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Ann Patchett’s Guide for Bookstore Lovers

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Ann Patchett at her bookstore, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, with one of her shop dogs. CreditHeidi Ross

The pilgrims have been coming to Nashville for as long as the Grand Ole Opry has been on the radio. They come for Fan Fair and Taylor Swift concerts or just to walk down Lower Broad in cowboy boots. Parents visit their children in college. Conventioneers deplane by the thousands. Nashville is a hip city now, with a food scene, an art scene and two poorly performing professional sports teams.

With all the reasons to travel to Nashville, one might be surprised to learn that some people come just to see a small independent bookstore. It’s true. The Book Faithful journey to Music City because they still like their novels printed on paper. They come because they’ve heard about the shop dogs, or because someone told them years ago that bookstores were moving onto the endangered species list and they wanted to see one that was thriving in its natural habitat: in a strip mall, behind Fox’s Donut Den, beside Sherwin-Williams Paint Store. Some come in hopes of seeing a favorite author read, or catching a glimpse of the author who co-owns the store.

That would be me.

Karen Hayes and I opened Parnassus Books in November 2011. This summer, when Pickles and Ice Cream Maternity went out of business, we took down the adjoining wall and doubled our space. Business is good, which, by bookstore standards, means we spring for employee health insurance and pay the rent.

Karen and I are vocal supporters of the Shop Local movement, while at the same time benefiting from the Destination Bookstore travelers. It seems as if every time I’m in the back room signing special orders or meeting with staffers to pick a book for our First Editions Club, Bill, the tall Englishman who works the front, comes to tell me a book club has just arrived from Omaha or Bangor or Sweden. I go out and pose for group pictures, recommend books, give an impromptu tour. I always ask the same question, “What made you think I’d be here?” because seriously, I’m gone a lot. They always give me the same answer: I’m not why they came. They came to see the store.

With its high wooden shelves and rolling ladders and dangling stars, Parnassus is — if I may say so myself — worth a visit, a reminder that a strip mall need not be judged by its parking lot. But there are many bookstores that could stand as the centerpiece of a vacation. Here are some categories to consider when searching for one.

Children’s Books

Before we opened Parnassus, I made a fact-finding tour of American bookstores. The best advice I got was this: If you want customers, you have to raise them yourself. That means a strong children’s section. If e-books have taken a bite out of the adult market, they’ve done very little damage to children’s books, maybe because even the most tech-savvy parents understand that reading “Goodnight Moon” off your phone doesn’t create the same occasion for bonding.

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At the Curious George Store, in Cambridge, Mass.

There are some knockout stores that sell nothing but children’s books, including the Curious George Store in Cambridge, Mass., Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, Books of Wonder in New York, and Tree House Books in Ashland, Ore., as well as loads of general interest stores that do a particularly great job with their children’s section, like Women & Children First in Chicago and Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn.

For many of us, children’s books are the foundation of bookselling, the cornerstone, the rock on which this church is built.

Before going, be sure to check the bookstores’ events calendars for visiting authors. If I may make a sweeping generalization, children’s book authors — from those who write board books suitable for teething to those who write young adult fiction full of vampires and angst — are the nicest people on the planet. Not only will they talk to your child or young adult, they will relate to them, they will draw pictures for them, they will create an indelible link between reading and joy.

The Destination Stores

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An Unlikely Story Bookstore and Café in Plainville, Mass. CreditWarren Jagger

I’m not sure why you’d be going to Greenwood, Miss., except for a mad desire to see TurnRow Book Company. It’s one of the most beautiful bookstores I know, and the sheer unlikelihood of its presence makes a traveler feel she’s stumbled into an oasis in the Mississippi Delta. Thanks to the Viking Range plant, the town also has a few top-notch restaurants and a very pretty inn, but the bookstore is the reason to go.

And since you’re in Greenwood, you’ve got to go to Oxford, a town defined by its writers. You can visit Faulkner’s home as well as the bookstore, or make that bookstores. Richard Howorth, the former mayor of Oxford, has three locations on the downtown square: the original Square Books; Square Books, Jr., the children’s store; and Off Square, which sells discount books and provides space for author events. Despite the enormousness of Ole Miss, these three stores are the backbone of Oxford.

When was the last time you strolled around downtown Los Angeles near Skid Row? Never? I’m from Los Angeles and it took the Last Bookstore to get me there. The store’s tagline, “What are you waiting for? We won’t be here forever,” has a suitably apocalyptic ring to it, but the place is so monumental that it’s hard to imagine it going anywhere: 22,000 square feet on three floors with new and used books, vinyl records and gallery space. The whole thing appears to have been made out of books, books that are folded and fanned and stacked into towering sculptures. The clientele is as eclectic and fascinating as the reading selection. It did my heart good to see so many tattooed kids with black nail polish and nose rings sprawled out in chairs reading books.

As long as you’re going to places you never thought you’d go, head to Plainville, Mass., to see An Unlikely Story Bookstore & Café, which I hope will soon replace Disney World as the place all parents feel duty-bound to take their children. Jeff Kinney took part of the proceeds from his juggernaut series “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and built his hometown a four-story bookstore — the ultimate fulfillment of literary civic duty. The building contains a dazzling bookshop, event space and cafe, and the top floor will soon be a Wimpy Kid museum, complete with movie props and the model for the Wimpy Kid Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. (How do you know that your character is reaching the heights of Snoopy? You get your own parade balloon.)

