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May 30, 2022: Jeff Deutsch, author, "In Praise of Good Bookstores"

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Today: Jeff Deutsch, author, "In Praise of Good Bookstores"

Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling.

• In Praise of Good Bookstores, by Jeff Deutsch

• Jeff Deutsch on reading (p. 132): “Engagement with [books] provokes an internal dialogue, a shuffling of hunches, assumptions, and prejudices, bringing texture and insight to the far reaches of our ignorance. The ability to question our own beliefs, to dwell in uncertainty, empathy, or curiosity, to pursue knowledge, beauty, and meaning unstintingly, so that we might make our best attempt at understanding, and to continually put ourselves in spaces that will challenge, not just echo, our assumptions, is an act of citizenship as much as its own individual reward.”

• Jeff Deutsch's vision (p. 160): “My hope is that we, this society struggling to be born, will recall the most important debts – those debts beyond the currency of the banks and financiers – and acquit ourselves of them by building models and systems that allow the gifts we have received, and those we create, to subsequently pass to the next generation.”

• Jeff Deutsch’s website

• Seminary Co-op Bookstores - you can also join the co-op for free

• Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun

• Aftermath, by Preti Taneja, published by Transit Books

• John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies: “For all books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction – it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.” (Pictured on the playlist: this quote’s bronze plaque from the New York Public Library’s Library Way on East 41st Street. See photos.)

• Best places to buy a book, a list of Mark’s favorite online booksellers, on his Good Reports site

• Sign up to get Mark's weekly email newsletter. You can also join Mark’s Creative Good community.

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