Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
bookstores
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Barnes & Noble Went From Villain to Hero
For many years, Barnes & Noble was the Walmart of bookstores, crushing independent sellers through economy of scale. Then a new big bad entered the arena. As it turns out, though, neither pandemic nor Bezos could crush B&N — and now, armed with renewed focus, it’s staging one hell of a comeback. (Still shop independent […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Life in the Stacks: A Love Letter to Browsing
“Algorithms are integral to how we find and consume art. But old-fashioned browsing still has its benefits.”
Posted inReading List
This Week In Books: I Bought Some Books
Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books?
Posted inArts & Culture, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
How Do We Read in a Digital World?
Digitization has changed the way readers experience literature — and examine themselves.
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Story
The State of the Bookstore Union
The Strand, New York City’s largest independent bookstore, is owned by a millionaire — and the booksellers who work there are all broke.
Posted inFeatured, Nonfiction, Quotes
The Business of Being a Feminist Bookstore
Running a bookstore is hard enough, but the business of feminist bookstores is deeply entwined with both politics and money.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Searching for Meaning Inside a Tech Company’s First Bookstore
University Book Store—begun by students in 1900—is just up the road from University Village, and while they serve superficially different markets, it’s difficult not to see Amazon’s choice of location as yet another act of aggression toward indie bookstores, whose owners and employees are particularly suspicious of the company’s motives. Speaking over her reading-stack-as-topography desk […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Story Business: Four Stories About Independent Bookstores
“Job title: bookseller.” Every time I sneak a glance at the sheaf of employment forms and tax information, I can’t believe it. That job title is mine, now. It’s a lifelong dream come true, as cliche as that sounds. True to millennial form, I’m going to do Online Things for my local indie: blogging, tweeting, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Frank Sinatra’s Favorite Bookstore
You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans […]