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

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Behind every great man and woman of history, there's usually a library or a bookstore that has been formative in their life. Not only have bookstores shaped influential leaders, but also the ideas and movements that have altered society. Stoicism originated in a bookstore, Benjamin Franklin’s bookstore influenced the American Revolution, and countless bookstores have been the backbones of activist movements. Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, talks with Ryan in today's episode about the unchanged charm of bookstores over centuries, the impact of Amazon on the book industry, the role of libraries, and the romantic yet challenging undertaking of running a bookstore. 📚 The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss is out now! Grab a copy on Amazon or get a signed copy here Check out more of Evan’s work on his website www.evanfriss.comYou can follow Evan Friss on Instagram: @EvanFriss and on X: @EvanFriss🎥 Check out Ryan’s YouTube video: 12 Lessons From 12 Months Owning A Bookstore🎥 Want to learn about some of the world’s most unique bookstores? Check out former podcast guest Max Joseph’s YouTube video BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

read efficiently, find time to read when maybe you can't have a physical book in front of you and then it also lets you discover new kinds of books, re-listen to books you've already read from exciting new narrators. You can explore bestsellers, new releases. My new book is up, plus thousands of included audio books and originals, all with an Audible membership.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? for free visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke 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 I 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 and 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 actually turned out it was two buildings that were adjoined. You couldn't buy just one of them. And it had a leaky roof and it had been vacant for a long time. And 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 and the other side to open a coffee shop. And 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 one 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 timey light company there in New Orleans. Anyways, Lippy moved Astro Records into that spot and he'd been our tenant there for the last four years. And 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. He's just 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 gonna try to keep the legacy of Astro Records going a little bit. We bought some of his inventory, so we're gonna still sell keep the legacy of Astro Records going a little bit. We bought some of his inventories, we're gonna still sell some records in the space, but now we're gonna 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. And 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 Write 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 those gigs. But 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, and 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 bookselling, 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, Stoa Pochila, and that's where Stoa means porch. Anyways, I don't wanna step on this story. And we're gonna 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 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 10.30. 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. They'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's not the only place with bookstores. Remember

my guest Max Joseph, a couple 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. So I don't know if you know this, but but stoicism started in a bookstore. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, 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. And 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 which culminates in him founding the stoic pochila, 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. And 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. That 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 what the books were about is 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. Yeah, and I feel like most of the books that I read, I hear about because I read an article

about them or somebody told me about them. But the discovery experience of a bookstore is so important, you know, you 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. And 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. It feels just wondrous to fall into this book and to discover it. This kind of experience is why bookstores remain places that people can spend a good deal of time just 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 and obviously they didn't have this back then but 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 his works read at that bookstore in the Agora. But but that 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 but yeah, there, 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. So in the 90s and early 2000s, Barnes and 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. Yeah. 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 the Strand Bookstore, I think it is. In Portland, there's a Powell's Outpost, and in Nashville, there's a Parnassus bookstore, which is a branch of Ann Patchett's bookstore in Nashville. The indie brand, I guess, has become chic enough to meld with the airport bookstore and 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 the bookstore the one he 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 and 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.

Everybody who loves to read also often has a passion to share good books with their friends. Franklin started basically a impromptu book club where he would gather with some of his colleagues and talk about his favorite books. 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 and

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. And I think the American Revolution is, as I said, a consequence 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 up, there were all these classic classical texts that were being translated into English, or, you know, as opposed to just being available in Greek and Latin, kind of for the first time they they were like, these were like modern accessible translations at that time that were coming out. And that when you read the letters from Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, 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. It's, I always found that really both relatable and like 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 and most people are still literate at the time relatively few books in circulation, and 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, you know, invented for another 100 or so years. You know, like so many even of the it's not just that there were like fewer books, but there were fewer types of books, you know, there was basically the classics, and then a handful of other things and that's it. That'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 best sellers 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.

So 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, and 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 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. Like, I 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 like everyone had read and 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 so there was a familiarity. I 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, Harry Potter, Taylor Swift,

whatever kind of contemporary examples we could think of. This 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. ["The Offensive Line"] Welcome to The Offensive Line.

You guys, on this podcast, we're gonna make some picks, talk some s***, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar. So here's how this show's gonna work, okay? We're gonna run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense Travis Kelsey, but you gotta step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines

surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter. Is it Brandon Iyuk, T. Higgins, or Devonte Adams? Plus on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery+, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday Night Football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in.

Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, events that have shaped who we are as a country and continue to define the American experience. We go behind the scenes looking at devastating financial crimes, like the fraud committed at Enron and Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. American Scandal also tells marquee stories about American politics. In our latest season, we retrace the greatest corruption scheme in US history as we bring to life the bribes and backroom deals that spawned the Teapot Dome scandal, resulting in the

first presidential cabinet member going to prison. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge this season American Scandal Teapot Dome early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. And after you listen to American Scandal, go deeper and get more to the story with Wondery's other top history podcasts, including American History Tellers, Legacy, and even the Royals. I 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 non-profit 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 like that I bought this book from this other, you know, 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, but 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. first American. And in many ways, that's an app 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 his hands and 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. So 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 it's funny, right? Because yeah, he is the first American in this sort of capitalistic sense. And then he's also, you know, a pioneer of the libraries and fire departments, you know, and and so he has 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 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 at top on top and it credits like the lending libraries that were absorbed into the the system of libraries that we now see as this timeless institution. But yeah, at one point they were 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 and it's amazing that this is a kind of public space that anybody could walk in. There's nobody who leaves without being awed by the space. It makes you, like the best bookstores, 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. It 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. We are and I've written I wrote a chunk of one of my books at that 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 doesn't really hold up. Yeah, I think that's fair.

What do you think makes a great bookstore? This is obviously something I've thought a lot about. I sometimes I wonder, you know, it's a tough business. But I also wonder how much it makes the business tougher than it needs to be like 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. And 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. 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 really important part of what makes a great bookstore. 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 if 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 flunking down money because they love literature. I don't mean this to be derogatory. It's something good to do if you have excess capital versus lots of other things. 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. So 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. 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. And 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. Yeah. I've, 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, 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 farmers market or something 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. Yeah, 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 it always, sometimes I walk through the shelves and my books are gonna go, this book is 2000 years old. Like 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. So 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 you know, they hook you up with Ingram, who's like the distributor for most independent bookstores. And what was both like 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 in 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. And like, that's an unfathomable amount of books to me. That's so many, not like inventory, but that's how many unique skews 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 playing together. But there is something about bookstores where they carry books that you know they can't possibly be selling many copies of. And I wonder how many of them would do better as a business and how many more

And 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.

Yeah, so what the in-store experience offers, as we talked about before, is the discovery. And so having fewer books, face-out books, I think is a great way to go in 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.

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, where do you start? 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. Well, 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 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. Okay, it's basically just books about or by Winston Churchill with a collection of other ones But 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 And it can kind of become a whole thing. Like I really love those those very specific bookstores of become a whole thing. Like I really love those, those very specific bookstores, you know, even a communist bookstore, an activist bookstore, as you said, a drama bookstore,

like 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 expert genre expertise. And those kinds of bookstores actually were

much more common than they are now. Those specialty shops, probably even more disproportionately than general book shops, were the ones that closed in the great wave of 90s and early 2000s. In the 70s and 80s, there were bookstores, lots of mystery bookstores, cookbook bookstores, history bookstores. Romance bookstores, lots of mystery bookstores, cookbook bookstores, history bookstores. Romance bookstores. Romance bookstores related to oceanography, all sorts of very niche subjects. Some of the people were aficionados and some of the people just thought it was cool to

go into a Winston Churchill bookstore. All right, I don't know anything about Winston Churchill, but this is where I'm going to go. Or 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- 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. That 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 a hundred 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. Like 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 and this kind of legal drama ensued over the course of it. It was a protracted legal fight. And Amazon, they both ended up keeping their names temporarily. And then the little feminist Amazon ultimately closed. It didn't become a trillion dollar company.