The Tiny Stores

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The little Corner Bookstore on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.

I’m a sucker for a little bookstore. In the right hands, the limited space can set off an explosion of personality and innovation. It’s like going to a French bistro with five tables and five things on the menu: You discover they’re exactly the right five things. New York City, land of skyrocketing rents and ubiquitous nail salons, has some of the best tiny bookstores in the world, including the Corner Bookstore, 192 Books and my favorite, Three Lives & Company. Sometimes what’s lost in square footage is made up for by a brilliant staff, or maybe it’s just that the people who work in tiny stores really do know exactly where every book is located. And they’ve read them. Little bookstores give off that same warm, snug feeling one gets from reading a novel in a comfy chair. Go look at the light in Newtonville Books outside Boston, or drive down the cape to Provincetown Bookshop, that essential last stop before hitting the beach. The novelist Louise Erdrich owns the tiny Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a store that uses a chunk of its limited space to display an elaborately carved confessional box. You’ll wish every bookstore had one.

The Venerables

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Grolier Poetry Book Shop near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. CreditShef Renyolds

In Washington you see the Vietnam Memorial, the new National Museum of African American History & Culture and Politics & Prose Bookstore. It’s where the Obamas shop, and it’s where the movers and shakers of our nation’s capital come to see what’s really going on. It also happens to be where I eat lunch, as they have the best bookstore cafe I know.

Doesn’t everyone who visits Harvard go across the street to the Harvard Book Store, a shop as esteemed as the university? When you’re finished there (it will take all day), walk down Plympton Street to Grolier Poetry Book Shop. In Cambridge a store that sells nothing but poetry seems indispensable.

But if you’re interested in Grolier’s aesthetic opposite, go to the fabulous Books & Books. It’s everything I love about Miami without any of the things I don’t love about Miami, a store where books are elevated to new heights of gorgeousness. Just walking in the door of either the Coral Gables or South Beach location makes me feel like an automatic hipster, a book hipster. I always leave with armloads of art books and travel books, things I never knew I needed but I do need desperately.

And then, of course, there’s Powell’s: an entire block, a dizzying, self-proclaimed City of Books. The fact that Portland, Ore., celebrates being defined by its independent bookstore is really all you need to know about Portland.

The Personals

I went on my first book tour in 1992 when I was 28, and I have been going on book tours ever since. I have made it a point to go to bookstores in every town I’ve ever driven through. I go both as a writer and a reader, for business and for pleasure, and I have been in love with too many to make a comprehensive list here. Still, I have to call out some of my favorites, like Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, lit by the internal fire of one Daniel Goldin, a stupendously great bookseller. And since you’re in Milwaukee, you won’t be that far from McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Mich., a personal favorite that proves Northern Michigan has a lot more to offer than cherries and apples. Malaprop’s was the heart and soul of Asheville, N.C., when Asheville was a sleepy little hippie town, and it’s still its heart and soul now that the city is cool and overcrowded, a position Malaprop’s maintained by being unabashedly true to itself.

No bookstore ever made a strip mall look better than Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif. Every author you could hope to see comes to read at Book Passage.

And then there’s Explore Booksellers in Aspen, Colo., a town that’s gotten so expensive that the bookstore would have to sell Chanel bags alongside Michael Chabon novels in order to make the rent, so a group of people got together and bought it so that the town could have a bookstore

All these bookstores will welcome you, as will those I failed to mention. They’re delicate little ecosystems based on a passion for books and a belief in community. They’re here for you, but they need your attention and support to thrive.

Of course we’d love to see you at Parnassus. The shop dogs are lazy. They pile up in the office and sleep beneath the desks, but if you ask, we’ll wake them up and send them out on the floor. When you’ve gotten your recommendations from our brilliant staff, and listened to story time in the children’s section, and seen a couple of authors (and country music stars) shopping themselves, we’ll give you advice on where to go to dinner and hear music. Or maybe you just want to sit in a quiet chair and read your new book. Go ahead, that’s what we’re here for.

It Feels Great to Successfully Call Out Sexism in Media (and Jonathan Franzen)

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GOOD MORNING AMERICA – Chris Harrison of ABC’s “The Bachelorette” and writer Jennifer Weiner is a guest on “Good Morning America,” 5/19/15, airing on the ABC Television Network. (Photo by Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images) Photo: Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images

In 2010, New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Weiner famously used Twitter to shed light on the sexism surrounding the rave reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The following is an excerpt from her new memoir, Hungry Heart, where she describes using Twitter as a force for good. The book is out now.

*****

How about #Franzenfreude?
Tweeted August 2010

When my first book was published, in 2001, I had a modest set of aspirations. I wanted to go on a book tour, even if nobody showed up at my readings. I wanted to see the book for sale in stores, even if the only people who bought it were my friends. And I hoped for a review in the paper I’d read for my entire life, the New York Times.

