I found that while writing the book, reverence seeped into every chapter anyway. How could it not? How could I write about space without speaking of altars or sanctuaries? What would it mean to speak of community and not celebrate the divine presence the rabbis tell us descends upon a meeting when bookish teachings are shared? Or to speak of time and not mark the transition from common to sacred time, or the hours of remembering and the hours of forgetting, or eternal and ephemeral moments? And so I infused the five chapters with reverence and included quite a bit of religious material.

There is something solemn about mornings, when the world is quiet and the shop is calm. The books are illuminated by a dim natural light. When empty, the bookstore is filled with community, with our collective memory—with aspiration both communal and individual—and when full, the bookstore often maintains a quiet usually obtainable only in solitude.

In this video, Jeff Deutsch advocates for the necessity of independent bookstores for building communities. Jeff argues that bookstores construct a literary landscape as critical to the human as any natural or material landscape.

…I point you back toward our shelves, where you alone as a browser can draw out the arguments made across generations, can assemble and rearrange ancient and modern ethical quandaries, can stitch together your own guide to the good life. I hope that maintaining a place where such actions are even possible is argument enough.

The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience. Until 1870, when the poet and essayist James Russell Lowell used the word in reference to John Dryden’s reading habits, “browse” meant, primarily, to chew cud, to ruminate.

Selling books is unlike selling anything else. The Seminary Co-op director counts the ways… The aspiration of the bookseller is to provide the conditions, by the power of the good bookstore, to slow the reader down that they might behold a more capacious vision of the possible.

“I first vis­it­ed Chicago’s Sem­i­nary Co-op Book­store when I was a con­fused and rest­less nine­teen ‑year-old. It was there I found clar­i­ty, repose, and — although I didn’t know it then — my career.”

“Last October, while Amazon opened its first four-star stores in the UK, more than 500 book and publishing industry professionals gathered for a two-day conference called "Reimagining Bookstores".

“The Age of Kishore”: Jeff Deutsch Celebrates Seagull Books Founder and Publisher Naveen Kishore: It is a tremendous privilege to be here with all of you wonderful devotees of the word and it is a profound honor to lead the celebration of Naveen Kishore, founder and publisher of Seagull Books.

An interview with Jeff Deutsch: We’re thrilled to welcome Jeff Deutsch to the Princeton University Press Board of Trustees. The first bookseller to join the Press’s Board, Deutsch is director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, the first not-for-profit bookstores in the United States whose mission is devoted to bookselling.

“What is the value of a space devoted solely to books?” This is one of the compelling questions our newly minted director of buying and content, Alena Jones, asks in her recent essay for Lithub…

Running a great bookstore is hard. Running one as a community answerable to 50,000 members around the world? Harder still. And so when Seminary Co-op Bookstores Director Jeff Deutsch outlined the workings of one of the world’s great bookselling operations, it seemed a message worth sharing.

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. I’ve spent time talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

In his own words, here is Jeff Deutsch's Book Notes music playlist for his book In Praise of Good Bookstores…