Books waiting for their readers

(F)rom a purely profit-driven perspective, the good bookstore is bound to stock books it shouldn't.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Jeff Deutsch

The average bookstore leaves new books on their shelves for 132 days before taking them down and replacing them with newer books. So says Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores. Deutsch, who manages Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, says his business leaves their books on the shelves for 280 days to give browsers a better chance to find them, even though this makes little sense from "a purely profit-driven perspective."

I like the sound of that, for I am someone who often doesn't hear about a book and start looking for it until after it has already disappeared from bookstore shelves — assuming it was ever there in the first place. (Even large Barnes & Noble stores don't always stock the kinds of books I often go there looking for.)

One hundred and thirty-two days may seem like plenty of time to leave a book on a bookstore shelf. That's more than four months. But while that may be a long time for a clothing store or an electronics store, for a bookstore that's nothing. Some people may not even enter a particular bookstore more than once or twice a year, especially if the store is some distance away. Even if they visit more often, they may not spot a book that might interest them on just one visit. I rarely look at bottom shelves, but hope the books down there will work their way up to a higher shelf by the time I return. Or, like me, people may not hear about a certain book until it has been out for several months.

Best-sellers usually stay around longer than 132 days, and classics are likely to stay on the shelves permanently. Obscure books from obscure publishers may never appear at all. You can order them, they will always tell you, but if you don't know they exist, how would you ever do that?

The ideal bookstore, if such a thing existed, would carry virtually every book published and keep it on a shelf until somebody buys it. Am I not describing Amazon? Well, no. The ideal bookstore permits, even encourages, browsing, something you can't really do on Amazon. It's OK if you already know what you want, but not if you don't. Browsing in a bookstore allows you to discover the treasure that's been waiting there for you, in some cases just for you. There may be nobody else in an entire city drawn to that one particular book. That's why the longer books are kept on shelves, the better.

To quote Deutsch again, "Of the 28,000 titles the Seminary Co-op sold in 2019, nearly 17,000 were single copies. In other words, each of those 17,000 books was sought by a unique reader." One book, one reader in the huge city of Chicago. Note to booksellers: Keep books on the shelf long enough to be discovered,