The Times is the holy grail for most writers.* Being reviewed in the paper means you’ve really, truly made it—or at least, that’s how it felt to me. But even before I was a writer, back when I was just a reader, I knew that a book like mine wasn’t the paper’s normal fare. Music critics at the paper wrote about opera and Top 40; TV critics covered sitcoms as well as PBS’s twelve-part series on slavery; restaurant critics reviewed Per Se and the under-twenty-five-dollar-a-head ethnic eateries in the boroughs. Every day, in every section, the paper made an effort to be broad and inclusive, to recognize that its readers weren’t all rich or male or even New Yorkers. Then I’d open up the Sunday paper and a version of the Paris Review would land in my lap. The book critics mostly ignored popular fiction and stuck to capital-L Literature . . . unless they were reviewing the popular fiction that men read.

Just as galling as what looked, to me, like straight-up sexism was the paper’s church-and-state separation of its daily and Sunday critics. The daily people weren’t allowed to talk about what they were reviewing with their Book Review counterparts, which meant that you could read a mixed-to-positive review of a literary novel on Thursday, then a mixed-to-positive review of the same book, by a different critic, in the Sunday section.

In previous decades, a writer who disapproved of the Gray Lady’s policies would have had to content herself with muttering imprecations to her spouse, her mom, her friends, her dog. But in the brave new world of social media, that same writer could hit Twitter and broadcast her displeasure to the world.

I’d noticed the gender/genre divide for a while, and for years had blogged about what I’d seen in the Times—how many male writers were getting the hat trick of two reviews and a profile, how many women were seeing their books relegated to the Style section, how dismissive the paper was when it deigned to even mention chick lit, how lucky I felt when Good in Bed earned a few positive words in a Janet Maslin beach-book round-up, and that I was allowed to sneak my book into my wedding announcement. When Twitter came along, it became even easier to give assessments, almost in real time, of what the paper was doing or not doing—how there were three pieces on the new Nicholson Baker book, which would go on to sell fewer than ten thousand copies, but the only mention of the new Terry McMillan, which was in beach bags across the land, came in a snide reference in the Inside the List column, to her divorce; how the paper quoted or mentioned Gary Shteyngart more than eighty times in five years, and no female writer came close.

When the paper joined in the coronation of Jonathan Franzen in 2010, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Franzen had emerged onto the cultural landscape in 1996, when he wrote an essay in Harper’s bemoaning the lowly position of the literary novelist in the world of ideas. Interspersed with his insistence that writers like him deserved to be more relevant were attacks on the long, long list of things he disliked. Franzen called bestsellers “vapid, predictable and badly written.” He attacked his peers, literary writers who put their e-mail addresses on their book flaps, as embarrassments. He complained that “our presidents, if they read fiction at all, read Louis L’Amour and Walter Mosley,” and even went after his own brother for failing to understand that Franzen’s work was “simply better” than Michael Crichton’s.

Then came Oprah. In 2001, she made Franzen’s dreams of relevance come true by choosing his third novel, The Corrections, for her popular TV book club. Franzen accepted her invitation, then spent the next two weeks trashing Oprah’s taste, denigrating her viewers, fretting that her sticker on his masterpiece would keep serious, male readers away, and generally acting like such a pretentious, elitist ingrate that even Harold Bloom came forward to condemn him. Oprah rescinded her invitation, with the frosty declaration that “it was never [her] intention to make anyone uncomfortable.” Franzen issued a few limp sorry-not-sorries, and the world moved on.

In 2010, Franzen was back with a new novel. Time magazine put him on its cover beneath the headline “Great American Novelist” (never mind that Time was among the long list of institutions Franzen had sneered at in his Harper’s essay). The New York Times wrote half a dozen stories in the run-up to Freedom’s publication, posting the first of two glowing reviews online days before the book’s release, profiling the author, then writing about the public’s feelings about Franzen, behaving as if its job was to sell the book, not cover it. Some female writers were less than amused. Jodi Picoult tweeted that she wasn’t surprised to see the Times lavish ink on “another white male literary darling,” and I wrote about how, even in a world where the Times typically gave the lion’s share of its attention to men, this seemed excessive. When Lizzie Skurnick, who wrote the Sunday Magazine’s “That Should Be a Word” column, tweeted to ask what to call the Franzenfrenzy, I was working on my own book at the Truro Public Library. I dashed off, “#Franzenfreude,” without first consulting the German-to-English dictionary that I don’t have, because I never studied German (it isn’t a language that Jewish families tend to urge their children to acquire).

It turned out, of course, that the “freude” part of “schadenfreude” means “joy.” It also turned out that, in spite of my very compelling hashtag, the Times was in no hurry to relinquish its unofficial duties as Franzen’s personal publicist. Instead of pulling back, the paper doubled down, running more stories about Freedom and Franzen, even dispatching a reporter to cover Franzen’s book-release party. Her breathless account of the evening—a list of the members of “literary Elysium” who attended, descriptions of the cut of the New Yorker book editor’s dress and the “high-ceilinged rooms awash in the romantic luster of the Colonial era”—concluded with the citizens of Elysium, including Franzen’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, and Salon book critic Laura Miller, lining up to take shots at the “detractors who’ve groused at his good fortune.” The whole thing ran beneath the completely objective, not at all biased headline “In This Galaxy, One Star Shines Brightest.”

