When Time Stands Still: The Joy of Bookstores

Old Rizzoli Bookstore, 57th Street, Manhattan (circa 2014)

Whenever I journey to a new town or city, one of my special pleasures is finding and spending time in a local bookstore. I love to while away the time tucked in rows of highly stacked shelves of books on history and politics, literature, religion and philosophy, and if time permits, art and music. It matters not whether the shelves are filled with new or used books, stacked in an orderly and well organized manner or chaotically piled in all directions. Perusing the shelves of a well-stocked bookstore is a uniquely enjoyable experience. Once ensconced in the cozy confines of a bookstore, my sense of time falls away.

I can spend hours of uninterrupted time in a good bookshop as I pull from the shelves any book that offers a fresh perspective on an interesting topic, a memoir by a famous editor or writer, a novel I have always wanted to read, or a book about a period of history I know little about. Any book that captures my attention is fair game. You never know what gems you might find. Every bookstore can surprise you with an unexpected treasure. A special few call you back again and again.

Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C.

In the mid-1980s, a few years after I moved to Washington, DC, to attend law school, I discovered Politics & Prose, a wonderful independent bookstore then owned by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, two politically minded book lovers who had the crazy idea to start a bookstore full of books that they would want to read. When it opened in the fall of 1984, Politics & Prose was a small shop in a narrow, cozy, one-story unit on Connecticut Avenue. Its small inventory of books was dominated by serious nonfiction and its shelves were filled with high quality books worth reading. There were no romance novels or beach fiction. You were more likely to stumble across an esoteric university press title.

Along with a selection of classic English and American literature, the store was filled with political treatises and biographies, history, religion, philosophy, psychology, and art history. I wanted to read every book in the store. There was no wasted space, no coffee table books, games or puzzles. Only books full of good writing, challenging ideas, new and interesting perspectives. Within five years, the store’s inventory expanded to 15,000 titles and it moved across the street to its current, much larger location. The store became a community hub where top-shelf authors came to speak each night. It was staffed by doctoral students and people who knew and loved books. To this day, whenever I visit DC, I try to spend a little time there before heading home.

Bookstores are powerful spaces. A good bookstore shapes our thinking, influences our tastes, and contributes to our intellectual and spiritual development. It affects our thoughts, creative imagination, and understanding of the world around us. Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s first publishers and booksellers, believed that reading was an underutilized activity in the American colonies. Franklin believed the rise of bookshops and libraries made reading more fashionable, and he would later credit increased reading as one of the inspirations of the American Revolution.

As explained by Evan Friss in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking Press, 2024), Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, helped radicalize the colonists in their journey toward independence. Friss, a professor of history at James Madison University, notes that Common Sense “argued forcefully for independence at a time when many were still undecided.” The pamphlet sold throughout the colonies and was read aloud in churches, coffee shops, and bookstores. Paine’s writing, “and that of other Enlightenment thinkers who promoted republicanism and attacked the monarchy and aristocracy, built an intellectual foundation for the Revolution, an event premised on a new way of thinking spelled out in books, pamphlets, and newspapers.” Printing and bookselling, writes Friss, thus “shaped education, intellectual life, and the means by which colonists consumed information and developed new ideologies, including revolutionary ones.”

The literature written and published during the Revolution not only inspired a nation, but it also led to the creation and growth of the modern American bookstore. With the help of Franklin and other intellectual leaders of the early American republic, books and bookshops became an important and influential force in American life. “Books hold ideas. Ideas hold power,” notes Friss. The bookstore developed into “a de facto public space, a meeting space, a communal space that wasn’t a house or church or political hall. In those cramped quarters, readers, writers, and literature gathered. It was intimate. It was far reaching. It was alive.”

The rise of the American bookstore also led to the art of browsing, lingering, and loitering among the rows of books. The pleasures of book browsing should not be undervalued. Browsing sometimes leads to sitting in a chair placed conveniently in the corner, close to the owner’s ten-year-old cocker spaniel sleeping on the floor a few feet away. Soon, you lose track of time as you become absorbed in the book that has caught your attention. This eventually gives rise to more browsing, and then to a conversation with the bookstore staff, before you wind up in the coffee shop next store with a newly purchased book in hand.

In many of the great independent bookstores across the United States, the owners and employees who stock the shelves and attend the front desk love books as deeply as the most avid readers. They know where each book is hidden away and have a knack for recommending just the right book at the right moment. People who love books love to talk about books, and it is these conversations that inspire new discoveries and innovative ideas. Bookstores have the power to alter lives. Their influence extends far beyond the shelves of the bookshop and into the lives and minds of readers, writers, and customers.

