The Agenda-Driven Bookstore

All bookstores have an agenda. Limited space necessitates a curation of inventory. How does a bookstore present a balanced approach?

Photo by rawkkim on Unsplash

I recently visited a bookstore in Wisconsin and left thinking there were only a handful of books I would have purchased out of the hundreds on the shelves. I thought about it for a while and wondered why that was the case. I immediately described it as an agenda-driven bookstore, but aren’t all bookstores? Limited space necessitates a curation of inventory. All bookstores have some sort of an agenda, be it selling the most books, carrying certain types of books, or promoting/limiting specific genres.

What bothered me about this particular bookstore was that there were very few old books. The classics were all but non-existent. The agenda and focus was towards the new. That’s fine. That’s the owner’s prerogative, but it reveals a mindset and a view of history.

That mindset assumes history is moving in the direction of continual progress and advancement. Old ideas have been superseded by the new, and one only needs to consult the new to avoid the mistakes of the past.

It’s intriguing, but it’s also arrogant. 99% of the books on those shelves will be irrelevant and unremembered in a few years, if not a few months. But there are books with ideas that have stood the test of time.

I’m the business manager at a bookstore and we carry both old and new books. I’m continually amazed at how many people purchase the old books. The classics. The Great Books. There is a hunger for those ideas. There is also a great desire for the new, but there needs to be a balance. Solely focusing on new books leads to ingesting ideas that will not stand the test of time. Solely focusing on old books lacks a certain vibrancy and connection of those ideas to the present.

In your reading life, and in your bookstores, look for a balance.