It was gross. It was bad journalism. It was completely disingenuous of the Times to report on the “good fortune” of the bright star that it had been instrumental in creating. It was also not Franzen’s fault. He’d been a jerk about popular fiction, he’d been a dick to Oprah and her readers, he’d turned up his nose at the kind of attention and praise that most writers would have killed their own mothers, or at least hobbled their pets, for. But he was just the right kind of writer (white, male) in the right place (New York City) at the right time, with the right publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to enjoy the Times’ largesse. And the great good fortune didn’t end with the newspaper. Oprah, after years of preaching that women shouldn’t go back to men who’d hurt them, made Freedom a book-club pick and invited Franzen back to her show. Franzen managed to stop insulting her long enough to collect her endorsement, and the attendant hundreds of thousands of sales that her imprimatur guaranteed, before going back to his regularly scheduled Oprah-bashing. It looked like Status Quo 1, Jealous Grousing Detractors 0.

But, in the days and weeks after the Franzenfrenzy subsided, the social-media conversation continued to simmer—about whose books were getting reviewed, and where, and by whom, and with what language; about who were the “right” writers to drive the conversation, about whether change was necessary, about whether change was possible. People kept talking. Back then, their number included Franzen himself, who acknowledged that, yes indeed, women’s books were packaged differently, and treated differently, than books by men . . . and then people started counting.

At the very end of what felt like a very, very long summer, I was having dinner at the Wicked Oyster in Wellfleet when my phone pinged. About ten people, from my agent to my editor to my sister to my mom, were e-mailing the same link, asking “Did you see this?”

“This” turned out to be a story in Slate, where a reporter had actually gone through and counted up how many men and how many women the Times had reviewed in a just-shy-of-two-years period. The news for Times defenders was not good.

Of the 545 fiction books reviewed in the Times between June 29, 2008, and August 27, 2010, 338 were written by men (or  62 percent of the total) and 207 were written by women (or 38 percent of the total). Of the 101 fiction books that received two reviews in that period (one in the newspaper during the week and one in the weekend’s Book Review), 72 were written by men and 29 were written by women.

I remember sitting in the dining room and saying, loudly enough for the sunburned, red-pants-wearing diners at neighboring tables to turn and stare, “I told you so!”

The Slate count was only the first of the damning tallies. That year, an organization of women in the arts called VIDA started counting, not just at the Times, but at a range of high-end newspapers and magazines. Its first Count, which would become an annual event, appeared in 2011. The organization used pie charts to illustrate the problem. What they found was shocking, even to me. In 2010, the Atlantic reviewed books by 10 women and 33 men. Harper’s reviewed 21 women and 46 men. The New Yorker published articles and short stories by 163 women, 449 men. At the New York Review of Books, a whopping 88 percent—or 133 of 152 articles—were written by men. And in 2010 the New York Times Book Review reviewed 283 books by women, 584 books by men.

The numbers prompted stories and pointed headlines. “Few Female Bylines in Major Magazines,” from the Columbia Journalism Review. “Where Are the Women Writers?” in Mother Jones. “Voices Unheard: Female Bylines Still Lacking in Male-Dominated Literary Magazines” on Yahoo.com. Editors were called on to justify their pies. Some were defensive. Others were contrite. “It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better—it’s as simple and as stark as that,” said David Remnick of the New Yorker.

In the five years since Freedom was published, there’s been some improvement. In 2011, the Atlantic’s bylines were 28 percent female. In 2014, they were 40. The New Republic inched up from 23 to 27 percent. The New Yorker’s percentage rose from 30 to 33 percent, while Harper’s went from a dismal 23 percent to 32 percent. Best of all, from my perspective, the Times hired a (female) editor of the Book Review who seems to have effortlessly corrected its gender imbalance, and who launched a column called “The Shortlist,” which makes room, sometimes, for romance and popular fiction. Which would be great . . . if you didn’t know that the paper devotes regular columns to crime fiction and science fiction and horror, to YA and children’s books and even self-help, but still has no regular, dedicated space for romance or commercial women’s fiction.

So—baby steps. But also an example of how Twitter can at times be a force for good, a way to raise awareness, to point out a problem, to chart progress, and to cheer when things get better.

*And by “most writers,” I mean “in my head.”

From HUNGRY HEART: ADVENTURES IN LIFE, LOVE, AND WRITING by Jennifer Weiner. Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Long Live The Last Bookstore

This amazing destination shop for bibliophiles is thriving.

When Josh Spencer opened The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, he thought it was going to fail within three years due to the declining state of the book industry. That’s why he chose the boldly ironic name. But The Last Bookstore has thrived. In this documentary from Chad Howitt, Welcome to The Last Bookstore, we learn about the successful shop and its owner Spencer, who is a husband, father, and paraplegic.

Spencer opens up about getting hit by a car and successfully adjusting to life as a paraplegic. He brought his no-fear mindset into his new career. “I’ve lost things in my life much more traumatic than a business. … If I can deal with that, I can certainly deal with a business failing,” he says. But it doesn’t sound like he has to worry about that: The Last Bookstore is extremely busy and has a crowd of regulars.

