The History of American Bookshops (From Benjamin Franklin to The Painted Porch) | Evan Friss

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1:06Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

1:57Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know if you've ever had one of those moments where it's not kind of deja vu, it's more like a flashback in time. On the 4th of July, I was with my family. We were hanging out and I walked across the street to Maxine's, which is this lovely little greasy spoon diner in Bastrop, and was picking up our food. And as I turned across the street, I saw this empty storefront. It's 912 Main Street. And it's empty. And it hit me that I had been standing in that almost exact same spot, five years, almost to the day. And I saw that that space was vacant.

2:35And my wife and I were talking about it. And she said, you know what, that space would make an amazing bookstore. And I thought that was about the craziest idea I've ever heard in my life. And we set about actually doing it. We spent basically all the money that we'd had. I'd just gotten a book advance for what was going to become the Stoke Virtue series. We spent that and more. And we ended up buying this building. It took quite a while. And it actually turned out it was two buildings that were adjoined. You couldn't buy just one of them. And it had a big roof. And it had been vacant for a long time.

3:07And everything in it had closed. and it was probably a crazy, insane idea under ordinary circumstances. And shortly after we closed, hired our first employee and started demolition, this little virus started spreading around the world and then the whole world shut down. And it seemed like we'd made a huge, huge mistake. And it took longer than expected and cost more than expected and challenged us in like a bazillion ways. but that's what became the painted porch. And actually we sort of called an audible. The plan had been on one side to open a bookstore on the other side to open a coffee shop.

3:46And then with COVID and trying to be more lean, we were like, you know what? Let's just, let's do a bookstore on one side. And then we got this email from this guy named Lippy who had a record store like across the street and sort of won over. And he said, hey, any chance you'd rent me that space? I'd like a little bit more space. And I think books and records go together. And it turned out we had a connection. He had lived in New Orleans and his record store there was next to the building that my wife worked at at Bevelo, which is an old time light company there in New Orleans. And anyways, Lippy moved Astro Records into that spot and he'd been our tenant there for the last four years.

4:28And it was awesome. He helped us. We helped him. He knew everything that was going on in town. He smoothed things over for us. He had our backs. This is an awesome guy. Well, he and his family are moving to the East Coast, and we're so happy for him. We're so sad to see him leave. We're going to try to keep the legacy of Astro Records going a little bit. We bought some of his inventory, so we're going to still sell some records in the space. But now we're going to expand the bookstore into the other space. But for this moment, when I was standing there across the street, it was vacant again. And that sort of hit me.

5:01And if you're wondering where this story is going, that ties in to today's guest. Evan Friss is the author of a new book called The Bookshop, A History of the American Bookstore. And I love bookstores. I've always loved bookstores long before I opened them. I told you when I was doing my event at Barnes & Noble for Right Thing Right Now, like the memory. I could specifically tell you the book that I bought in that bookstore. I could tell you where I got all these different books. And it's funny, I'm heading to Australia here shortly for those gigs. But it's funny, I was just pulling a book off the shelf for something I'm writing for the Wisdom book now, this Emerson book.

5:36And I was like, oh, I bought this in Bondi Beach last time I was in Australia. So I love little indie bookstores. So I was so excited to read this book because it dives into the history of American book selling, how the marketing of books has changed throughout history, and just the stories behind America's most iconic bookstores, which I was very excited to nerd out about with Evan. Evan and I talked about how stoicism itself started in a bookstore. That's why my bookstore is called The Painted Porch, Stoapokile. That's where it's stoa. It means porch. Anyways, I don't want to step on this story.

6:09And we're going to talk about the foundational roles of bookstores and libraries. Evan tells some awesome stories. He's a professor at James Madison University. He's also written a history on bicycles called On Bicycles, which is fascinating. And I thought this was an awesome interview. If you haven't checked out The Painted Porch, come by anytime. We always love bumping into people. We have a little children's reading. We read like books to kids every Thursday, I think at 1030. So I was grabbing us lunch after. You can come by if you got kids, stop by anytime. It's always fun. And that's the kind of things that bookstores do.

6:46They're like a community space. Good things happen in bookstores. That's what I have on the right window in the bookstore, I guess, if you're in the bookstore looking out. And then I have on the left window, I have a quote and it says, a town is not a town without a bookstore. So check out Evan's book, The Bookshop, A History of the American Bookstore. And of course, America is not the only place with bookstores. Remember my guest, Max Joseph, a couple of weeks ago, you should listen to that episode. He has a great documentary on bookstores. I will also link to that in today's show notes. Enjoy.

7:36So I don't know if you know this, but Stoicism started in a bookstore. I didn't know that. Yeah, so Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, he's a young man. He visits the Oracle at Delphi and he's told the secret to wisdom is to have conversations with the dead. And he doesn't know what this means because we never know what the Oracle means. And it's not until many years later, he suffers a shipwreck. He washes up in Athens and he ends up in a bookstore or at a bookseller, as they called them then. He ends up and the bookseller is reading one of the dialogues of Socrates. and he realizes in this moment that that's what it means to have conversations with the dead, that books are a way for us to communicate with people who are not there anymore.

8:26And so that's where Stoicism is founded. He ends up falling in love with philosophy, meets a philosopher there, and then it sends him on this journey, which culminates in him founding the Stoic Pequille, which is the name of my bookstore, which is on the other side of this wall, The Painted Porch. That's amazing. The very first bookstores were, I mean, it's difficult to define exactly what a bookstore is, but basically at the Agora in ancient Athens, where they had stalls of people selling all sorts of things, fish and oils and cloth, people started selling books and people came and gathered there to talk books.

