Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

Listen to the chapter here!

James:

We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore.

Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get, you know, a reluctant reader, some, you know, young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read. If you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should, but you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha, and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books, our epic 22 year long quest to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we really enjoy going deep into the books that shape people's life.

Now today on chapter 141, we're going to be talking to the one and only James Daunt. James Daunt grew up in England, the child of a diplomat. He moved countries a little bit growing up, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its center.

He went to Turkey, he went to Cyprus, he came back to England for boarding school. And then after studying history at Cambridge, he didn't know what he wanted to do. So he went to the career services department and they pointed him towards investment banking in New York city, across the ocean, you know, a financially lucrative job, something new included travel, which he loved.

He went over, he actually liked investment banking, but his girlfriend now wife said, you can't do this forever. This is the most boring profession to listen to forever. I can't imagine doing this forever.

He thought, how do I combine my loves of reading and my loves of travel into doing something wholly different? Because he thought, if I'm not going to do investment banking, I don't want to work at another office job, I want to try something different. And so he opened up a bookstore, an independent bookstore named Daunt Books, D-A-U-N-T, Daunt Books, named after him, his last name on the Marylebone high street in London. He didn't know anything about running a bookstore, but he knew he loved books. He knew he loved travel. So he organized the bookstore by country, not by genre as most bookstores are not by the Dewey decimal, which I do, which most libraries do, but by country.

And you know, it wasn't easy. There was lots of struggling, lots of pain, lots of bookstores were going out of business at the time, but eventually he found his groove. And he found a knack for it.

And so he went to bookselling school. He took mentorship seriously. He took development seriously.

He took career planning seriously, performance management seriously. And eventually the little bookstore Daunt Books grew into, you know, a second one, a third one. And what was happening in the world at this time was of course, Amazon was kind of taking off big bookstore chains like Borders.

They were going out of business. And so eventually in the UK, there was like one noble chain left, Waterstones. It was purchased by a Russian entrepreneur who approached James Daunt and said, what do you think about leaving this?

James Daunt then continued to run his independent bookstores, Daunt Books, but then went on to also lead Waterstones. And he led it so well. He kind of turned the bookstore chain model on its head.

He stripped out co-op fees. Those are the fees that publishers pay bookstores to display their new releases on the front tables to almost guarantee bestsellers. He took those completely out of the system.

He said he wanted each of the stores to run like independent bookstores, which is what he was familiar with. But he also knew that there would be different customers, different tastes in every store. And he wanted the booksellers to be booksellers, to figure out what to sell, to order them, to sell them.

And he wanted them to be passionate about them. He took a lot of that head office out of the chain, the planograms, the what to do, the how to do it. And instead the stores managed themselves.

What happened? Sales went up, profits went up. The chain survived and it's very successful today.

And so what happened is on this side of the pond, the largest bookstore chain in the world, Barnes & Noble, when it went through receivership, when it was going through chapter 11, they called the one and only James Daunt, the bookstore fixer. And he comes over and he does the exact same thing, turning the stores into independent bookstores in philosophy, having the booksellers kind of run and manage the store, changing things now, including things like pay structures, having less temp workers, part-time workers, incentivizing people to stay longer and have a career. So this guy is essentially the largest bookseller in the entire world.

Do you know anyone else that runs a thousand bookstores? There is no one else does this. And he has a wholly unique way of thinking about how to run bookstores.

So I was very excited to reach out to James Daunt, not thrilled when he said yes to coming on 3 Books, slightly less excited when the three books he gave me were massive giant tomes, but I hung out with these giant tomes. I paced through them. I flipped them.

I fell into them. So we are going to go deep with the world's largest bookseller, the wonderful, wise, kind leader of bookstores and people, James Daunt. Let's turn the page into chapter 141 now.

James, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. This is a podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. I know you fit at least two of those titles, if not maybe three of them.

There couldn't be a better dream guest for a conversation about books. You are currently overseeing, I believe, the nine shop independent book chain, Dom Books, a 300 shop Waterstones book chain. And by my count, if I have it right, 628 store Barnes & Noble chain.

