Chapter 7: On the Bookstore as a Third Place

…and a theory of public naps

If you’ve come to Buffalo Street Books this summer, you’ve noticed a dramatic change. The big room adjacent to the store which has been vacant for years is undergoing a renovation. We’ve got saturated blue walls and a new floor with a swooshy, curved pathway guiding people from the interior of the Dewitt Mall through the room and into the bookstore. Soon we’ll have new furniture: tables and chairs and comfy seats. This is something our bookstore community has talked about for a long time and it is now coming to pass. Our owners and customers and friends swiftly responded to our fundraising this spring and we exceeded our goal of $25,000, which surely means that everyone could easily see the need for this project. So in this newsletter, I’d like to talk about the bookstore as a third place. Zadie Smith will make a surprise contribution to my meandering argument.

The term was coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. If the home is the first place and the workplace is the second, then third places are public or semi-public spaces where people go to socialize, anything from churches to porch stoops. Oldenburg argues that third places are crucial to a healthy democracy because they offer relief from the stress of work and the isolation of home, and because they promote serendipitous interactions across lines of identity or affinity. A third place is characterized by its relaxed, informal atmosphere, the way it welcomes regulars and newcomers, and the absence of any pressure to be there or to leave. It may be a place of commerce, but you don’t need to buy your way in. You are welcome to just hang.

So Buffalo Street Books is creating a third place, one with many possible uses, and this marks a departure from the way the room has been used in the past.

A quick history of the reading room: the space was long a part of the bookstore, with bookshelves, books and other products for sale, as well as space for events. As the annual sales for indie bookselling began to decline across the industry in the face of Amazon’s monopoly, it became too expensive to maintain the $1000/month rent plus inventory for the reading room, and the bookstore relinquished the room at the end of 2018. The Dewitt Mall was unable to rent it to another business and the room sat empty ever since, dragging down the atmosphere of the bookstore and leading many customers to think BSB was going out of business. In the spring of 2022, the landlord temporarily lowered the rent to $500 and Executive Board members personally donated the funds to re-rent the room for six months. For 2023, the landlord has extended the discounted rent, and a generous coop owner has donated the funds to cover that amount for the entire year.

We’ll continue to hold author readings and we plan to expand our events calendar to lots of other kinds of events, including workshops and makers’ markets and film screenings and open mic events. As we recently announced, BSB has inked a partnership with Story House Ithaca, a new and blossoming nonprofit that hosts a deeply exciting menu of events and performances under the capacious banner of “story.” Now, the reading room will be the “house” of Story House. Once the partnership ramps up, you’ll see regular Story House events on our calendar on Thursdays, then spreading to other days, and BSB and Story House will also collaborate to bring new events and happenings.

In between events, the reading room will be a hang-out space. Come with your laptop. Buy a book and plonk down and start reading it before you’ve even left the store. Meet a friend, or convene your book club here. Buy lunch or a coffee at GreenStar Coop next door and come over to sit, sip, and chat with whoever is here.

Because the thing is, third place are declining. Of course they are, as our public life fractures and disintegrates. This isn’t an entirely predictable development; co-working spaces would seem to be an effort to blend second and third places, and as office work has failed to rebound from the pandemic, we might have predicted that second-and-a-half and third place would proliferate. But as Karen Christensen (publisher of Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place) writes, the pandemic led corporate third places to realized that they can make more money by getting rid of seats and redesigning their stores as temples to the smart phone and the car, prioritizing mobile orders, drive-thrus, and other fast delivery methods (see also this article in Fast Company). Never mind the fact that you can no longer receive a still-hot meal from a restaurant in thrall to its app—you’re also missing out on what you didn’t even know you had.

Christensen writes, “we have fewer places to gather, so we become less comfortable with strangers, more isolated, and lonelier, and in many cases more vulnerable to online and TV propaganda.”

Certainly this trend explains another one, the rising affection for Barnes and Noble among people who excoriate Amazon—you can always find a table at B&N.

We must acknowledge, though, that hosting a third places comes with risks. The first risk is financial: who pays for the running and upkeep of a space that is not primarily given over to commerce? For Buffalo Street Books, this means additional rent plus the labor of our events coordinator to plan and schedule all the happenings that will bring people to the space which will hopefully tempt them to buy books to offset the rent, not to mention the utilities and maintenance costs. The more the room is used, the lower the risk, but we do need to keep our eye on the numbers.

Another risk is the very flip side of its promise, that the space will enable clashes and conflict rather than community. The philosophy behind the third place rests on a trustful and optimistic view of neighborhood relations, and the idea that those hosting the space can project their values through the design and usage of it. We hope a diversity of people use this space, and we trust that they will do so peacefully. But of course—of course—people are going to fall asleep in this room.