9:04And those are what I would consider to be the very first bookstores in the world. Yeah, I was thinking about that because I was at Fabled, which is a bookstore in Waco a couple weeks ago. And I didn't know there was an event. And I get there and I was just shopping with my family. And it turns out it's a friend of mine was doing a book signing and talk there. But just the idea, like, I love the idea that 2300 or so years ago, people were bumping into people at bookstores and hearing somebody read something. that they wrote or that somebody else wrote. And it was striking them the exact same way that it strikes us all these centuries later.

9:47That even though what a physical book is now versus then has changed a great deal, and who was reading and who was writing and what the books were about has obviously changed a great deal. But so many of the fundamental elements of the bookstore experience remain unchanged. Sure. And reading aloud was obviously a lot more common then. And that's the way a lot of people read books was really listening to them, which was a community experience. And there's still a great charm to that when people come to bookstores and just put away their phones and sit there and listen to a human read from a book is a kind of enduring magical experience.

10:33Yeah. And I feel like most of the books that I read, I hear about because, and I read an article about them or somebody told me about them, but the discovery experience of a bookstore is so important. That he's walking in there and whatever the bookseller chose to focus on that day changes the course of his life. And then in many ways, you know, redirects or changes part of the course of Western civilization is remarkable to me. But just that we walk into bookstores and we discover things that we didn't even know we didn't know about. Yeah, that's one of the hallmarks of browsing is this kind of serendipitous nature of fumbling upon something happening upon something.

11:20And as you say, Sometimes it's not as accidental as we think. The book wasn't selling well or the bookseller really likes it and they put it at eye level in the right spot. And it feels just kind of wondrous to fall into this book and to discover it. And this kind of experience is why bookstores remain places that people can spend a good deal of time just kind of on their own, wending their way through the aisles. And people are still much more likely to buy books that they didn't know about, never heard about in person, several times more likely than online. Yeah. And obviously, they didn't have this back then.

12:02But one of the things you learn about the publishing industry very quickly is like, yeah, pretty much everything you see, you're seeing for a reason. And one of those reasons is, is somebody paid for that shelf space? I can imagine Socrates did not pay to have his works read at that bookstore in the Agora. But yeah, you sort of chance upon these things and you don't always know why this thing is being surfaced to you at this moment. And sometimes it's wonderful and serendipitous and sometimes it's not. But yeah, you never know why you're seeing the things that you see. Yeah. And I will say that bookstores are a lot more autonomous now than they used to be.

12:42So in the 90s and early 2000s, Barnes & Noble and Borders, there was a lot of what they called co-op advertising when the publishers would pay significant fees to have their books at the end caps and stacked on tables. And that's actually kind of died down even at the corporate chains that still exist and certainly at the indie stores. So there's a lot more booksellers are empowered even more in terms of the decision making than they were a couple of decades ago. Well, the one place that I see it remain undiminished, or perhaps it's almost all that there is now, is your airport bookstore, which is like entirely a branded pop-up at this point.

13:27Yeah. The Hudson News Group is actually part of the American Booksellers Association, which would surprise a lot of people because it has a kind of indie brand. And in recent years, they've partnered with a lot of well-known indie bookstores. So if you go to LaGuardia Airport, you'll see a branch of, you know, the Strand Bookstore, I think it is. And in Portland, there's a Powell's Outpost. And in Nashville, there's a Parnassus Bookstore, which is, you know, a branch of Ann Patchett's bookstore in Nashville. So they're the kind of indie brand, I guess, has become chic enough to meld with the airport bookstore.

14:10And sometimes it works very well. But a lot of times they do read like airport bookstores, which are their own kind of interesting genre. Well, talk to me about Ben Franklin's bookstore, the one he got to know as a young man. Because it's not just Zeno, but it feels like behind every great man and woman of history, there's usually a library or a bookstore somewhere formative in their life. Sure. So for Franklin and many of his peers, books were everything. They were leisure. It was their chief hobby. But it was also what really shaped them intellectually. And the American Revolution is a consequence of many things, but it's certainly an intellectual revolution and a consequence of the Enlightenment.

15:02And Franklin and his friends and other so-called founding fathers are eating this stuff up. Much of it's coming from Europe. And they're huge readers. And everybody who loves to read also often has a passion to share good books with their friends. And Franklin started basically a kind of impromptu book club where he would gather with some of his colleagues and talk about his favorite books. And then he started a library because he wanted those books available on hand when they were having these discussions. And then he got involved in bookmaking. He was really interested in printing, which was essentially his first job when he was out on his own.

15:44and his bookstore was a kind of was a formative American bookstore. I don't really consider it the first modern American bookstore because it's very different than we would expect. It's a place where he's printing off sermons and political treatises and school books and his own famous almanac. It's a place where people are picking up mail. It's very loud. It's very dirty. But part of the space is devoted to retail, selling books, and also a host of other products as well. And people come and talk to him about the books and the books he chooses, of course, to sell, and the books that find their way into literate colonials really shape their perspective and frame of mind.

16:33And I think the American Revolution is, as I said, a consequence of of reading and people having access to literature, books, pamphlets, et cetera. It kind of reminds me of those sort of early days of rock and roll where you hear about people in London or people in America that are like waiting for the newest import to arrive at the record store. There's all these things they've never heard of. It feels like at that period of American history, first off, there were all these classical texts that were being translated into English or as opposed to just being available in Greek and Latin, kind of for the first time, these were like modern accessible translations at that time that were coming out.