So, you know, that's the largest bookseller in the world. This is about a thousand bookstores total. It's all over the world.

I thought we might start by just asking you for your current diagnosis and prognosis on the state of books in the world.

James:

Well, in the world, I would sort of hesitate to pine because I think there are parts of the world where it must be really tough. And we only got to look at Russia or other places where that is almost certainly the case. But I'm broadly ignorant of that beyond reading my newspapers.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, books are in a very good place. We've had the rather unexpected circumstance of coming out of COVID with a lot more people reading, particularly younger readers, any teenagers up through into their early 20s reading dramatically more. And happily for us as a bookseller, choosing bookstores as a place to interact with books more than perhaps was the case before.

So strong sales growth of books generally, so publishers doing very nicely, but disproportionately favoring bookstores, whether they be independent bookstores or us as the large chain bookseller.

Neil:

I don't mean to sound surprised, but you do hear about, you know, Amazon's record numbers. And I thought that COVID was, I mean, I guess I assumed it was more of a momentary spike with everybody being at home, but you're saying here we're talking in fall 2024, a couple years out, you're seeing young people and people in general reading more and visiting bookstores more than in the past, which is music to my ears. I'm just like, I'm kind of surprised to hear it that way.

James:

I think COVID did cause people to read a lot more, engage with books a lot more. That didn't favor us as a physical bookseller. Yes, we have an online operation and that went up and grew, but primarily, as you say, it favored Amazon.

But when we reopened our stores, we found them dramatically busier than they had been before COVID. And it hasn't stopped. The habit, I think, of reading was reestablished.

And perhaps immediately after COVID, as people wanted to get into physical spaces and wanted to get out and I think meet each other and be in congenial environments, the bookstore became one of the big beneficiaries of that. And our stores remain every bit as busy as they were then. And great waves of trends and popularity coming through.

Big authors, Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yaros, those kind of the romantic fantasy and all the iterations of that garnering a readership and a level of excitement, which hasn't really happened since Harry Potter. So it's very exciting.

Neil:

Oh, that's great to hear. I have to admit my ignorance now. I know Colleen Hoover.

I know James Clear. I know, you know, but the names you mentioned, are those a young adult Harry Potter type of trends you're seeing? Oh, great.

That's wonderful. Well, before we get into your three most formative books, you've had a large and varied and dynamic career. I thought before we jump into your three formative books, I could replay back to you three quotes I picked out that you have said about books over the years and ask you to expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit, if you still agree with them or so on.

So if you don't mind, I will offer those over to you now, including in 2021 in the Sunday Times, you said, when you were asked what your favorite book is, you said Anna Karenina. I'm a bit sentimental, so I never quite finish it.

James:

I've read Anna Karenina a few times. I think it is just a fabulous book, but I am also extremely sentimental. I obviously know how it's going to end.

It's one of those novels of immense texture and emotion and locks you into these characters who are deeply flawed. But, you know, one cannot but help be emotive in the tragedy that is steadily unfolding. And then I always think, well, I don't need to finish this.

And I never quite have.

Neil:

So you're not finishing it so that you can preserve the feeling of wanting to read it again. Is that right? Because I have had that not wanting to finish a book before, but I have not articulated it that way.

So I'm really curious about this particular emotion.

James:

Generally, I always finish a book. That's actually not true. If I start a book that I'm not enjoying and I don't think is of adequate quality, then I stop reading it and that's that.

But if I'm absolutely loving a book, I will finish it. Except occasionally, and it's true in my case also with films and movies, is when you can see some awful denouement. I can't quite face it.

And then I always come back to them and I watch them again. I had it most recently with The Banshees of Inniskillen, which is a sort of fabulous movie, but absolutely torture in terms of the trajectory, the awful dynamic and the tragedy of what's unfolding before you. And by not finishing it, I can then go back and watch it again relatively quickly and do it again.

Neil:

That's an incredible strategy. I am liking this. This is a unique way of thinking about film and books for me.

But yeah, I like that, especially if the author is, I guess, you know, dead and not going to be producing new stuff. You know, you feel like it's a place of savoury. There's no sequel.