It did not, but it had a real impact. It was actually the model on which a lot of other feminist bookstores in California, Texas, New York, and elsewhere formed. And 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. In the late 60s and 70s in particular, there were a whole host of bookstores that fit that mold in different ways, black bookstores, gay bookstores, feminist bookstores that fit that mold in different ways, black 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 in so far 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. The 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 19th century and early 20th century New York, people who loved exploring the unexplored parts of the continent, your Theodore 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 it has a reading library, et cetera. It's also where they hang up all their taxidermy of like polar bears and norwals 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. Yeah, digital spaces to congregate certainly have their benefits and advantages and ease of access, but we all know it's not the same.

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. And 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 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, de facto community organizer. It's like an HQ. Exactly. Well, I think about that with with City Lights, right? So City Lights is a bookstore in San Francisco. It's a perfectly regular, nice, you know, book shop that's still there today. But also, you know, 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 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. Yeah, 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.

And even going back earlier, some specialty shops like Gotham Book Mart 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, you know, 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, right? I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like, 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 you know 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, you know, 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, you 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 have 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, you know, a PR hit, but 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 an author has to convince oftentimes an assistant to an agent to be filtered through

and then the agent. 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. 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. Then those booksellers have to convince consumers to buy it. 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.

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 you know 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. It'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. You know, typically, you have the book and it goes up for preorder. 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. And 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 like if your publisher wants to send an email to people who have bought your previous books, which basic

marketing, like Amazon charges a fee for that, you know, 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 they were making themselves utterly dependent on this, you know, behemoth that 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 you know vitamins and toilet paper and batteries and other things. That's right. And you know many people have speculated that books have always been a kind

of lost 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.

I liked their bookstores. I 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, you know, as opposed to a lot of poetry collections and, you know, obscure novels.

Like 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 book selling in general hasn't been a very sort of 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. And 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 gonna say, Oh, hey, you know, Ryan has another book coming out next month. Put it on your radar. Yeah, even though, of course, that would be very useful. the hatred of Amazon. I mean, look, it's not 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. So it's kind of weird that customers, like I was just thinking about this where it's like, people are like, I wanna 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 that, you know, 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. I haven't seen a lot of statistics lately.

Just anecdotally, I often check Amazon and my feeling is the books are less discounted than they used to be. And so that may represent that may be the consequence of a number of different decisions and factors and 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 this census data where this economist was looking county by

county and how many bookstores there were. It was very useful for me because I where this economist was looking county by county and how many bookstores there were. And 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 best sellers. But for a lot of people in the American suburbs, there wasn't an indie bookstore there that preceded that. And 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 know, 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. And 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 paperback should be a thing. And then mass market paperback 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. And 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% of the

nonfiction market is audiobooks. And some of those are probably cannibalizing people that would have taken, you know, 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 2300 years ago, is accessible to a long haul truck driver in a way that wasn't possible before. Yeah, 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 the book of the month club was popular and a lot of elitists slammed this as a kind of handful of as a kind of handful of men, so-called experts, just picked what everybody should read. And this was, 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. So 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 other factors that that people talk about in today's world. Yeah, they've been predicting the death of books and bookstores basically since since they were invented. And there is something, there's something very durable about the technology, clearly, like the technology of the sort 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 by books, even just mere proximity, sociologists have discovered changes one's upbringing. If you grew 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. So 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 Lies in 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. It'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. 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. We live in a very bookstore centric family right now, where 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 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? Like, 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 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? I 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 like 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 is not much bigger where the owner of the bookstore lives. And the downstairs is not much bigger than this like 10 by 10 studio is like 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 Pirates Alley in New Orleans,

which is where when like Lafitte and the pirates would come in up the Mississippi River having, you know, raided Spanish galleons or whatever, where they would fence all their goods. It's just like, only in New Orleans, could you have that. And it's a 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.

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