17:16And that when you read the letters from Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, it's like, they're like excited. Something's like coming off the boat and they're rushing, they have standing orders at some of these bookstores or these lending libraries to like get anything published on this topic or by this author, the sort of anticipation and excitement of it. I always found that really both relatable and humanizing about the founders. Sure. The market for books was very narrow compared to what we're used to today. And even at Franklin's fledgling bookstore and similar ones in colonial America, we're talking about you know scores of titles not thousands of titles at any given time and they're all brought in by way of Europe and people get very excited when there's something new to read or a new translation and what Franklin as a printer decides to print has just as much impact as what he decides to carry as a bookseller because again there's just relatively few books in circulation.

18:27And most people are still literate at the time. So there's not a huge market. And the books that get printed and pushed at the various bookstores are the ones that people are reading and are influencing people's thoughts. And yeah, people are giddy about things coming fresh off the boat, so to speak. Yeah. It's like the novel as a form is still developing. obviously self-help kind of books aren't invented for another hundred or so years. It's not just that there were fewer books, but there were fewer types of books. There was basically the classics and then a handful of other things, and that's it.

19:12That's exactly right. Franklin at one point invested in a novel, and it was a huge flop. It just didn't suit American, colonial American audiences at the time. Very few people were reading fiction. And for the most part, he sold religious texts. One of his bestsellers were sermons from a well-known itinerant preacher, philosophy texts, school books, and his almanacs. And there were some, they wouldn't necessarily read as self-help books today, but even his almanacs include a lot of kind of life lessons. And there were other books about home remedies and how to take care of yourself and your children or how to understand the law.

19:57So there were some kind of primers on a whole host of subjects, the economy, medicine, law, politics that were educational and maybe stretch could be conceived of as a kind of self-help genre. They weren't labeled as such, but touched on some of those same kind of things. That's sort of what the almanac was, right? It's kind of a self-help magazine that he was publishing. Yeah, it's a kind of compendium of miscellaneous. It's a really interesting read if you go back and look at it. And what people seem to really gravitate to were these maxims about how to live your life. And the great thing about the Almanac for Franklin was that he wrote it under a pseudonym.

20:41And he sold it, and you can update it every year. So he made money from writing it as the author, he made money from printing it as the printer, and he made money as selling it as the bookseller. Yeah, I was struck also, this is another, I think, intersection between these sort of book clubs and stoicism, is I was amazed at the play, the Joseph Addison play, Cato, which was so popular at that time, which I imagine that many of them didn't see as a play. They probably read it or read excerpts of it. But when I sat down and read the play a few years ago, what struck me was how many of the lines from that play end up in sort of seminal moments of the revolution.

21:26I regret I have but one life to lose for my country or give me liberty or give me death. I guess one of the upsides of this sort of smaller literary culture was that everyone that had read had read the same handful of texts. So they were all kind of on the same page about these ideas. There was kind of a mass culture, even though it was much smaller, but because you couldn't read novels or you couldn't read science fiction and you couldn't read self-help and all these other things. It was like everyone had read the same handful of classical texts or plays or whatever. And so there was a familiarity.

22:06I just think about this even with the Federalist papers, you know, they pick these fake names, but the fake names are nods to historical and literary figures that, you know, it's probably lost on your average person today. But the subtext of that illusion would have very much landed with someone in 1780 or whatever. Yeah. And sort of relatedly, the bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about. The colonial population was still largely illiterate, but that book, that pamphlet was read aloud in taverns and churches and city halls and squares across the country and was probably in terms of a kind of cultural zeitgeist or what we would call a kind of water cooler moment where everybody is talking about the same piece of media was probably as galvanizing and as momentous and as influential and as broad of a readership as any book since, you know, Harry Potter, Taylor Swift, whatever kind of contemporary examples we could think of.

23:23This was a pamphlet that many, many colonial Americans heard about, which is a remarkable thing considering how anemic the kind of media infrastructure was at the time. Totally.

23:42Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

24:27We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

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25:19I was struck by Franklin's sort of lending library because we see him as such a capitalist, right? He's sort of the first American capitalist, really. And yet he creates this kind of nonprofit community book reading thing that basically becomes the forerunner of public libraries in America. And I made this joke the other day and a bunch of my fans got mad. I thought it was funny. But I was saying that I bought this book from this other indie bookstore. And I said, because they're not my competition. I said, actually, my competition is those socialists over there at the library. And I think people thought I was making a culture war statement.

26:01But I was saying, like, actually, libraries are a wonderful example of socialism, where the government decides to collectively own something on behalf of all of the citizens and we can partake in it. And there is obviously bookstores are close to my heart and I love them. And I think they do a very important thing. The idea of bookstores and libraries, I mean, you couldn't imagine something more like they share the same love of something and then they are diametrically opposed in how they go about making it accessible to the public. Yeah, I think, well, Franklin has been described by some historians as the first American.

26:41And in many ways, that's an apt title in part because of his capitalist impulses. But also he comes up with this system, this kind of list making checklist for how to become a better person with these 13 traits and is very busy and doing all these kinds of things and struggling to sort of keep his wits about him as he has been. has his hands in everything. So in that way, he's very American too. And his library, like most libraries at the time were private or even through the 19th century, they were often subscription based. So the kind of taxpayer funded public libraries that we have now didn't really become popularized until the late 19th century.

27:26So they weren't necessarily competition for bookstores. And in fact, a lot of bookstores used to have libraries in them where they would rent out books for small fees on a weekly basis was pretty common. But once libraries do become popularized, booksellers panic and think that this is the end of the business, essentially, that there are these places where people can go and get books for free and check them out. What are they doing? They're just giving books away over there? Yes. Why would anybody want to buy a book when you can just get it, taste it, and release it back into the wild. Yeah. No, it's funny, right?