Exactly. OK, from the 2023 article feature about you in The Guardian, and I'm taking these really out of context purposely to try to give you something to talk about here. But you said Amazon doesn't care about books.

James:

Oh, that was a bit mean. I think it is out of context. I think what I was sort of trying to get at is that I think Amazon is actually a fabulous thing for books.

It's in many ways democratised the buying of books. It's made buying books extremely easy and reliable. And more people own books in consequence of Amazon than if they hadn't existed.

And that's a great thing. But they are a website, self-evidently. They have a single proposition.

They're driven by algorithms, typically reasonably, I think, crudely orientated as necessarily they must be. And they, by definition, are absent what we can do within bookstores, which is the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves. And it is, I think, self-evidently true that Amazon is a commercial organisation which just wants to sell a lot of things to you and as many as it can.

It's extremely interested in the book buyer. It started with the book buyer because it's attached to a level of education and affluence and to a wallet with a credit card in it that can buy all sorts of other things. But they will want to sell you your sneakers and they want to sell you a medical plan and they want to sell you everything else in the world, whereas we as booksellers are only interested in books and in the world of books and literature, which is a different focus.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. And I love that phrase, the serendipity of illogical choice. And it's interesting because, you know, for those of us who have been part of Amazon's trajectory in books, you know, when it was first a bookstore originally and then they did debut the Amazon recommendation engine, which was dynamic at the time.

They also, for a long time, hired editors and then I don't think have kept that whole curation element up. They also tried to do Amazon publishing and I don't think they've kept that up. They also tried to do Amazon bookstores and I don't think they've kept that.

So it's almost like they've dabbled in trying to do what you do, but they've always kind of run skittering away from it.

James:

Yeah, I think Amazon does what it does exceptionally well and as soon as it sort of strays out and tries to go beyond that, it all becomes a bit complicated and actually the online and the digital format is not the best place to do that. But, you know, I do think there are immensely positive things about what Amazon does. I mean, the search functionality of Amazon.com is fabulous and it allows you to find books in a way with an ease and a precision and a pace that nobody else really can match or had matched prior to Amazon.

Neil:

Yeah, OK, great. Thank you for taking that little tiny few words and expanding on it so much. The last quote I had for you was from a 2023 podcast, which I thought was a really brilliant interview on this podcast called Always Taking Notes.

The host did a wonderful job and as did you. And you said, I arrange Don't Books and continue to arrange it by country, which is how I read. I put novels, histories, and anything based on where it's set.

I guess I wanted you to expand on that, but also to explain to people what you mean by reading by country.

James:

I find myself interested in cultures and peoples and one of the ways in which those sort of are most easily understood is about a country or a place. And if you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you understand the novels, you understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

But in the world of books, that takes you quite broadly. If you read like that and perhaps arrange your shelves like that, which I personally do at home, you get books which all speak to each other and lean on and draw upon each other. And if you arrange a bookstore like that, you get something that's actually really interesting, obviously quite different to the conventional bookstore of which 99 out of 100 bookstores are arranged, which is simply by subject.

But if you arrange by country, that throws it all up in the air and it forces you to browse and consider books in a completely different way. And I think that is an intellectually interesting exercise to go through. And we've got lots and lots of bookstores where you can go in and find a history section or a business section or a religion section or whatever it might be.

We have very, very few bookstores which throw all that together and mix it up, but it's still totally coherent. And that's what my stores are.

Neil:

I love that. I love that. So I live in Toronto, and my books upstairs, I took a lot of pain and time to organize them into the Dewey Decimal classification system a couple years ago.

And I like them like that because I think they talk to each other in kind of the way a library does. But I tried to mentally experiment with what you do. Right away, I was like, OK, my favorite novel is A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, Australian writer.

That takes place very clearly in three different parts of the world. And then I'm like, well, where would I put Harry Potter? So on a detailed level, when it comes to novels, I'm assuming that there's a lot of...

You're making a lot of calls in every specific book.

James:

There's a lot of subjectivity. And then we also have a little part of the store which is just all the stuff that doesn't fit into...

Neil:

OK, OK. That's what I was kind of getting at.

James:

And we have such a book. All the books that you are going to ask for and which you will want to read but which we don't have a place for, they're all here. And if you ask for one of those, we can find them.

Neil:

I read a lot about your mentorship at Daunt Books. When it was one store, Marylebone I believe, and then you expanded slowly as other booksellers in your midst were interested in running their own shop. Did you have a key question or two you taught booksellers to ask when customers would come into the store?

When a customer or when a reader comes into a store, what's your philosophy there on what the interaction should or should not look like? How much silence do you let remain? What's the question you ask?

What is your gentle steering thought?

James:

I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who's looking to engage or not? And that also customers, as they come into stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, like sort of the spider in this web.

But there are people who quite clearly just want to get on with it and browse and they don't want interactions. And there are those who signal that they do. And then you have a series of decisions to make about how closely you interact with that customer.

There are standard questions to ask. Somebody's looking for help. What was the last great book you read?

If they say Colleen Hoover, kind of thing, that places them immediately. We don't judge as booksellers what people read. There's no great books to read or terrible books to read.

We want to put the best possible book for that reader into their hands. That's obviously self-evidently the case when we're dealing with children. You know, we're not going to sell Anna Karenina to a six-year-old.

We want to know what they like and then follow that through. And as soon as you know and you're given just enough of a clue from that. But as a bookseller, you can read that as they come into your store.

What are they looking at? What have they picked up? And you can map somebody pretty quickly.

And then on the basis of what they've either picked up or looked at and the speed with which they've, where they've lingered, you'll know what kind of a reader you're dealing with. And then you want to respond to that. There are some where you've got that sort of perfect customer and they're interested in things that you generally want to sell and generally are of interest.

In which case, I would always recommend to them from a distance, which allows me to raise my voice, which means I'm not just talking to them. I'm talking to the four or five other people within Earshot. If it's something a bit more specialist, a bit more technical, I'll get up, you know, not close, close, but closer, so that I don't have to raise my voice.

So it's just a personal conversation because I know it won't interest other people in the store. So it's all those kind of things that as a bookseller you're doing. Above all, you're trying to create a friendly environment, where you're stimulating people as they come in and they're having an interesting time and hopefully jogging them to look at different books slightly sort of adjacent to perhaps their sort of core focus.

Neil:

I find this so fascinating. I feel like we could spend the whole conversation just going deep down this like little tree diagram of all the things James does when people come in. So I find this whole world like, and I know you used to teach this, right?

You went to Italy, I believe, and taught bookselling school at some level.

James:

Never miss my invitation to this. They have a wonderful bookselling school over there. Never miss my invitation to that.

Neil:

What is that bookselling school?

James:

They have the Italian set up, well, it was set up in memory of a family member of one of the major publishers, the Maoris. And they have a school for booksellers. And they run it all year round.

Booksellers from the chains, from the smallest independent everywhere come in to the school and they are taught bookselling. And bookselling is definitely something one can teach. They're the only sort of school, as I understand it, which sort of works at a national level and welcomes booksellers of any stripe.

And consequence of which I think the calibre of bookselling in Italy is much more diverse than it is in terms of the scale and quantity of independent booksellers that there are. And more skilled. And it's just been a great stimulus within Italian bookselling.

Neil:

Well, that is interesting. I have a lot. I'm so curious about that.

I do wonder, part of my brain wonders, do you think that there are elements of bookselling that an algorithm will never be able to mimic in any sense now that we have things like StoryGraph has emerged as an algorithm? There's all these new dynamic algorithms that are trying to do what I think bookselling did. But do you feel like it's a uniquely human skill?

James:

I personally believe it is, and I think it's, of course, technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic. But if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly-skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read, and particularly kids who find reading off-putting or haven't quite engaged with it. That is a very, very human thing, just the same as I think that in schools you need a teacher, and plunking people in front of a screen ain't ever going to replace the mentorship and enthusiasm and inspiration of a great educator.

Neil:

Nice. Okay, good. We have one of our values on the show is humans are the best algorithm, so it's very much up our alley.

Okay, now let's jump into your three most formative books. I asked you before we hit record if there was a general order here, and I didn't think there was, so I'm going to try to put a book up. I'm going to try to do a quick 30-second background for the reader so that they can picture, if they're listening to this, which most people are listening to this, they can picture holding the book in their hands, like they're in a Barnes & Noble, or a Waterstones, or a Daunt Books, and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with the book, and then from there I've got a few follow-up questions.

If that's okay?

James:

Sure.

Neil:

Okay, all right.

We'll start with A Savage War of Peace, colon, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alastair Horne, H-O-R-N-E. This was originally published in 1977 by Viking Press. The cover is this black-and-white photo of a crowd of Algerians and French military packed tightly in a street with Algerians on a building ledge waving flags calling for independence.

In the middle of the cover is this brown box with an orange, a thin orange border that reads A Savage War of Peace in an all-caps, aerial-type font with Algeria 1954-1962 below, Alastair Horne's name in cream below that. Sir Alastair Horne was a British Oxford Fellow who lived from 1925-2017 and was knighted for his service to Anglo-French relations. What is the book about?

Well, the Algerian War lasted from 1954-1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned De Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War. Dewey Decimal Heads can file this under 965.046 for History and Geography slash Africa slash Algeria. James, tell us about your relationship with A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horne.

James:

Let me just say that the very interesting question that was posed to me was, you know, what are the three most influential books? And I answered that sort of quickly and on the basis of what's happening in the world today. It is somewhat complicated and the Middle East is very much, I think, in most people's front of mind.

But also, what are the books that sort of have an enduring sense of education to me personally? And The Savage War of Peace, which is an absolute page-turning read. I mean, it is a book that you race through.

But it's also a book that teaches that, frankly, if our lords and masters, political lords and masters in very many countries over the last sort of 20 years had read it and digested it in any way, some of the misadventures that we've been taken on, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like, would hopefully have been avoided. But those lessons have not been absorbed. History does teach, and this is a very good example of a book that can teach.

Having said which, it is a far from perfect book. It is a book of its time, and Alistair Horne was a man of his age. And one of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself and to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.

And in this case, Alistair Horne was, as you've said, he died a decade or more ago and belonged to a period probably that we can characterize into the 50s and 60s himself. I think it's very insightful, but it's also curious in terms of its interaction and understanding of Islam. I don't think that this is a text that one just accepts for what it is, but it's provocative and it's interesting and it tells a story in a really dynamic way, so it's hugely entertaining as well.

Neil:

I started reading about the Algerian War because of your book choice. It was often online part of larger write-ups called Decolonization of Africa. That was the superseded headline on Wikipedia and so on.

And then I thought, hey, this reminds me of what James is doing at Barnes & Noble. He's decolonizing it in a way, as I understand, you're pulling head office strictures and planograms and so on out of stores, mandated co-op displays, head office planograms, and, of course, you're trying to balance some of the benefits. If I think about India, where my dad is from, obviously people in India largely still speak English and use systems of government and rules that have been put in place by the British before India gained its independence, so you're also trying to presumably balance the benefits of what the head office can offer.

How do you think about that, the balance of how much head office you want in the stores, how much head office you don't? Where do you draw the lines on where that is? And if you don't mind, as you answer this, could you also just give a quick backgrounder for those that don't know, on what you have done since you joined Barnes & Noble, because I know it's well documented, but in this podcast we haven't talked about it yet.

So if you don't mind just saying, here's what we're doing, and here's how it's going.

James:

The general principle that I have is to try and get each of the bookstores within these very large chains to run themselves and think of themselves as independent bookstores. That's in simple form what one's hoping to do. And all I'm really doing is taking the principles that I have within my own bookstores, which are by definition independent bookstores, where I've always run my own on Maribyrn High Street.

I sit in it and I really, it's got my name above the door, but that helps sort of give one a focus to it. But where I'm really trying to run the best possible bookstore for Marylebone High Street, and then each of my stores does that, each of my Daunt books. When Waterstones got into big trouble and effectively was going to close, I went there because I thought this was just a catastrophe to lose all these bookstores.