If you build comfort, people will nap. Is that bad? Is that a risk, or is that proof of concept? I turn to the magnificent book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Constructions (long out of print but available used at Bookshop) to find this gem: “It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep. In a society which nurtures people and fosters trust, the fact that people sometimes want to sleep in public is the most natural thing in the world.” This is so marvelously counterintuitive and utopian. If people are falling asleep in your third place, they feel safe there. Raise your hand if you’ve ever dozed in a library—my hand is raised and fervently waving. You can’t solve homelessness, but you can destigmatize the public nap. A Pattern Language continues, “do anything you can to create trust, so that people feel no fear of going to sleep in public and so that other people feel no fear of people sleeping in the street.” (Maybe also stock Narcan.) I for one look forward to seeing how this plays out in our reading room.

While I’ve got my copy of A Pattern Language cracked open, I’d like to point out two more patterns relevant to bookstores that they’ve counterintuitively solved. To the problem of “plastic, bland, and abstract” retail franchises, they prescribe the following: go small. This minimizes the risk of failure and thus undercuts the advantage of deep-pocketed national chains. And it also allows the small business to more tightly and uniquely curate their wares to distinguish from the impersonal retailer. This exactly explains what BSB did in 2018 by giving up the reading room as a retail floor to concentrate our books in the main selling space. We’ve cut back to offer more and it has worked.

And then there’s this gemstone of a question: “Where can the need for concealment be expressed; the need to hide; the need for something precious to be lost, and then revealed?” In A Pattern Language, naps are public and secrets are needs, a human need which our structures do not meet. They have the solution, what I’m tempted to call a fourth place: “Make a place in the home, perhaps only a few feet square, which is kept locked and secret; a place which is virtually impossible to discover—until you have been shown where it is; a place where the archives of the house, or other more potent secrets, might be kept.”

If that’s not a description of a book, I don’t know what is.

Book Recommendations

Just published: Josh Cook’s The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, written by a long-time bookseller at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This book addresses ardent readers as well as those behind the scenes, but I suspect it will mainly appeal to booksellers. Cook makes an extended and passionate case for the tight curation of progressive books as way to build a bookstore community’s trust in its booksellers, decenter white supremacy, and promote books that point to a just and sustainable future. He describes bookstores as platforms and booksellers as advocates who are not under any obligation to stock books with violent or destructive ideologies (I don’t agree with all his arguments, but they are thought-provoking). He discusses creative ways to shake up convention in a store’s design and methods, and he argues for industry changes so that bookselling becomes a profession with the possibility for longevity and expertise, thus creating more opportunities for readers to discover books through curation and conversation with passionate booksellers (Esquire published an interview with Cook on these issues).

We’ve just begun the fall publishing season when all the big novels come out and I am here for it. Two books that I was particularly anticipating have absolutely lived up to my expectations. Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum is an autofictional tome, a big story that ranges from the 1970s to present-day Chile as it cracks open the question of Salvador Allende’s death and its aftershocks among his fellow revolutionaries. Dorfman is a first-person character in this fabulist story rooted in his own history with the late President, and I just loved how he plays with history, memory, mystery, and desire.

You don’t need me to tell you about Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, but let me add to its chorus of praise. What a beautiful story of (to spoil the last word of the book) the unfathomable. Smith writes of Eliza, a middle-aged, unmarried woman in Dickens’ England, where she is cousin and housekeeper to a writer and simultaneously bored by her life and enraptured by the complexities of their household that her cousin can’t see: “[T]here were these moments of grace when she startled herself with the idea that if anybody truly understood what is signified by the word ‘person’, they would consider twelve lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul.” The sensational trial of a man who claims to be the long-lost heir to a fortune draws Eliza into its spell. Smith builds a whole world from the consciousness of her heroine, a book that is at once small and particular and globe-spanning.

I leave you with this quote, Smith’s invocation of my fourth space: “All her life she had been trying to open a locked door. She had pushed as hard as she could upon it—using means both personal and metaphysical—in the belief that the door opened outwards, onto ultimate reality, and that this was a sight few people are ever granted in this lifetime—particularly if they happen to be born female. Now, without any effort on her part, the door had come loose on its hinges. Finally, she could open it! But to her astonishment, it opened inwards. She had been standing inside the very thing she’d been looking for.”

As usual, look for these books at your local indie—in person or online—or at Bookshop.org, or in audio format at Libro.fm. Happy reading!