28:03Because yeah, he is the first American in this sort of capitalistic sense. And then he's also a pioneer of the libraries and fire departments. And so he sort of embraces that. There's a duality in America, I guess, in that we are both very selfish and very capitalistic. And at the same time, we do a lot of things together. And some of our best creations were things that we decided to do together. And the library being one that, yeah, you make a good point. It's sort of an evolution. I think when you look at the New York Public Library, the big one on Fifth Avenue, yeah, I think it's Fifth Avenue, the one with the lions, there's like a stone engraving on top.

28:43And it credits the lending libraries that were absorbed into the system of libraries that we now see as this timeless institution. But yeah, at one point, they were not that way. Yeah. And that library in particular, I did some research for the book there. And it's just the most majestic space to inhabit. it and is amazing that this is a kind of public space that anybody could walk in. And there's nobody who leaves without being awed by the space. And it makes you, like the best bookstores, just want to read and learn and be quiet and pay attention just by the architecture, the atmosphere, the grandeur of it.

29:34It puts such a primacy on literature and you can feel the kind of gravity of how important everything seems important inside of that building. And I think the best bookstores make people feel that way too. Well, yeah. And I've written, I wrote a chunk of one of my books at that very library. And then there's another library, like another branch, like across the street. And then there's also like a Barnes and Noble within like a five minute walk also. So the idea that they're technically in competition with each other doesn't really hold up. Yeah, I think that's fair. What do you think makes a great bookstore?

30:10This is obviously something I've thought a lot about. Sometimes I wonder, it's a tough business, but I also wonder how much it makes the business tougher than it needs to be. Ardent capitalists don't often go into the indie bookstore business. It's so often like a retirement project or like with Ann Patchett, It's just a fun thing to do. And so I sometimes wonder if we're necessarily getting the best independent bookstores that we can get because there's so much just this is how it should be done. Yeah, I think there's no singular model for a great bookstore. The owner of a small, wonderful bookstore in New York where I used to live and where my wife worked for many years, always liked to say that there were three S's that make a great bookstore, the space, the staff, and the selection.

31:04And I think that pretty much captures it, that a bookstore should be inviting and charming and welcoming and a great space that you want to inhabit and be in. The people working there, of course, matter a great deal. And the books themselves, the kind of books that people want to find, discover, and the degree to which you could talk to people or get lost on your own if that's your kind of thing. But I also think customers are a really important part of what makes a great bookstore. And the best bookstores have a lot of repeat customers, regulars who come by. There are people behind the scenes, the UPS driver, all sorts of people that you may not think about.

31:46If there's a kind of perfect mix of atmosphere, people, camaraderie, cooperation that can make for a great bookstore. And people get into the business for all sorts of reasons. And there are, in the 21st century, some examples of, for lack of a better word, vanity bookstores, people who have a lot of money, who are just plunking down money because they love literature. And I don't mean this to be derogatory. It's something good to do if you have excess capital versus lots of other things. So there's some of that. And there's celebrities opening bookstores and saving bookstores. Lin Manuel Miranda bought the drama bookshop in New York, which had a very long storied history, but was also just struggling to make money.

32:35So I think those are kind of interesting ventures. And there are people who go into it from very diverse backgrounds, but I think it is certainly true that it's probably one of the most romantically idealized kind of... It's a fantasy business. Yes. Some people want to be professional athletes when they grow up, and other people dream of retiring and opening a bookstore in a small town. Yes, that is true. And it's very hard to actually do it and open it. So at a bookstore, you will meet many customers who say, I always wanted to open a bookstore, but I'm glad you're here. So now I don't have to.

33:17Yeah. I've found that with a couple of things I've done in my life where you do something like I live on a ranch and I have this bookstore and people for both of them, they go, I've always wanted to do that. And then you realize two things. One, there's a reason that a lot of people don't do it because it's hard. And then the other hand, you realize how many of the reasons that people make up for not doing things are not like you don't have to be a billionaire to be able to open a small book stand at a farmer's market or like these things are more accessible sometimes than we think. And, and creative people are always coming up with interesting ways or interesting spins on things that have been around for a very long time.

34:00Yeah, it's certainly less capital intensive business than many other kinds of businesses you want to start. And like you said, if you start with a small bookshop, you don't have to build out a kitchen or other kinds of expensive aspects of a business. The books are generally returnable to the publisher for some period of time. So, you know, there's some abatement of risk there. And they also don't expire. It's not like opening a grocery store and the meat can go bad before you sell it. You know, there's something nice and dependable about books. And also, sometimes I walk through the shelves of my bookstore and I go, this book is 2 ,000 years old.

34:43Like this copy of the Odyssey, it's a new translation from Emily Wilson, sure. But people have been buying some version of this book for centuries. And here it is, still flying off the shelf. Like show me another business where we're still doing that. It's crazy. Yeah, it is. And the good bookstores have to predict what their customers want, which is different. There are some classics or books that sell well in every region, every kind of bookstore. But a lot of bookstores have communities that are in some ways distinct and the readerships are distinct and their interests are somewhat distinct.

35:26So it can take a while for a bookseller to discover exactly the kind of or read the temperature of its audience, their audience, but usually they can be fairly adaptable. And the biggest problem is usually limiting the number of books that one has in a bookstore because the number of books being printed every year just continues to increase. So the choices feel endless. No, that's a really interesting point because that was something that shocked me when I started the bookstore. So I called the folks at Parnassus and they were actually very nice. They gave me a bunch of advice. And they hook you up with Ingram, who's the distributor for most independent bookstores.

36:08And what was both eye-opening but also disappointing was Ingram, you go, hey, I'm opening a bookstore in this part of the country, and I have this much square footage and this much shelf space. And they go, okay, we'll send you a list. And you go, what? And they go, we'll send you a list of all the books you should carry. And they're like, We know what you should carry. And realizing that that's what a lot of bookstores do is that it's just, hey, these are the top selling titles or these are the titles that the publishers are pushing right now. And that your average bookstore, like a bookstore of my size, about 2 ,000, 2 ,500 square feet, or we're expanding it now, but it should have something between, per Ingram, it should have something between 10 and 15 ,000 titles.

36:58And that's an unfathomable amount of books to me. Not like inventory, but that's how many unique SKUs you should have. And so no one can stay on top of that. But I do think there is this pressure on indie bookstores, especially, to carry what's new or to just carry all of these titles. We made a very different decision. Our bookstore has about a thousand books, but we picked them all. And almost all of them are face out as opposed to like they are there on your library where it's just all the titles blurring together. But there is something about bookstores where they carry books that you know they can't possibly be selling many copies of.

37:40And I wonder how many of them would do better as a business and how many more people would enjoy going to bookstores if they carried more books they would like, as opposed to all 150 titles from every imprint that put out that year by Simon & Schuster or Penguin Random House or whatever. Yeah. In the age of Amazon, I think curation is even more important. Everybody knows who walks into your bookstore and every other bookstore, that they could go online and find everything and anything. Cheaper and faster. Yes. So what the in-store experience offers, as we talked about before, is the discovery.

38:23And so having fewer books, face-out books, I think is a great way to go and what customers come to appreciate. And historically, one of the main reasons that bookstores have failed, the ones that have relates to overstocking, basically just carrying too many books, not returning them fast enough or in high enough quantities. And the Ingram, they call it, I believe the Rosie recommended opening store inventory is a useful tool for a lot of people. If you're starting a bookshop with thousands of books, you know, where do you start? And they offer a template, But I think the best booksellers quickly gravitate away from the default list and find their own taste and the taste of their communities and try and, in some ways, yeah, find a curation that really works for them and for their customers.

39:26Well, yeah. And you can also see why it's great for Ingram, right? The Rosie. So it's like, if they're suggesting 15 ,000 titles, you're talking about$200 ,000 in inventory just to get started, right? And then how many of those are you actually going to move? You may need more copies of this or that. So yeah, I think to me, it's all about curation. And if you're not curating, yeah, why are you a bookstore? One of my favorite ones in New York, have you ever been to Chartwell Books? No, I haven't. It's a Winston Churchill themed bookstore in Manhattan. Oh, okay. It's basically just books about or by Winston Churchill with a collection of other ones.

40:07But you're like, oh, yeah. I mean, and probably 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago, it was a better business idea. But you're like, how many Churchill fans are in Manhattan? Probably a lot. And it can kind of become a whole thing. Like, I really love those very specific bookstores. even a communist bookstore, an activist bookstore, as you said, a drama bookstore, these sort of thematic ones are so interesting because you're like, I'm a fan of that thing. What are you going to show me that I don't know about? I do too. And there's just the kind of appreciation when you walk in or an appreciation and understanding that the person working there is a kind of expert, almost like a librarian of the subject matter, that you feel like you're immersed in this genre expertise.

41:00And those kind of bookstores actually were much more common than they are now. And those specialty shops, probably even more disproportionately than general bookshops, were the ones that closed in the great wave of 90s and early 2000s. So in the 70s and 80s, there were bookstores, lots of mystery bookstores, cookbook bookstores, history bookstores. Romance bookstores. Romance bookstores related to oceanography, you know, all sorts of very niche subjects. And some of the people were aficionados and some of the people just thought it was cool to go into a Winston Churchill bookstore. And all right, I don't know anything about Winston Churchill, but this is where I'm going to go.

41:46Or science fiction bookstores were also quite common. And you don't see many of those anymore. There are some romance bookstores that have opened in recent years as that genre has picked up. And even other kinds of bookstores that are often identified as Black-owned or queer-owned bookstores tend to be more general than back in the 70s and 80s when Black bookstores, gay bookstores were much more prevalent. Did you watch Portlandia, the feminist bookstore skit? Yes, I very much enjoyed that show. I saw an interview where they interviewed like the actual women that it's based on. You realized like it wasn't a skit.

42:31That was who they were. It was amazing. And then you go, oh, that's awesome that like you created this niche for yourself where you're kind of running a bookstore and also you hate the people coming into your bookstore for not being as ideologically pure as you. It was like amazing. Yeah, at one point, there were over 100 feminist bookstores in the United States. And in the book, I profile one of them and the name happened to be Amazon. It opened in Minneapolis. It was a small, tiny feminist bookstore that started on the front porch of this activist. and she eventually found a storefront and they were called Amazon.

43:13Like a warrior. Yeah, chugging along, succeeding. People loved the store. And then came the other Amazon and people started calling feminist Amazon, complaining that their books didn't arrive on time and complaining that their credit card was charged too much and this and that. And they got so fed up, they eventually sued Bezos' Amazon This kind of legal drama ensued over the course of it. It was a protracted legal fight. They both ended up keeping their names temporarily. And then the little feminist Amazon ultimately closed. It didn't become a trillion dollar company? Right. It did not, but it had a real impact.