And I also knew that if the booksellers within each store were just sensible and allowed to do what I knew that they wanted to do, it would be fine. And that, which I started in 2011, has proved to be the case, that actually just encourage people to use common sense and you set standards and have expectations, but leave them to get on with it. You will create much better bookstores and sales will go up and everything's fine.

When Barnes & Noble also got itself into this sort of mess, I arrived in 2019, again, with that simple message, which is, guys, our stores aren't good enough. The reason that we're going bankrupt and the reason our sales are declining is because the stores don't appeal to our customers and we have to figure out how to make them more appealing. And I can't dictate that to you.

I can set the principles of good bookselling, but you're going to have to execute against them. So we're going to take away all of the directive side of corporate retailing and instead replace them with clear expectations of quality and setting of standards and principles, but encourage each of you within your stores and your store teams to really address what it is to become a really good bookstore. And if you do that well, I'm sure that more people will come into your stores and they will buy more books from you and we will be fine.

And that's happening imperfectly across the estate. But overall, our sales have completely been transformed and our profitability and all the other good things that come with being a profitable business. You can invest in pay and promotions and the career structures of your booksellers.

So that helps you, again, spend more money on your infrastructure, start doing up stores, open up new stores, invest in new IT. All of these good things make the stores better and you're in a virtuous cycle now of better and better stores, more empowerment at the local level, itself driving better performance and better bookstores. And up we go.

It's not perfect yet, but it's going extremely well.

Neil:

So taking away the publisher paid kind of cold placements, letting booksellers in the store choose what they're selling based on the local readership, downloading empowerment, I mean, if you're a bookseller, this is like you're cheering for this off the rooftops. This is what you've been asking for probably your entire career. But you said you had some central body principles.

What were those thou shalts or the do-dos that were consistent?

James:

I think everybody who works at Waterstones at various points and now at Barnes & Noble will definitely be saying, it's a lot more difficult this way. I mean, yes, we like the idea of being allowed to do whatever we want, but that's difficult. It's much easier to be told precisely what to do and then you just do it.

With empowerment comes responsibility and the intellectual effort required to rethink your store is considerable. And if you're the store managers, you've then got to motivate your store teams. It's hard work.

And if you, as we've done, we've reorganized, literally relayed our stores, moved furniture around, constantly changing and tweaking how we present the stores. Every time you do that, it's a lot of work. And bookselling is a tough trade.

One, you're working in a store every day. You're not working from home having a nice time. It's unfortunately been traditionally extremely badly paid.

And even as we improve things, this remains a very ill-advised route to riches. It's hugely rewarding in many other ways, but we are going to have to- Very ill-advised route to riches. We're going to have to, we rely on- Nobody comes into books for the money, that old adage.

They really don't. And on the other hand, as we do actually transform this business and run it better, one of the key objectives is to make it a more rewarding career. And it's intellectually rewarding.

I think it's emotionally and spiritually and all other ways, and vocationally, very rewarding. But we also now have to really make true on it being financially sensible for people to devote their careers to it. Too often, people come into bookselling and then leave after a year or two, have a nice time and go, because they need to get a mortgage and a car and all of those good things.

But again, underpinning the success of Waterstones has been putting in a career structure and having people stay with us, good people stay with us. And we're now beginning increasingly to do that at Barnes & Noble.

Neil:

Underpinning the success has been putting in a career structure. I did hear you say in another conversation that that meant moving, because you have a set amount of labor dollars, presumably as a percentage of sales or something, and then you have to decide to move more of that to people that stay longer as opposed to people who start. So it may be even less lucrative to start here, but now it's even more rewarding to stay on.

Is that right?

James:

I mean, you have, obviously, to the extent that you can drive your sales up, then you have more dollars. So that's helpful. But there is always going to be a difficult series of decisions around where you spend those dollars within your team.

Generally speaking, we want to move away from a model which effectively had a very small number of people who were properly paid and full-time and benefits and all of those things. And then the vast majority, part-time, kept below a certain number of hours because then you don't have to give them a break and you don't have to give them benefits and you don't have to do this and you don't have to do that. Effectively, the standard retail model to...

