In Praise of Good Bookstores wins the Heartland Booksellers Association Award for nonfiction

Jeff Deutsch’s In Praise of Good Bookstores has won the 2022 Heartland Booksellers Award in the Nonfiction category.

In Praise of Good Bookstores is an urgent and eloquent exploration of the essential role good bookstores play as places of discovery, refuge, and fulfilment. Deutsch—the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores and a PUP Board member, as well as author—draws on his experience as a bookseller and his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew, reflecting on how 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. Throughout the book, Deutsch pays homage to the incalculable value of browsing, a practice that fosters immersive self-reflection, and considers how qualities such as space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he predicts a future in which the bookstore not only endures but realizes its highest aspirations.

Praised by Washington Post book critic Ron Charles as, “the most moving and erudite justification for the survival of bookstores I have ever read” and by City Lights Bookstore’s Paul Yamazaki as, “a compendium of delights”, In Praise of Good Bookstores pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions.

The Heartland Booksellers Award celebrates literature in the Great Lakes and Midwest, with content either about the region, or an author from the region. The Award is a joint award given annually, across five categories, by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association and the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association.

About the Author

Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, the first not-for-profit bookstores in the United States whose mission is devoted to bookselling. He joined Princeton University Press’s Board of Trustees—the first independent bookseller to do so—in 2021.

Learn More

Read Jeff Deutsch on good bookstores, in PUP Ideas

Read an interview with Jeff Deutsch and sales rep Lanora Haradon

Watch Jeff Deutsch and editor Rob Tempio discuss good bookstores