43:56It was actually the model on which a lot of other feminist bookstores in California, Texas, New York, and elsewhere formed. And were really amazing, provocative spaces that weren't, again, just places to buy books, but were activist spaces where people found like-minded community members, people found partners and lovers, People found texts that were inaccessible at the local library and any other kind of bookstore. Sure, they'd be banned potentially. Yeah. So really kind of revolutionary spaces. And in the 70s, late 60s and 70s in particular, there were a whole host of bookstores that fit that mold in different ways.

44:43Black bookstores, gay bookstores, feminist bookstores. And preceding that, there were communist bookstores, socialist bookstores, Nazi bookstores. And of course, they had very different political goals. But the bookstores overlapped in many ways, insofar as they were places to acquire literature, but they were also places to inspire people and show people a certain kind of perspective and to lead them toward a set of particular beliefs. or at least in hope of that happening.

45:30The wonderful thing about the internet is how cheaply it allows people all over the world to connect, right? Like people to come together with shared ideas. It radically lowers the cost of that connection in that community. So that's the good part. The bad part is because it's so cheap, it becomes almost ephemeral and not real. Like I was just in New York for the launch of my last book. And I was walking to an interview, and I passed the Explorers Club, which is like one of my favorite things, like the idea that in, you know, 19th century and early 20th century New York, people who loved exploring the unexplored parts of the continent, you know, your Theodore your Roosevelt's or your Shackleton's or whatever, that because they couldn't email each other or even call each other on the phone, they had to build a clubhouse where they could meet and talk and, you know, has a reading library, et cetera.

46:26It's also where they hang up all their taxidermy of like polar bears and Norwalks and stuff. But the point is, you know, today, if you're a gay or a trans activist, you can create a WhatsApp text thread and you all message each other. You don't have to build a physical building that maintains all the stuff. And so the upside is that it's easier to connect. And if you're some kid in small town Ohio, you can find your people. But the downside is we don't get the byproducts, which are these cool physical spaces or the manifestation of that connection being a bookstore, a club, a lending library, or whatever.

47:07Yeah, digital spaces to congregate certainly have their benefits and advantages and ease of access, but we all know it's not the same. And one of the most remarkable things I found in my research was that the reach of some of these, what I thought were local bookstores. So one of the first gay bookstores in the country was in New York, founded by a guy named Craig Rodwell, who was a teenager who knew nothing about books. He wasn't even a serious reader, but he was just an activist and thought that people needed to read stuff to, you know, activate them. And so he decides he starts this Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the West Village of New York.

47:50and he immediately starts getting letters from kids all around the country. Later in Vietnam, people are sending him notes asking about what they should read, asking if they can get a job when they return or asking if they could come to New York and have a place to stay or what they should do about being bullied or harassed. So he opens this little, small, relatively small local bookstore. And he becomes a leader, sort of a de facto leader, a de facto therapist, a de facto community organizer. It's like an HQ. Exactly. Well, I think about that with City Lights, right? So City Lights is a bookstore in San Francisco.

48:33It's a perfectly regular, nice bookshop that's still there today. But also, because of how things worked at that time, it also has a small kind of independent press as part of it. And I believe that's how we get Ginsburg, right? Like some of these bookstores or these sort of activist shops were also publishers or ways that some of these more seemingly fringe authors or artists were able to get discovered and reach a broader audience. Yes. City Lights is probably the most famous example of that as an early publisher of Beat Poets, many of whom were rejected by mainstream publishers and, of course, targeted by various law enforcement officials.

49:21And even going back earlier, some specialty shops like Gotham Bookmark in New York City started its own imprint. And there's a long history of booksellers as publishers. And they're often the ones who can determine a need that's not being filled and will sometimes go to publishers, but have often historically turned into publishers themselves. It's probably because that is an interesting thing in publishing that I didn't fully appreciate, which is like, okay, let's say I'm just a regular author. I don't have a bookstore or a podcast or whatever. I write a book. I sell that to a publisher or I sell that to an imprint of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate who in turn sells it to Ingram or some other distributor who then sells it to a buyer who works at a bookstore who may or may not sell that to a customer.

50:15I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there are so many steps between the creator of the thing and then the purchaser of the thing, even in something as efficient as publishing. And I imagine what City Lights or some of these other indie bookstores that published works that went on to be successful mainstream is that because they were talking to customers every day, they actually knew what people liked and didn't like or what was important or what the zeitgeist was in a way that some of these publishers in a big city, Ivy League education or whatever, are just not in touch with. And so there is something about publishing and I think being a creative where you're so intermediated between you and your audience.

51:05You could be an author, sell millions of copies of one of your books. I found this all the time. I would talk when I did book marketing. I would talk to someone who sold a million copies of something in 2002. Well, then when they were putting out the sequel in 2011, the whole book market had changed. And the idea of it being a hit at Borders was irrelevant because Borders doesn't exist anymore. And they don't have a million fans that they can connect with because those million fans are spread out all over the world. And they happen to have just chanced upon this at a big box retailer or it was blessed by a PR hit.

51:45But being actually directly in touch with your audience is kind of the most important thing. And bookstores see those people every day. Sure. And I think most people don't realize how many gates or hurdles there are between the author and the reader. So, you know, an author has to convince oftentimes an assistant to an agent to be filtered through and then the agent and the agent has to convince an editor and then the editor has to convince the publicist and marketers and editor in chief at their firm. And then once the book is actually out, they have to convince the New York Times to do a review and they have to convince Ingram to buy so many copies and they have to convince booksellers to carry it.

