing.
This aura of anti-commercialism has a history. It dates from the mid-twentieth century, when publishers saw themselves in competition with Hollywood and television for Americans’ leisure time and dollars. They promoted their product as superior to mass entertainment—more refined, more edifying. They rethought the strategy when it became clear that readers like mass entertainment and dislike being taken for snobs. The industry also saw a gold mine in movie tie-ins. Still, the general sentiment that reading is somehow superior to viewing persists.
But using the number of books that the average American reads a year as a barometer of our civilization’s moral health, which people love to do, is kind of pointless. Many books are used, not read. You don’t “read” a cookbook or “Pickleball for Dummies.” And many books are bought to register the buyer’s approval of the message or the messenger. Current Times best-sellers include Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Hold” and J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.” How many of the people who bought those books (and I wonder how much overlap there is) will actually read them? They won’t feel they need to. They have cast their ballots.
The chief rationale offered for brick-and-mortar bookstores today is that they are community-building spaces. That is how Friss describes the Three Lives bookstore—forgive me, shop—and it’s how almost all the store owners in “The Secret Lives” (and many of the librarians) explain what they do and why it gives them satisfaction. They are practitioners of bibliotherapy. They introduce people to books that will help them overcome grief or minister to confusions about life choices or personal identity.
And the stores are fashioned to be neighborhood gathering places, like park playgrounds. They welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. They schedule author appearances and other events, often hundreds of them a year. Regulars drop in to chat about books. With any luck, there is a café. Nowadays, this is as true of Barnes & Noble chain stores as it is of Three Lives. That is what it means to run a bookstore. The rewards are not just material. The bookstore survives by redefining itself.
This constitutes a major shift in the ethos of bookselling. Traditionally, owners of bookstores, and of used bookstores in particular, had a reputation for being surly (unlike librarians, who are trained to be helpful). That was certainly my experience when I began to frequent New York bookstores in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. It was true of the Shakespeare & Co. on lower Broadway and of the National Book Store, on Astor Place, both now long gone; it was even true of the Strand, near Union Square. One good thing about online stores is that they can’t see that you’re a penniless graduate student.
Still, for much of my life, I’ve been a haunter of bookstores. I have no interest in spending a lot of money on a book. I don’t collect books, and I can’t understand why anyone would pay extra for a first edition. I buy books I want to read. I like older and out-of-print books, as long as they’re readable and “like new.” So the key to a good bookstore, for me, is the curation. In this area of life, anyway, size doesn’t matter. I don’t want two hundred thousand titles to choose from. I want the staff to have selected, from the zillions that are out there, the kinds of books that interest me. Ideally, the store will stock a mix of new and used.
Friss doesn’t mention the famous “secret bookstore” Brazenhead Books, which was run out of a rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street by a character named Michael Seidenberg, who died in 2019. It was said to be like a night club. Cocktails were served, and people could hang out at all hours. There was no sign outside, since the store seems to have been legally unsanctioned. You had to know someone to know where it was.
I was never cool enough to be invited to a secret bookstore, but there were stores “just for me” in New York. One of them, which Friss mentions briefly, was Books & Co., which was founded in 1977. Its collection, all new books, seemed to be expressly curated for grad students in literature. Friss says that the store had an advisory board chaired by Susan Sontag, and few people have had their hand closer to the intellectual pulse than Susan Sontag. The founder and owner was Jeannette Watson, a granddaughter of the founder of I.B.M.
One unusual thing about Books & Co. was its location, 939 Madison Avenue, between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Streets, next to the old Whitney Museum. The Upper East Side isn’t where you would expect to sell a lot of Baudrillard, or all four volumes of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. But you could. I passed on the Heidegger; I did buy Robert Hughes’s “Shock of the New” there, an inspirational book for me. Books & Co. was, surprisingly, not an unfriendly place. Or maybe I fit in better with the clientele there than elsewhere. St. Mark’s Bookshop, which opened in the East Village the same year, was the bomb thrower’s alternative.
Books & Co. had money problems almost from the start. Watson lost an opportunity to buy the building, which was purchased instead by the Whitney. When the lease expired, the museum doubled the rent. Watson tried to find ways to keep the store alive, but it closed in 1997. St. Mark’s hung in there until 2016. Today, 939 Madison is an Aquazzura, a luxury boutique chain with stores in Saint-Tropez, Paris, Milan, and Dubai. I think the best store in Manhattan currently for new books curated for artistic and literary tastes is 192 Books, in West Chelsea. In five years, it will probably be a Jimmy Choo.
Because bookstores don’t last. When I came to New York, the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Eighth and Fourteenth Streets was known as Book Row. In 1969, it had more than twenty bookstores and, according to the Times, more than three-quarters of a million volumes. The Strand began on Book Row and operates in its spirit, advertising a huge inventory. It claims to have eighteen miles of shelves. The store moved from Fourth Avenue to its present location, on Broadway and Twelfth Street, in 1956. In time, the owner, Fred Bass, wisely bought the building. The store is now a tourist attraction and gets a significant portion of its income from the sale of tote bags and T-shirts. It does make money. Bass used to live in Trump Tower.
I cruised Book Row when it, and the New York it belonged to, was on its last legs. A lot of those millions of books were worthless. When books are damaged, they should be thrown out. The Book Row stores were barns. They attracted buyers who enjoyed hunting for a needle in a haystack. The Strand does not carry damaged books, and there are always some needles in there. But it also has a ton of hay.
Art galleries played a big role in the development of modern art; bookshops played a lesser role in the history of modern literature. But there were some that mattered. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, is the best known. Beach published James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922—the only edition you could buy until 1934, after a judge ruled that the book was not obscene. (The store was shut down in 1941, when the Germans were in charge. The Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank today is no relation.) The closest American counterparts are City Lights, in San Francisco, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, which published (and still publishes) Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems,” and the Gotham Book Mart.
The Gotham Book Mart was founded in 1920, by Frances Steloff. It moved around a bit but ended up at 41 West Forty-seventh. The location, even more incongruous than that of Books & Co., was in the diamond district. The Gotham’s clientele included Broadway theatre people. It was also popular with celebrated writers, housed a James Joyce Society, and was known, back in the day, as a place where you could buy banned books.
I was interested in modern poetry and eager to shop there, but by the time I showed up Steloff had sold the store (she was in her eighties and remained present; you could see her at a desk in the back), and it had lost its modernist glamour. The offerings were haphazardly chosen and indifferently displayed, and the vibe was hostile. I’m sure they had dealt with a lot of shoplifting. The store moved again, in 2004, and closed three years later.
I preferred to hang out in the Pomander, on West Ninety-fifth Street. The bookstore was founded in 1975 by a Colombian émigré, Carlos Goez, and it featured British and American literature and philosophy—my kind of collection. Goez sold the Pomander in 1986 (he died soon after), and the store briefly relocated to 107th Street and West End Avenue, two blocks from my apartment. Although the inventory was still attractive, there was less turnover, and the store eventually closed.
But curation is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything. Learn from Aquazzura and Jimmy Choo: go boutique. The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold. Romance is among Amazon’s most popular genres, and, according to the Times, the number of bookstores dedicated to it recently rose from two to more than twenty. The stores’ names are not coy: the Ripped Bodice, in Brooklyn and Culver City; Steamy Lit, in Deerfield Beach, Florida; Blush Bookstore, in Wichita. You can fondle the product all you want, and the staff will be eager to assist you. ♦