The extraordinary design of the store would be enough of a reason to visit, though. The huge space is filled with sculptures made of books, a mammoth head mounted on the wall, and white columns. But then there’s also the passion and dedication of Spencer and the staff. “We’ve tried to add a real human element,” says Spencer. “We want it to be an authentic, real experience versus something that’s cold and calculated. I think that’s the difference. I think that’s one reason why we’ve been able to do well when other bookstores perhaps are struggling.”

One highlight of the documentary is getting to see Spencer sort through boxes of books that people have sold or donated to the bookstore. Going through boxes of old books sounds like it would be fun for any bookworm, and Spencer agrees: “It’s kind of a fantasy job for anybody who’s really in love with all kinds of books and who loves finding buried treasure.” And he’s not just talking about rare books: “I found 500 bucks one time, weird love letters, a pressed pot leaf in a Song of Solomon book one time.”

Of the book business, Spencer says, “I think that the digital age has made print books more popular. … It’s just made everyone come out of the woodwork who really wants to see print books survive.”

Madeline Raynor is a Slate freelance video blogger.

No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them.

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Books line the walls on at Common Grounds, in DeKalb, Ill., in August. Credit Katie Smith/Daily Chronicle, via Associated Press

Even with Facebook, Netflix and other digital distractions increasingly vying for time, Americans’ appetite for reading books — the ones you actually hold in your hands — has not slowed in recent years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Sixty-five percent of adults in the United States said they had read a printed book in the past year, the same percentage that said so in 2012. When you add in ebooks and audiobooks, the number that said they had read a book in printed or electronic format in the past 12 months rose to 73 percent, compared with 74 percent in 2012.

Twenty-eight percent said they had opted for an ebook in the past year, while 14 percent said they had listened to an audiobook.

Lee Rainie, the director of internet, science and technology research for Pew Research, said the study demonstrated the staying power of physical books.

“I think if you looked back a decade ago, certainly five or six years ago when ebooks were taking off, there were folks who thought the days of the printed book were numbered, and it’s just not so in our data,” he said.

The 28 percent who said they had read an ebook in the past year has remained relatively steady in the past two years, but the way they are consuming ebooks is changing.

The Pew study, based on a telephone survey of 1,520 adults in the country from March 7 to April 4, reports that people are indeed using tablets and smartphones to read books. Thirteen percent of adults in the United States said that they used their cellphones for reading in the past year, up from 5 percent in 2011. Tablets are a similar story: 15 percent said that they had used one for books this year, up from 4 percent in 2011.

While 6 percent said they read books only in digital format, 38 percent said they read books exclusively in print. But 28 percent are reading a combination of digital and printed books, suggesting that voracious readers are happy to take their text however they can get it.

“They want books to be available wherever they are,” Mr. Rainie said. “They’ll read an ebook on a crowded bus, curl up with a printed book when they feel like that, and go to bed with a tablet.”

The Lasting Benefits of Growing Up Around Books

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Photo: Darren Johnson / EyeEm/Getty Images

There are many things one may take issue with in Marie Kondo’s mega-best-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but for a certain sort of person, one particular piece of advice she gives is unthinkable: Throw away your books, she says. Get rid of as many as you possibly can, both the ones you’ve read and the ones you haven’t (and know you never will). For your very favorites, she allows, you may rip out the best parts and keep only those pages.

This is impossible advice to follow for bookworms, whose preferred home environments look something like beloved used-book stores. And there is now, Quartz reports, a bit of empirical evidence about the lasting benefits of keeping stacks of books lying around, at least in childhood — kids who grow up around books end up being more successful. In a study of nine European countries, a team of economists from Italy found that boys who had access to non-school-related books grew up to make 9 percent more, on average, than boys who did not have many non-textbooks around. (Alas, this data set focused only on the guys.)

Writer Thu-Huong Ha breaks down the study methodology:

The researchers based their models on data collected from men between ages 60 and 96 from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, part of a massive ongoing survey of Europeans. They compared whether the men grew up in rural or urban environments, the years they were in school, roughly how many books they had in their houses at age 10, and their income across their lives.

According to the study, which was published in The Economic Journal, the magic number of non-schoolbooks appeared to be ten. “Crucially, there was no significant difference between whether participants reported having 50, 100, or 200 books growing up,” Ha explains. “The key was whether they grew up with any number of books greater than ten.”

This study captured data from in the pre-internet era, so it’s not clear what this may mean for children growing up today. And it’s true that it may not be the books themselves that created this association, or not exactly, anyway. A house with books is likely a house that values education; it may also be a signal of higher socioeconomic status.

But in recent years, psychological science has found that reading fiction increases empathy; one 2014 study on the Harry Potter series in particular found that kids who read about magic and Muggles were more likely to have positive feelings about people who were different from them. Perhaps the emotional intelligence that kids gain from reading helps set them up for success later in life. In sum: Books are great! Keep ‘em around.

The Man Behind ‘The Last Bookstore’

Aug 18, 2016 | 465 videos

Video by Chad Howitt

Josh Spencer is the owner and operator of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. It’s aptly named; after all, there have been widespread closures of bookstores across the country in favor of online purchases and e-readers. Chad Howitt’s short film, Welcome to the Last Bookstore, is an emotional look at Spencer’s journey towards opening the store and the heart behind its success. Years ago, he was in an accident that left him unable to walk and forced him to reexamine his life. “I’ve always been a writer and a reader, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try books,’” he says. “It was busy from the first day we opened our doors.”

