The bookstore as a pleasure palace

Independent bookstores across America continue to close their doors. Why? Too few customers buying too few books. It's just too easy and too economical to buy books online and at large chain stores.

And so it comes as a bit of shock when Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, says in his 2022 book In Praise of Good Bookstores, "The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience."

For its motto, the Seminary Co-op lifted a line from Epicurus: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry. Here our greatest good is pleasure." Yet this store has remained in business for many years and obviously sells enough books to keep its doors open and its staff paid regularly.

Imagine that. A bookstore with the same philosophy as a good restaurant, a good bar or, for that matter, a good topless club. Give the people who walk in a pleasurable experience and they will keep coming back, they will tell their friends, they will spend more time there and eventually spend more money.

Deutsch seems more interested in selling a pleasurable experience than selling the thousands of books on his shelves. In a bookstore, the pleasurable experience is not eating, drinking or looking a pretty girls but browsing. Book people may enjoy looking at books as much as they enjoy reading them, perhaps even more in some cases. And if there is anything more pleasurable than searching for the books you desire, whether you know what you are looking for or not, it is finding them.

It is hard to beat finding something totally unexpected in a bookstore. The other day I happened across a single paperback copy of Ann Patchett's book of essays These Precious Days. I hadn't even realized the book was in paperback yet. I felt like celebrating. And so I spent some money. But what I was really paying for was the browsing experience, the joy of the search.