Good article, and so very true from the experience I’ve had in just the last year of running Star Cat Books. This quote in particular stood out for me:
Therefore, bookstores themselves are social spaces. Often when I go into a bookstore I notice people animatedly talking in a way they don’t in any other type of shop. For avid readers, a bookstore is as much part of the social fabric of the community as is an old-fashioned town square or a beloved park.
I remember Wordsworth in Cambridge, MA, being just this sort of place—I practically lived in it during my college and grad school days for this reason—and it’s why I immediately put a sitting area of comfy chairs and a coffee table right in the front of my store when I bought it. Bookstores are indeed about books, but they’re most importantly about people and their relationship to books and therefore to other people, too.