News and Interviews
Princeton University Press: Jeff Deutsch on In Praise of Good Bookstores
Like most career booksellers, I did not set out to become a bookseller. It was perhaps ten years after I started working in bookstores that I looked back and realized that I was, in fact, a career bookseller…
Convincing by Presence: A conversation with Jeff Deutsch
Jeff Deutsch is the director of the storied Seminary Co-op Bookstores in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, which in 2019 became the first not-for-profit bookstore in the country. Over the course of his nearly lifelong career as a bookseller, Jeff came to see the importance of forming and articulating new models to support bookstores as vital community institutions…
Techtonic with Mark Hurst: Playlist from May 30, 2022
Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.
We Booked Jeff Deutsch: The Director of the Seminary Co-Op Talks About His New Volume Celebrating Bookstores, Including The Hyde Park Institution
Deutsch’s own book, “In Praise of Good Bookstores,” appears this spring. It is an intelligent, literary love letter to the Hyde Park stores and to bookstores everywhere. His greatest fondness is reserved for the browsable, terrestrial, brick-and-mortar shops for which, Deutsch cogently argues there has never been, and may never be, a robust for-profit model.
Princeton University Press: Jeff Deutsch on In Praise of Good Bookstores
Like most career booksellers, I did not set out to become a bookseller. It was perhaps ten years after I started working in bookstores that I looked back and realized that I was, in fact, a career bookseller…
Time for Kids: Books and Beyond
On March 14, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced 57th Street Books, in Chicago, Illinois, to close its doors. The store wouldn’t reopen for nearly a year and a half. During that time, director Jeff Deutsch was worried. Customers couldn’t come to the shop and browse the shelves. His main advantage over online retailers, such as Amazon, had vanished overnight…
The Biblioracle Recommends: Thinking About Good Bookstores
This week’s Chicago Tribune column is about Jeff Deutsch’s wonderful new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores, a kind of personal and philosophical meditation on the nature of bookstores as both physical spaces and ideas in and of themselves.
Literary Hub: Why Good Bookstores Might Not Actually Be “Stores”
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jeff Deutsch, the author of In Praise of Good Bookstores.
Reckless Reader:
Seminary Co-Op
Jeff Deutsch, Director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op, has been a bookseller since 1994. Apart from a brief stint at an artists’ community, it’s all he’s ever done. “It’s very fulfilling,” he told me in a conversation over Zoom. “I remember visiting the Co-op before I started. I remember very well that first descent down the stairs and into the labyrinth of books that was so storied.”
Author Celebrates Bookstores That Encourage Customers to Browse
The largest seller of books in the world is Amazon — not a professional bookseller. That doesn’t sit well with Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, which he will discuss April 10 at a hybrid event being held at Princeton Public Library and co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books, Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Princeton University Press, and Classics Books of Trenton.
Crains Chicago Business
Longtime Hyde Park bookseller Seminary Co-op Bookstores makes an unusual leap.
Book Smart
Imagine you’re in Hyde Park, walking west on 57th Street. At Kenwood Avenue, you pass Noodles Etc., apparently the true successor to the long-gone Agora after a string of North Side and Evanston interlopers—Prairie City Diner, Ann Sather, Lulu’s—came and went.
Announcing Our Fall Partner Bookseller: Chicago’s Pioneering Nonprofit: Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books (Part One)
Let’s think for a moment about browsing. The word “browse,” it transpires, comes from a fifteenth-century ancestor, brousen, that means to “feed on buds, eat leaves or twigs” from trees or bushes, from Old French broster, “to sprout, bud.”…
Announcing Our Fall Partner Bookseller: Chicago’s Pioneering Nonprofit: Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books (Part Two)
Seminary Co-op’s director Jeff Deutsch re-imagined its co-operative model as a registered nonprofit both to recognize the unavoidable realities of the contemporary marketplace and to update the co-op model of a bookstore built by and for its customers.
Seminary Co-op Launches Two Imprints
The Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago is marking both its 60th anniversary this year and celebrating its upcoming re-opening to browsers by introducing several initiatives. The new initiatives include the launch of two publishing imprints—one focusing on bookselling and the literary arts—each in partnership with a scholarly press.
Lit 50 2022: Booksellers and Allies
And Deutsch still brings just-getting-started energy to his role, with a podcast numbering over a hundred episodes and with plans to launch not one, but two publishing imprints next year.
Lit 50: Who Really Books In Chicago 2019
The Seminary Co-op works to define the bookstore as a cultural institution, says director Jeff Deutsch. “We firmly believe that the work of bookselling provides great cultural and civic value, in addition to the great value the author series provides.”
Chicago Tribune: Indie bookstores give what Amazon lacks: A human touch
Walking into the entryway of Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park is like entering an Athenaeum, a kind of temple of books. Intellectuals furrow their brows and read in comfortable chairs, framed by tall shelves that house the published volumes of the literary minds at the University of Chicago, backlit and encased in glass.
Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year Finalist: Seminary Co-op Bookstores
The Seminary Co-op, founded by five students in 1961 in the Chicago Theological Seminary’s basement as a member-owned cooperative, has become a cultural institution with an impact extending far beyond the Windy City.
Meet New GLIBA Board Member Jeff Deutsch from Seminary Co-op & 57th Street Books in Chicago!
I work at The Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which includes the Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books. I have been there for just over four years and an enthusiast for 25 years.
The Biblio File
Sarah McNally & Jeff Deutsch with all you need to know about Bookselling
BookExpo 2019: Celebrating the Pannell Awards
“We are so proud to serve young readers on the South Side of Chicago and are humbled and grateful to receive this recognition on behalf of all booksellers working in underserved communities,” says Jeff Deutsch, director of Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which comprises 57th Street Books and the Seminary Co-op, an academic bookstore.
UChicago News: Jeff Deutsch appointed director of the Seminary Co-op
Jeff Deutsch, a respected bookseller with two decades of bookstore experience, will be the next director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, the Co-op’s Board of Directors announced today. He will begin his new position on July 1.
UChicago Magazine: Bookstore nation
Where the director of the Seminary Co-op likes to browse and buy.
UChicago Magazine: A fresh page
New Seminary Co-op director Jeff Deutsch talks about his life in books and the future of the beloved store.
Publishers Weekly Star Watch 2018 Honorees
In 2014, after two decades in academic bookselling, Deutsch took a job at the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago. His task was to head the Seminary Co-op, which prides itself on having one of the largest academic collections in the world, and 57th Street Books, a general-interest bookstore.
Publishing Talks
This week’s podcast is one I am really excited about. Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which calls itself the first not-for-profit bookstore in the United States whose mission is devoted to bookselling (there are other nonprofit bookstores of course, generally components of literary centers, like Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, and Writers and Books in Rochester, NY are examples).