52:29And then those booksellers have to convince consumers to buy it. So it takes a lot of convincing and a lot of people who have to be on board before that book falls into someone's lap. And publishers, it wasn't also just about kind of determining the market. But at one point, publishers logically thought they could just cut out the middleman and sell the books themselves. And to this day, if you go to Penguin Random House, which is the largest American publisher, and my book is Viking, which is an imprint of that. If you go to the Penguin Random House site and search for the book, you can't actually buy it from Penguin Random House.

53:10It's just a button to connect to various retailers. But at one point in time, the publishers figured they could get into the game and it would be more profitable. So there were Double Day bookstores, Scribner bookstores, Brentano bookstores, lots of fairly muscular publishers who had storefronts across the country as well. Yeah, I mean, I just did this on my last book. Typically, you have the book and it goes up for pre-order. And so you just tell people, buy it from Amazon. And I said, look, why don't you buy it for me? And I bought it from my publisher and then I resold it to the audience. And one of the reasons I did that is I'm in the middle of this four book series.

53:52And the idea of having to start from scratch four times seemed totally insane to me. And, and like, we should talk about Amazon, because it's obviously the 800 pound gorilla in these, these book discussions. But like, you would think that Amazon would want to help people sell books, but in some ways, they don't. If your publisher wants to send an email to people who have bought your previous books, which is basic marketing, Amazon charges a fee for that. And people have for a long time sent their people to Amazon because it's cheapest and fastest. And they just didn't understand that they were making themselves utterly dependent on this behemoth that probably if it could get out of the book business without a PR backlash, would gladly do so because they make more money selling vitamins and toilet paper and batteries and other things.

54:52That's right. And many people have speculated that books have always been a kind of loss leader for Amazon, that they were a way to initially get an audience and get people to go to the website and that they make most of their money elsewhere. It's hard to know exactly. And one of the most interesting experiments was when Amazon opened 24 brick and mortar bookstores across the country, which I write about and profile in the book. And it seemed like basically nobody could figure out if bookstores were dead or alive, including Amazon. And so they were going to wade into it. And I liked their bookstores.

55:31I thought they were great. Yeah. Was there one in Austin? There was one in Austin. I went to one of the ones in New York too. But I liked it because unlike so many indie bookstores, it was filled with popular books, as opposed to a lot of poetry collections and obscure novels. I did feel like if anyone could succeed in that market, Amazon going, well, we have the data of the most popular books. I thought it was a great model. I personally think more indie bookstores should emulate what Amazon was trying to do. Yeah. The bookselling in general hasn't been a very data-centric industry. So to your point about a local bookstore, historically has known almost nothing about its customers the way that Amazon has, of course.

56:25And one of the things about the pandemic was that a lot of people were buying books online from their local bookstore that set up online platforms out of necessity. And they began to cap, some of the bookstores anyway, began to capture data about their customers for really the first time and have tried to use that and leverage that information. But for the most part, you're right. You go into a local bookstore, you find a book and an author that you really like, it's sort of up to you to follow this author and see when the next book comes out. And unless they have some really excellent booksellers who just remember you, when you walk in, nobody's going to say, oh, hey, Ryan has another book coming out next month.

57:10Put it on your radar. Even though, of course, that would be very useful. Yeah. It's interesting. Also, I never quite understood the hatred of Amazon. I mean, Look, it's done some not good things. And I've had some issues with it, especially with counterfeit books and other things. I also think the idea of making books cheaper and thus more accessible, they weren't squeezing the authors when they decided to steeply discount books. They were squeezing the multi-billion dollar publishers for the most part, right? Like they were squeezing Penguin Random House. The author's royalty stayed the same.

57:48So it's kind of weird that customers, like I was just thinking about this where it's like people are like, I want to support my local businesses. So that's what they think of when they think of a bookstore. But of course, that local business, my bookstore, any bookstore, is buying from Ingram, which is worth billions of dollars, who is in turn buying from the big five, which are each worth billions of dollars. It goes from local to international conglomerate very quickly. Yeah, I think the critique has largely been that Amazon, especially initially, was lowering the prices to such a degree that it was essentially trying to just kill off all the other rivals and booksellers and that it would eventually have a monopoly and could price books accordingly.

58:40And I haven't seen a lot of statistics lately. Just anecdotally, I often check Amazon. My feeling is the books are less discounted than they used to be. And so that may be the consequence of a number of different decisions and factors in sort of Amazon leadership's own thinking. I will say that the publishers were very thankful that Amazon existed during the pandemic and that there are people across the country who have no bookstore near them. So one of the most remarkable statistics I came across back in the 1930s was the census data where this economist was looking county by county at how many bookstores there were.

59:27And it was very useful for me because I could tally up where the bookstores were and how many there were. But for a majority of American counties, people were living with no bookstore nearby. Now, of course, the population centers had a lot of bookstores, and they were disproportionately in the Northeast and New York City in particular. But a lot of people were never near a bookstore. And that's one of the things the chains allowed when they were opening bookstores in every state, even though they were often derided as overly corporate and tasteless and pushing bestsellers. But for a lot of people in the American suburbs, there wasn't an indie bookstore there that preceded that.

1:00:08And then when they disappeared, Amazon was the kind of alternative for a lot of people. But I do think that when you buy books on Amazon, it's a joyless experience. You can get what you want and it's often at a better price than if you're a Prime member, the delivery is free. But you're not finding books that you wouldn't have found usually. Otherwise, the algorithm can sometimes work, sometimes not. But there's a special human connection when a bookseller takes a book and presses it into your hands and says, you'll love this book. And you often do. Well, I do think running through the book publishing and the book selling business has always been a kind of a snootiness or a cultural elitism.