In The Bookshop, Friss introduces some of the great bookstores of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, which sat on the corner of Washington Street and School Street. It was owned by James Fields and William Ticknor, who published and sold books from their bookshop but did not always make good business decisions. In 1854, as the buyer for the bookshop, Fields rejected a manuscript for a story written by Louisa May Alcott. “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write,” Fields told her.

Fortunately, although Fields and Alcott remained on friendly terms, and Fields even loaned Alcott forty dollars, Alcott did not listen to Fields’ sage advice. After she published Little Women years later to great fame and fortune, she returned to Old Corner, handed Fields the forty dollars he had lent her, and said, “I found writing paid so much better than teaching that I thought I’d stick to my pen.” Fields laughed and admitted his error in judgment. He and Alcott remained friends.

Ticknor and Fields exercised better foresight in 1860 when they bought the rights to Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that sold exceptionally well and spread antislavery sentiment throughout the United States. Even in parts of the South, where the book was banned, Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the rounds through the enlightened souls who purchased the book by mail from bookstores in New York and Boston.

The Old Corner Bookstore ceased to exist when Ticknor died in 1864, and Fields sold the premises to another publisher. Today it is included on the Freedom Trail and the National Register of Historic Places. “It was once a literary jewel,” writes Friss, “a place where some of the greatest authors congregated, and a regular store . . . where books arrived, were put on the shelf, picked up, tasted, bought, read, and discussed. The Old Corner helped launch American literature and the American bookstore.” Sadly, on the historic site of Old Corner today sits a Chipotle, a reminder of the commercial priorities in American life.

A good bookstore can define a community. They are where ideas flourish and free speech thrives. The world is shaped by them. At successful independent bookstores, like Politics & Prose in Washington, Books & Books in Coral Gables, and The Strand in New York, speaking engagements by authors, book signings, group discussions, literary tours, and annual book fairs are part of the experience. Indeed, these events enrich the surrounding neighborhoods and allow the stores to become crucial community spaces, where people gather as much for social fellowship, and to converse and be educated, as to browse and buy books.

Owning and operating a bookstore is challenging. Bookstores are not the most commercially viable of enterprises. After all, a bookstore is one of the few places where patrons frequently linger for a long time without spending any money. They are low margin businesses that require large physical space, a combination that performs poorly in high-rent cities like New York, Washington, and San Francisco, even though enthusiastic readers disproportionately populate those cities.

Over the years, certain bookstores were less interested in making money than in pursuing a mission. Their purpose was to change the world. In 1967, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York’s Greenwich Village was opened not to make a profit, but to function as a welcoming space and information center for the gay community. It soon became a political launching pad and hub for the gay rights movement. Drum & Spear, which opened in Harlem in 1968 as part of a wave of Black-owned bookstores, sought to promote books by Black authors, books about Black history, literature, and Black liberation, and books for Black children that would instill pride in their heritage and skin color. These were more than bookstores. They were intellectual centers of the gay rights and Black Power movements, safe places where the gay and Black communities, respectively, could think, talk, read, and thrive at a time when most bookstores catered to mostly straight white customers.

Oscar Wilde and Drum & Spear both accomplished their desired aims. And both became victims of their own success, as the books they sold eventually became available in the larger bookstores, or online, or in new and competing mission-driven stores. Neither store is open today but, in their heyday, they were spaces that inspired political change and influenced what people read. They impacted the lives of thousands of people and fomented positive changes in American society.

The Joy of Books, Hendersonville, NC

Even a modest used bookstore is a gem. My sister Linda recently gave me a gift certificate for The Joy of Books, a used bookstore in a narrow, confined space in Hendersonville, North Carolina, with a small but fine collection of books on history, literature, poetry, religion, and philosophy. On our last visit to Hendersonville, I picked out a two-volume biography of John Adams that Andrea wanted and had discovered on the library shelves of the bed and breakfast inn where we stayed, a book by historian Douglas Brinkley on America’s race to the moon in the 1960s (American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and America’s Race to the Moon), and Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe. But the most pleasurable part of the gift was in the experience of browsing, looking, handling, and sampling dozens of books before it was time to go.

From the nation’s founding and throughout American history, bookstores, small and large, successful and unsuccessful, have impacted American life. Bookstores are magical places full of discovery, where one can get lost in the pages and ignore the passage of time. They are community spaces, places where ideas are hatched, where democracy is born and nurtured, and where the world is changed and transformed for the better. As long as I am alive, I will love books and the gift of reading. And wherever I find myself, I will always search the streets for a good bookshop to browse, linger, and feel at home.