For more of Howitt’s work, visit his website. He’s currently working on a short film based on the poem “From 35,000 feet / Praise Aviophobia,” by the American poet Geffrey Davis.

Author: Nadine Ajaka

Is Amazon planning to open a bookstore in New York City?

Michael Schaub

Amazon is ready to take Manhattan – according to a report in the New York Post.

Amazon has largely been credited with a crisis in brick-and-mortar bookselling. The online retailer’s success – including its ability to undercut books’ traditional retail prices and its launch of the first popular e-reader, the Kindle – contributed in part to the demise of Border’s, the national bookstore chain that went bankrupt and closed in 2011. From its debut in 1994, Amazon has been seen as a digital player.

So the company raised eyebrows last year when it opened its first bookstore in Seattle. That was followed by a report that the online retailer was planning to open hundreds of bookstores in malls around the country, a story that was quickly denied and recanted.

The New York Post cites unnamed sources who claim the company will open a physical bookstore and cafe in Hudson Yards, a large real estate development on the far west Side of Manhattan.

If the report is accurate, Amazon Books will join department store Neiman Marcus and restaurants helmed by chefs Thomas Keller and José Andrés when the Hudson Yards retail space opens in 2018 or 2019.

The Post quoted one source as saying: “I don’t know if the final lease was signed yet, but I know the deal is happening. There’s no way that deal is dying.”

Although Amazon denied the report of it seeking to open hundreds of bookstores around the country, it has since announced plans for bookstores in San Diego and near Portland, Ore.

According to the New York Post, Amazon’s New York store would include a cafe, which might be a first for the company — the Seattle store doesn’t have one, and there’s no word on whether one will be part of its other planned stores.

Manhattan is home to many independent bookstores, including The Strand, McNally Jackson, Housing Works and Bluestockings.

Amazon did not respond to our request for comment.

Pulp Friction

David Plunkert

Pulp Friction

If Barnes & Noble goes out of business, it’ll be a disaster for book lovers.

Even by the standards of the ailing book publishing industry, the past year has been a bad one for Barnes & Noble. After the company spun off its profitable college textbook division, its stock plunged nearly 40 percent. Its long-term debt tripled, to $192 million, and its cash reserves dwindled. Leonard Riggio, who turned the company into a behemoth, has announced he will step down this summer after more than 40 years as chairman. At the rate it’s going, Barnes & Noble won’t be known as a bookseller at all—either because most of its floor space will be given over to games and gadgets, or, more ominously, because it won’t even exist.

There’s more than a little irony to the impending collapse of Barnes & Noble. The mega-retailer that drove many small, independent booksellers out of business is now being done in by the rise of Amazon. But while many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic—not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.

If Barnes & Noble were to shut its doors, Amazon, independent bookstores, and big-box retailers like Target and Walmart would pick up some of the slack. But not all of it. Part of the reason is that book sales are driven by “showrooming,” the idea that most people don’t buy a book, either in print or electronically, unless they’ve seen it somewhere else—on a friend’s shelf, say, or in a bookstore. Even on the brink of closing, Barnes & Noble still accounts for as much as 30 percent of all sales for some publishing houses.

But the focus on sales masks the deeper degree to which the publishing industry relies on Barnes & Noble. The retailer provides much of the up-front cash publishers need to survive, in the form of initial orders. Most independent bookstores can’t afford to buy many books in advance; a single carton of 24 books would represent a large order. Amazon also buys few books in advance, preferring to let supplies run down so as to prompt online shoppers to “add to cart” because there are “only five left in stock.”

Barnes & Noble, by contrast, often takes very large initial orders. For books it believes will fly off the shelves, initials can reach the mid-five figures—hundreds of thousands of dollars that go to the publisher before a single book is even sold. That money, in turn, allows publishers to run ads in magazines and on Facebook, send authors on book tours, and pay for publicists. Without Barnes & Noble, it would become much harder for publishers to turn books into best-sellers.

Even if Barnes & Noble doesn’t close, publishers are already starting to suffer from the chain’s decline. “What can happen is that their number of stores can shrink, their store footprint can shrink, so that the number of titles on which they put meaningful advance orders can shrink,” says Mike Shatzkin, an industry veteran. “Publishers are going to have to adjust to a model where they print what they know will sell rather than what they hope will sell.”

Big-name authors, like Malcolm Gladwell or James Patterson, will probably be fine. So too will writers who specialize in romance, science fiction, manga, and commercial fiction—genres with devoted audiences, who have already gravitated to Amazon’s low prices. But Barnes & Noble is essential to publishers of literary fiction—the so-called “serious” works that get nominated for Pulitzers and National Book Awards. Without the initial orders Barnes & Noble places, and the visibility its shelves provide, breakout hits by relative unknowns—books like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—will suffer.

In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits. Literary writers without proven sales records will have difficulty getting published, as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some will probably never be published at all. And rigorous nonfiction books, which often require extensive research and travel, will have a tough time finding a publisher with the capital to fund such efforts.