1:00:55And that's what looked down on the chains. That's what sometimes looked down on Amazon. And the cost to that was people were made to think that reading was not for them or books were not for them or bookstores were not for them. And I do think we have to credit Amazon with making books more accessible. I mean, some people are price conscious, right? And if every book is$28, people are not going to read as much as they are when they're cheap. And when you go back and you look at publishing, there was a big debate about whether paperbacks should be a thing. And then mass market paperbacks should be a thing because they were seen as sort of eroding both the profit margins of the industry and the dignity of the industry.

1:01:37And certain authors were champions of them and certain ones were not. But I also think about this with audiobooks. I mean, at this point, I think 30 or 40 percent of the nonfiction market is audiobooks. And some of those are probably cannibalizing people that would have taken a trip down to a local bookstore and bought a hardcover. But I think a big chunk of it is people who don't read or have trouble reading. And now suddenly, that experience of walking into a bookstore and hearing the bookseller read you the works of Socrates, as Zeno experienced 2 ,300 years ago, is accessible to a long haul truck driver in a way that wasn't possible before.

1:02:17Yeah. City Lights, which you mentioned before, refused to carry paperbacks for many years. There were other sort of more modernist avant-garde bookstores that also railed against paperbacks. in the earlier part and middle of the 20th century became the book of the month club was popular and a lot of elitists slammed this as you know a kind of handful of men so-called experts just picked what everybody should read and this was you know in in their view they were democratizing literature but to critics this was a kind of sellout in many ways and was going to crush the local independent bookstore.

1:03:00So these debates have been around a very long time. And whether it was paperbacks, whether it was other forms of media, radio, television, film was going to kind of be the death knell of the book industry. One of the recurring themes of the book business has been its precariousness or the kind of the sense that it was near death. And so I think you're seeing some of those same discussions about audio books and lack of attention spans and other factors that people talk about in today's world. Yeah, they've been predicting the death of books and bookstores basically since they were invented. And there is something very durable about the technology, clearly.

1:03:50The technology of the bound book and the technology of a place that has a bunch of them in one place, and you can grab it right now and take it with you. Clearly, there's something perennial, and I would say timeless about that, or it wouldn't have lasted all these centuries. Books are amazing, and they still are, and children still love books, And there's no better way to connect than reading someone a book and being surrounded by books. Even just mere proximity, sociologists have discovered changes one's upbringing. If you grow up in a house full of books, whether or not you read them or your parents read them, there's something about the physical objects that makes us feel warm and curious.

1:04:39So as we wrap up, what would you say are three special bookstores that everyone should visit? You can pick anywhere in the world or America, but when you're like, these are some of my favorite bookstores, who are you thinking of? Well, I'll say the first one is the one that inspired this book, which is called Three Lives and Company, which is in New York City's West Village and is a tiny, charming, amazing bookstore with wonderful readers who work there, wonderful customers who linger there. And it's just the kind of quintessential shop around the corner in every way imaginable. Another one, and this one you already mentioned, I think, is City Lights, which is a kind of weird shape.

1:05:27It's a triangular building in San Francisco, but it just has so many books and reminds me of a lot of the bookstores that no longer exist in terms of a dedication to stocking books that it wants to sell. And that doesn't mean that it kind of ignores its customers or ignores what's going on in the world. But they have books there that the booksellers think people ought to read and are often maybe a bit esoteric. There's a whole room of poetry or arcane. And it's just a wonderful place to kind of discover. And then I would be remiss not to give a shout out. My wife is a fledgling bookseller in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who has a small shop called Parentheses.

1:06:14And she's kind of putting into we live in a very bookstore centric family right now. or I'm writing about them and she's selling them. But she's really created a kind of beautiful space with mostly face-out books and is a kind of charming anchor to our small town in Virginia. That's lovely. Well, congrats. I'll add two more that are favorites of mine. Have you been to the last bookstore in downtown Los Angeles? I have. That's a beautiful Instagram-worthy kind of space for sure. If you go there, you'll see lots of people taking pictures. I think is an underrated, like more bookstores need to understand that what people are looking for on a Sunday is something to go do, right?

1:06:56Like, again, if they wanted a book, a specific book, they would buy it on Amazon very cheaply. They could get it right now as an audio book or an ebook. They want to do something after they go to brunch with their friends. And then they want to be able to tell and show people that they did something. And so I think Last Bookstore does a really good job of, first off, it's a great bookstore, and it's also a really great used bookstore, but in a beautiful space. But the experience is very cool and very shareable. And I think that's helped make it successful. I agree. And then have you been to Faulkner House Books in New Orleans?

1:07:30I have not. So William Faulkner lived in New Orleans as he wrote his first novel. And it's a bookstore that The owner bought the three-story building that he lived in. He lived upstairs in the apartment, which is now where the owner of the bookstore lives. And the downstairs, it's not much bigger than this 10x10 studio. It's a very Southern, mostly William Faulkner, New Orleans-themed bookstore. but it has this extra significance in that a great writer got their start in that business. And it's right off Pirate's Alley in New Orleans, which is where when Lafitte and the pirates would come in up the Mississippi River having raided Spanish galleons or whatever, where they would fence all their goods.

1:08:19It's just like only in New Orleans could you have that. And it's an amazing bookstore. It's one of my favorites. Awesome. I will check it out. Well, thank you for writing about bookstores and spreading the word. And I'm really glad we had this chat. Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us. And it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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