The good bookstore

(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

A good bookstore should stock books it shouldn't? What an outrageous idea, and yet it makes perfect sense.

Most bookstores, being profit-driven, need to focus mostly on bestsellers and classics. That's where the money is. It makes sense to have a large display of Lessons in Chemistry near the front of the store. That's a novel many people are buying these days. Make it easy for them to find it.

Yet true bibliophiles, those individuals who are the best bookstore customers even if not the most numerous, read beyond bestsellers and classics. They read the more obscure books by authors they love. They seek out books nobody else has ever heard of by authors nobody else has ever heard of.

Too often such readers must resort to Amazon because the local bookstore doesn't have the books they are looking for. And sometimes they may not even know a book they might love even exists because they never see a copy of it in a store. Serious browsers can spot single copies of unusual books on store shelves. For example, I recently spied a lone copy of Abultions, the obscure first novel by Patrick deWitt, on a store shelf. Someone at the store may have been relieved that the book, published in 2010, finally sold. Meanwhile, I was thrilled to discover a book I had never before heard of by an author I love.

Jeff Deutsch writes in In Praise of Good Bookstores that in 2019 his Seminary Co-op bookstore in Chicago sold copies of 28,000 different books, yet nearly 17,000 of those were single copies. That is, most of the books sold that year sold just a single copy. And that's in the huge city of Chicago. The store's profits were the result of sales of multiple copies of those 11,000 other books, yet many customers left happy, and will likely return again, because they found that one obscure book they didn't expect to find. That sounds like a good bookstore to me.