A Love Letter To Books And Bookstores
Jeff Deutsch's "In Praise of Good Bookstores" (2022) is a meditation on bookstores, books, the life of the mind, and biography. It is eloquently, if repetitively, written and attempts a great deal in a short space. Still, I was moved by reading this book.
The book has a strong autobiographical component. Deutsch was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn where books were everywhere. When he was old enough to make his own decisions, Deutsch immediately moved away from the Judaism of his birth, feeling that he needed to understand other approaches to life. He retained from his upbringing the love of books and of reading and entered the bookselling business in 1994. He has worked for many years for the large Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and has overseen its transition to a non-profit. Deutsch is concerned with the demise of small, independent bookstores which he attributes largely to the rise of Amazon. He has little good to say about Amazon and its impact on books and reading. In his book, Deutsch argues for the importance of small, brick and mortar bookstores where readers of all persuasions can come and browse and learn, more than purchase a commodity. He looks from varying perspectives of how bookstores enhance a community and readers and he urges that bookstores need to have a separate business model from that common in the culture and used, say, in the selling of tools or of socks.
The book explores the layout and design of Deutsch's beloved bookstore in Chicago and of the ways it encourages browsing and, in his word, "rumination". He explains why he finds this important. Deutsch throughout distinguishes between education and learning. He finds that many people in the United States have been blessed with the opportunity of higher education and are educated in a skill or profession but he finds fewer people, regardless of educational attainments or their lack, are learned. The love of learning, for Deutsch, is undertaken for its own sake while most education is undertaken for the sake of something else, usually a good job and a paycheck. In some ways, this is a distinctly unpragmatic approach but undoubtedly valuable. Deutsch's distinction parallels the more classical distinction between knowledge and wisdom. He finds it is the role of a good bookstore to promote the love of learning for its own sake and that a bookstore is better equipped to meet this goal than is a university or even a library. He draws heavily, not exclusively, in his discussion on Talmudic sources and means of learning from his childhood. Some of this is fascinating and valuable, but I find it overdone, for an approach that Deutsch abandoned as soon as he was able and never looked back. There are many paths, as he recognizes, to reading and the love of learning.
Deutsch is himself a reader as well as a bookseller and his erudition shows. Virtually every page of this book includes allusions to and insightful discussions of many writers which show the love of learning more, perhaps than does the discussion of the economics of bookselling. Every person, Deutsch rightly says, must find the books that mean the most to him or her, and the path to these books is not always obvious. He discusses many authors I know and many with whom I am unfamiliar. Let me mention two examples.
Just before reading this book, I had reread a long difficult novel "Auto-da-Fe" by the 1981 Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti. I had read the book shortly after Canetti received his award and went back to it when it was selected by our book group. Deutsch says that Canetti "brings up the rear" of his own canon the authors "whose oeuvres I long to read entire and then reread." He aptly quotes Canetti who said "true spiritual life consists in rereading", a sentiment I came to share from my rereading of "Auto-da-Fe".
The second author is Walt Whitman. I have been rereading a great deal of Whitman of late, including his essay on the nature and promise of American democracy, "Democratic Vistas". Deutsch discusses and quotes Whitman's poetry several times in his book but he gives his most sustained attention to a passage from "Democratic Vistas" in which Whitman says that it is the reader, more than the author, who must "himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay -- the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start of framework". Deutsch comments on this passage and concludes that Whitman is referring to the "construction of the poetic and principled narrative one tells about oneself to oneself, the narrative one tells about the world to oneself and one's community in an attempt to live a meaningful life." I have recently studied "Democratic Vistas" intensely and written about it. Deutsch brought Whitman's essay home to me again.
I have lived in Washington, D.C. for many years and the Capital City is still blessed with several good bookstores. I remember my younger days when there were many more and when I browsed in them. The life of reading and of learning continues. Something has, indeed, been lost with the loss of so many bookstores. The more important part of what Deutsch has to say, however, is not about bookstores or ways of operating bookstores. It is about books themselves, learning, and the life of the mind.
Robin Friedman
