From a lifetime bookseller and passionate reader, a thoughtful and endearing commentary on the unique significance of bookstores Do we still require bookstores in the 21st century? If so, how do you recognise a good one? Jeff Deutsch, the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookshops, one of the best bookstores in the world, honours one of our most significant and imperilled civic institutions in this exquisitely written book. He thinks about how elements like time, space, abundance, and community may be found in a good bookshop. Along the way, he also makes a possibly ambitious prediction about a future in which the bookshop not only survives, but also achieves its highest goals. In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch?s arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing?since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them.