The irony of the age of cultural abundance is that it still relies on old filters and distribution channels to highlight significant works. Barnes & Noble and corporate publishers still have enormous strides to make in fully reflecting America’s rich diversity. But without them, the kinds of books that challenge us, that spark intellectual debates, that push society to be better, will start to disappear. Without Barnes & Noble, we’ll be adrift in a sea of pulp.

Why We Find It So Infuriating When Novelists Are Judged Based on Attractiveness

An attractive novelist.
An attractive novelist.

Tuesday morning I watched my Twitter feed fill up with point and counterpoint: an endless stream of retweeted photos taken on the red carpet of Monday night’s Met Gala and another endless stream of literary people aggravated by an article inEntertainment Weekly on the subject of debut novelists. It turns out, the piece announced, that being conventionally good-looking or articulate can boost the advance on royalties a first-time author gets for his or her novel. This wasn’t news back in the 1980s, when the Brat Pack signed rich book contracts while being photographed wearing cool clothes in Manhattan nightclubs, but somehow every time it gets reported (every six or seven years or so) it is always received as a disgusting revelation.

I agree that this isn’t a great situation, and as Slate’s Mallory Ortberg pointed out over at the Toast, one quote from Knopf editor Claudia Herr—“We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at”—registered as particularly insensitive. It’s dehumanizing to all of us to relegate anyone’s body to the status of “hard to look at.” But whether there’s cause enough in it to indict book publishing en masse is another matter.

What does all this have to do with the Met Gala? The event consisted entirely of young, slender, beautiful people walking around in extravagant clothes, a phenomenon deemed fascinating enough to generate scores of articles and many more admiring tweets, some from the same people who complained about theEntertainment Weekly story.

This is not to run down the Met Gala because: whatever. While I couldn’t care less about it personally, you should knock yourself out, if it makes you happy. Let a million slideshows bloom! Nevertheless, the fascination with that red carpet does demonstrate, once again, just how much the media cares about how people look, and also that one of the reasons they care so much about it is that we do, too. Book publishers take this into account when offering on a first novel because they know that the sales of debut fiction are tragically dependent on the press—not so much reviews as profiles and other feature stories that focus less on the book than on the author as a personality.

The media loves the idea of tipping off its readers to a first-time novelist who’s young, achingly handsome, and brilliant, the embodiment of a zillion cheesy romantic fantasies. (Never mind that it’s the very rare novelist indeed whose first book is a masterpiece.) It also loves writers over 60 who publish a book for the first time because people like that give hope to the approximately 75 percent of Americans who believe they’re going to write a terrific novel themselves some day, once they finally get the time. (If you’re talking about the journalists who write these stories themselves, that percentage bumps up to 99.) They like an author with an unusual or traumatic personal story, especially if some of that story makes it into the novel itself. They prefer good talkers, colorful characters, and the celebrity-adjacent over the shy, quiet, unprepossessing people that writers usually are.

None of this has much to do with the quality of an author’s book, I hear you protest. I concur: It sucks that this matters. And most people in publishing think it sucks, too, I assure you. It’s hard enough to find someone who not only can write well but can also reliably produce a book that people want to read. The need for authors to be mediagenic in some fashion is nothing but an additional nuisance. And yet that’s often what it takes to get us, the public, to pay any attention to them at all. The way an author looks can affect how big an advance she gets, because it affects how much coverage her book gets, and that coverage affects its sales.

Given how pervasive the imperatives of celebrity culture are, why are we so surprised by this? Why do we find it such a bitter, bitter betrayal, even as we spend half the morning poring over Beyoncé’s gown and makeup? I suspect it’s because most readers like to think of books and literature as not just above and beyond all that but fundamentally separate from it. The world of books should provide us with a sanctuary from the mercilessly unfair, superficial world around us, because that’s exactly what books did when we were young. For the bookish child, reading serves as a secret garden, a place of refuge where what counts isn’t popularity but inner beauty, truth, and art. Books show us a way out, whether we want to escape a high school full of mean girls or a Hobbesian family where might always makes right.

Then, as adults, we want book publishing to exist in an incorruptible pocket universe. It needs to remain better than the world that has let us down again and again. It should be a realm in which all any editor ever worries about is the merit of the manuscript in her hand and where there’s an infinite amount of time for the industry’s brightest minds to comb through the slush pile in search of that proverbial gem. Despite ample evidence that publishers are businesspeople best viewed as investors in manuscripts they believe they can market to the public, we persist in imagining them as fairy godmothers whose enchanted touch bestows upon us, Pinocchio-style, the status of “real writers.” Economically, book publishing is a low-margin, low-growth industry where everyone struggles for a bit of purchase in a culture that seems less and less interested in what it has to offer. In our dreams, it is an intellectual and artistic Valhalla, where we can finally be valued at our true worth and mingle with the great spirits we have adored ever since we first learned to turn a page. Even book editors feel this way: Otherwise, why embark on such an unpromising career path?

So it’s inevitable that book publishing will disappoint us. Some of its flaws—especially its lack of diversity in race and class—must be corrected; that’s both the right thing to do and essential to the industry’s survival. But book publishing will never be purified of all the venal, commercial, and petty concerns of the world, because it is and always has been part of that world. It cares about what we care about, whether we want to admit that to ourselves or not.

