Chapter 8: Libraries vs. Bookstores

…a throwdown for literary glory

Do we really need indie bookstores? Isn’t it true that all the claims I’ve been making for the value of bookstores apply more robustly to libraries? Libraries are public, which means they serve a far broader constituency than any bookstore, most notably the poor and the indigent. And their services go far beyond books and literacy. At my library, you can rent umbrellas and museum passes and backpacks with binoculars and field guides, make a pair of earrings with a 3D printer or a laser cutter, use a computer or tether to a wireless hotspot, take a class in genealogy or resume building, rent a room for a club or a tutoring session, see the circus, join a queer craft group. Buffalo Street Books offers none of these things. And you don’t need a single dollar to walk in and take advantage of these riches. So doesn’t Tompkins County Public Library morally best Buffalo Street Books?

To help me judge this throwdown, I talked to Woody Chicester. Who better? Woody worked for years at BSB, first as a bookseller and then as General Manager, before decamping to TCPL where they are currently a Library Assistant, which includes nonfiction book-buying among other duties.

Yup. TCPL wins the bracket.

Woody confirmed my suspicion that if BSB and Odyssey Books disappeared from Ithaca, the library might struggle a bit under the burden of shouldering most of the literary community—the library staff are already stretched thin and it wouldn’t be easy to expand programming to fill the gaps—but it would not fall. They told me that the fates of the two institutions used to be more entwined, back when the library ordered all its children’s books and some of its fiction from BSB, but that ended in the early days of the cooperative. The bookstore offers a 25% discount to schools and nonprofits, but TCPL can get a better discount through large distributors. So the library without BSB would continue to fulfill its vision statement: “We envision a library where everyone can belong and find joy in learning, discovery, and personal growth.” Its 38,000 users would continue to browse and check out its 260,000 books, magazines, and DVDs.

But of course the real answer is subtler than that. The library and the bookstore are quite symbiotic. Woody told me the library relies heavily on BSB for programming, especially children’s events and (surprisingly, to me) adult literary events, since so much of the library’s adult programming has nothing to do with books. The two institutions collaborate on events, as they did this summer for the third annual Ithaca is Books festival, when people from both places served on the planning committee and the library hosted several events as well as the book fair. The bookstore and the library promote each other’s news on social media. Woody frequently sends library patrons one block down to Odyssey or two blocks down to BSB to buy a book when the holds list for a new release is too long to be borne.

Woody argues that there is one way in particular that indie booksellers are better than librarians at fostering literary culture. Librarians generally know what they read and what they have been trained in, while booksellers know the entire book industry, every genre in the field, and they can recommend a book to anyone. Their jobs orient them toward the new and they are in constant conversation with publishers’ sales reps and other booksellers and they are constantly reading Publishers Weekly and other industry guides, so they know far more than just their little corner of the market. Woody wishes that libraries had more reason to be so outwardly focused, so comprehensive in their overview of what’s out there. Woody said, as TCPL’s buyer for DVDs and “the 100s,” which is cool librarian Dewey Decimal code for philosophy and psychology, all they need to do is stroll toward the front of the library: “The new section will tell you what to buy six months going forward.” If you pay attention to what is being published and what is being checked out, you’ll know how to respond to the upcoming future. They said they wished they could teach this mindset—a very indie bookseller mindset—to their colleagues and that TCPL, now under new leadership, is moving toward this way of thinking, asking all buyers to know all the sections and how they are used.

And let’s be honest, no book lover can exist on libraries alone. If you love books, you want to own a subset of what you’ve read, a personal collection that you can draw on for the rest of your life. You want to buy books from your favorite authors so that they’ll write more of them for you. Sure, you could do both things if the world contained only Amazon and B&N, but not effectively, because they exist to peddle blockbusters and enrich shareholders. Indie bookstores exist to be responsive to readers and to be the interface between readers and publishers, conveying the news from one to the other.

And indie bookstores are on the forefront of fights against banned books. Of course, libraries are vital to this issue since only governments can censor. The American Library Association trains its members to defend intellectual freedom, resist book bans, and educate on this issue. (The Milwaukee Public Library absolutely nailed its attempt to educate patrons about banned books in this eminently rewatchable reel via Kottke.org.) But bookstores are another front in this war because part of the fight is market-driven; publishers need to know that readers exist for progressive, radical, and controversial titles so that they’ll keep publishing them.

Buying books is the only way to ensure there are more books. Libraries buy books and so do you. The throwdown ends in a pas de deux.

Book Recommendations

Speaking of new titles and holds lists too long to be borne, I was lucky enough to read two big new titles long in advance of their release date, because I am an owner of Buffalo Street Books. Do you all remember that one of the perks of ownership is getting to browse and graze the Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) shelf in the backroom and getting to take home forthcoming books for free? These two books both lived up to their hype and my high expectations.

Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel is a beautifully structured and deeply personal story about Boerum Hill, the neighborhood in which he grew up. If you read Lethem’s recent essay in The New Yorker then you know the research upon which he drew, but the novel is a child’s story, told from within and looking back, a story of incomprehension—or, rather, a story of comprehending too much but not having the words to truly think it. Lethem’s characters don’t have names, though they are as real as any on the page, and he is doing something very interesting with the omniscience of narration and the interplay between individuality and social context in the making of a person.

Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC is as mind-blowing as his earlier book, When We Cease to Understand the World. I loved both books, though I read them in dread and nausea. Also fascination. Also sheer wonder at the stories—are they true? they seem true, but they are both billed as novels; how did he write them?—and how little I knew of them. The MANIAC is about the mathematician and physicist John von Neumann and his other era-defining accomplishment, besides his monumental work on the Manhattan Project: he also helped found computing, and Labatut draws a straight line from von Neumann’s math and the achievement of an artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to beat humans at the game of Go. Labatut’s own achievement is to pierce through the biography and the unbelievable list of von Neumann’s accomplishments to inhabit the mindset of such a polymath, one who did not shy away from the violence that his scarily computational brain could unleash. Read this if Nolan’s Oppenheimer left you unsatisfied.

Both titles are available as audiobooks at Libro.fm—and of course your local library. Happy reading and listening!