The Reading Ace 🖤🤍💜

He has several interesting ideas about what a "good" bookstore entails, but they are more idealistic then realistic. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, where he was formerly co-director, is lauded as a not-for-profit bookstore. Is it nice that they're able to keep stock on shelves, and not worry about miscellanea to boost their profit margins? Sure - it's a very romantic idea of a bookstore.

But most bookstores these days - even bigger chains, like Barnes & Noble - aren't large endeavors supported by a university. They can't afford to live up to Deutsch's ideal of the "good" bookstore.

Also not a fan of the consumer shaming.

Deutsch makes the argument that, rather than spending $17 on a cigarettes or a latte, people today should be spending that $17 on a book instead!

"The average consumer who would think nothing of spending $17 on a couple of packs of cigarettes, or a couple of lattes and some baked goods, bristles at spending the same amount for a copy of a book that might provide untold hours of reflection and unquantifiable fulfillment.

I don't continue to derive pleasure from - nor even recall - what I had for breakfast last week, much less last year, but I can tell you what I was reading when I took my first bookselling job in 1994: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin."

Because food is gone after you eat it, but a good book can touch you forever. And, I mean, I get it - people should definitely buy more books. But the entire thing just smacks of the whole "Millenials are killing the x industry because they're spending all their money on avocado toast!" mentality. There are several social and economical reasons why people might balk at the cost of new books (especially hardcovers, which are more durable in the long run) and I promise you that buying themselves a nice coffee in the morning is not one of them. You are upset at the wrong people.

He also gets weird about libraries, which I'm choosing to chalk up to his romantic ideal of what a library "should" be:

"While municipalities offering services to their communities, such as internet access, civic activities, maker labels, and tool-lending libraries, is a wonderful development, there is no reason why these services should be adjuncts to the library when they would fit more naturally in a community center. As it stands, these services, currently offered by many libraries, dilute the original purpose of a library as a storehouse of books, just as socks and tchotchkes dilute the bookstore's ability to do the same."

Would it be nice if libraries were only repositories of books? Sure - not having activities or supplemental lending libraries would increase the space for books, which helps serve a wider variety of readers. But in the 4 US states and 6 cities that I've lived in, only ONCE have I been within reasonable distance to a community center. You know what were always close and accessible to a dirt-poor teenager who couldn't even afford bus fare, though? Public libraries.

I did not mean for this to turn into such a rant. I'm just gonna stop myself there, before I start on about his ideas about the kinds of books people "should" be reading.

Oh wow - I'm 90% sure I read this back in 2006.

...no, thank you.

Reading this again as an adult, I absolutely relate to the section the title is taken from:

Kids who hop on top of pop must be stopped.

Nobody loves Moby Dick as much as this guy.

The entire essay is spent romanticizing the physical act of Herman Melville writing the book, and quoting entire passages - sometimes covering several paragraphs of text.