An Heir Who’s Ready to Take the Reins at New York Magazine

Adam Moss, the editor in chief of New York magazine, was having dinner at Sant Ambroeus, an upscale restaurant in the West Village, with Pamela Wasserstein and her two brothers when she mentioned that she was ready for a career change.

It was the summer of 2014, the magazine had just gone from weekly to biweekly, and Mr. Moss recalled thinking at the time that it made sense to have the Wasserstein heirs, whose family trust owns the publication, more involved with the day-to-day decision-making.

The next day, Mr. Moss called Ms. Wasserstein, then working for the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, and floated an idea: She should run the magazine.

Nearly two years later, that plan is finally coming to fruition. On Monday, Ms. Wasserstein, 38, will become chief executive of New York Media, the magazine’s parent company, giving the family more direct control of the publication and making it something of a New York media dynasty.

The move can be traced to 2004, when Ms. Wasserstein’s father, Bruce Wasserstein, bought New York magazine for $55 million. After Mr. Wasserstein, an investment banker who helped popularize the hostile takeover, died unexpectedly in 2009 at 61, there was a short period of uncertainty about the publication’s future. The economy had soured and some speculated that the family might sell.

Instead, Mr. Wasserstein’s children held on, and proved to be devoted owners. Ms. Wasserstein and her two brothers, Scoop and Ben, a former editor at the magazine, had monthly meetings with the management team and were part of discussions about the publication’s strategy. And in November 2014, a few months after that phone call with Mr. Moss, Ms. Wasserstein joined the magazine full time as co-chairwoman and head of strategy. (Scoop Wasserstein is a film development executive and Ben now works for a production company based at HBO.)

“It’s all family, every aspect of this place,” Mr. Moss, who has edited New York since 2004, said in an interview last week at the magazine’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. About Ms. Wasserstein, he added, “She’s really been kind of one of us for a long time.”

The Wall Street investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, Pamela’s father, in 2006. Mr. Wasserstein died in 2009. Credit Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times

Ms. Wasserstein, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former corporate lawyer who previously led corporate development for Tribeca Enterprises, is taking the helm of a publication for the first time, and many would not envy her position. Magazines in particular have struggled to offset decreasing print advertising revenue and falling circulation.

Newsweek was sold for $1 in 2010 and Time Inc., whose publications include Time and People, was spun off from Time Warner in 2014 and saddled with debt. Popular Science said recently that it would come out bimonthly instead of monthly.

New York magazine, with a circulation of about 400,000, was down 12 percent in ad pages last year compared with the previous year. But the publication has several things in its favor.

“On editorial grounds, they’ve been terrific since the Wassersteins have owned them,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor and former dean at Columbia University’s journalism school and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. “When you find a benign owner like the Wassersteins, you’re happy if you like magazines.”

Digitally, the magazine has become something of a force. It has built up a collection of online brands, including Vulture, The Cut and Daily Intelligencer, and its sites now have roughly 16 million unique online visitors a month, up 19 percent in the last year, according to comScore.

Ms. Wasserstein said she expected digital sales, which grew 10 percent last year, to make up 60 percent of the magazine’s advertising revenue this year (digital ad revenues surpassed print ad revenues for the first time in 2015, partly because of the decision to go biweekly, she said). And Mr. Moss, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine, is widely considered one of the best in the business.

The magazine is privately owned, so it does not disclose financial information, but Ms. Wasserstein said it was “strongly positioned for growth.”

Adam Moss is editor in chief of New York magazine. Credit Brad Barket/Getty Images for New York Magazine

“We’re happy with our strategy,” she said, “but we’re amplifying.”

To that end, she outlined a plan for New York centered on increasing its online audience and its digital revenue. The magazine is focusing on pumping up video offerings and building out a new branded content studio that it hopes will bolster ad revenue.

And on Wednesday, the magazine will introduce a new technology and culture site called Select All, which was born out of Following, a pop-up blog that covered social media. Max Read, the former editor of Gawker, will lead Select All.

There is certainly no shortage of technology-focused sites, but Mr. Read said Select All would be different by approaching technology “from the culture side” and focusing on “the way we live our lives.”

Separately, the magazine is exploring a cable television deal and trying to build out its live events business. Lest the publication itself be forgotten, Ms. Wasserstein said she was still dedicated to the print product. “For us, it’s a key part of our identity,” she said.

If it seems like New York is trying a bit of everything, it is not alone in the industry.

“Any media company is a laboratory right now,” Mr. Moss said. “There is no established way to do anything.”

However the magazine manages to navigate out of the industry’s uncertainty, installing Ms. Wasserstein as its leader seems to indicate the family is willing to see it through. She will replace Anup Bagaria, a managing partner at the private equity firm Wasserstein & Company, who has been chief executive of New York Media since Bruce Wasserstein bought the magazine.

“We are committed, and we see a bright future for the company,” Ms. Wasserstein said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to take this on if this wasn’t a place that I felt we could build value and an opportunity that I was excited about and my family is excited about.”

But she added: “Could circumstances change someday? Of course.”