And there's nothing wrong with that. They give good local jobs that are flexible and people can do it for two days a week or three shifts a week or whatever it might be. And you can splice that into all sorts of other things that people are doing in their lives, students, mothers, the parents, dog walkers, whatever it might be.

These are temporary and flexible jobs. I'm not denigrating that at all and it will be part of what we do. But if you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full-time.

You will learn how to be a better bookseller if you work five days a week more effectively than if you work two days a week. You've got longer at it. And then we need to keep those people and pay those people appropriately and that requires a career structure.

And so yes, the dollars get moved increasingly into a promotional ladder. And you want that to be quick. You want people to be able to see the opportunity fast.

And I always say, you want people at that manager level, when you're being properly paid, by the time they're sort of 30, that should be your objective. Get them up fast and then keep the job interesting and keep opportunity beyond that. To do that, you need a vibrant business and you need an expanding business.

So one of the key things for us is to grow physically so that there are opportunities for people. You don't have to wait for your manager to retire to become a manager because we're going to open up new stores or new opportunities.

Neil:

How heartening and inspiring that view is today in an era of growing freelance and gig workers and that stretching of working in factories or warehouses where you don't get even breaks and you're hired for eight-week contracts and you're laid off after four weeks and you're hired back and then you may be part-time. These are the stories I hear. It's the antithesis to how the labor pool feels right now to think about inserting steps and layers and management opportunities and we want more full-time workers.

That creates a better bookselling experience and it increases your sales. It makes so much sense.

James:

It's not without its challenges, of course. If you're promoting people on the basis of performance, then you have performance management and that's saying, well, sorry, Neil, you're just not cut out for this. That's a tough thing to be doing and that was entirely absent before.

So I don't shy away from the fact that bookselling is a tough, tough gig. It's a tough job. It requires intelligence.

It requires an open personality. It requires an immense number of skills and hard work and dedication and it's something that I know lots of people enjoy but I don't, at any point, pretend that it's not difficult.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly. Okay, that's really, thank you for opening that up for us. That is really interesting and I still find it quite heartening for society at large that this is succeeding and this is working and this is good for our communities.

I wanted to ask you about reviews. This came up in my head because I had just read this book by John Green called The Anthropocene Reviewed and he said, I find it interesting that the five star scale has taken over a qualitative analysis because it isn't for people. It was originally meant for data aggregation systems and while I think the five star scale system is somewhat ludicrous, it has also become indispensable and I thought, yeah, that's true.

John Green points out, of course, that a bench can be reviewed, a bathroom can be reviewed, everything has, and then we're looking at the reviews of everything. It's like so oriented to this review culture so I, of course, I went to see A Savage War of Peace on barnesandnoble.com and it has three ratings, one of which is a written review which is 15 years ago. The other two are no rating but they've compiled into the four out of five.

Amazon's got 527 ratings for this book with a 4.5. Goodreads has 2740 people. So this is how many people have read this book at least, right? 2740 people and it's come up to a 4.2. I know I'm like the kind of person who wants to support my local independent bookstore so I go review hunting, right? And then I have to make a conscious decision to not buy at the review place but to then leap over to buy from the place I'm trying to support. I live in downtown Toronto so I support all these amazing bookstores here. But Barnes & Noble seems way behind on this.

Like, you know, it's... What do you think is the importance of reviews? And what...

Do you have a strategy for like trying to... Is it a catch-up game now? Or is there some other philosophy underpinning the historical lack of reviews on every other website?

It's not just yours. It's just, you know, reviews seem to have... Google's trying to grab everybody's reviews too.

James:

Yeah, but Barnes & Noble has a very antiquated and very poor website and we're just about to replatform and redo it. We have, some years ago, done that at Waterstones and really worked on the Waterstones website. And there we have...

We endeavor to put a website which is fundamentally a bookseller-driven website. We have...

Neil:

Ah, cool.

James:

Customers can leave reviews and that's fine and things, but we lead with bookseller reviews. Not of everything because we can't cover everything, but everything that we think is important and certainly everything that's new and prominent. And there are...

On some, it's just a single bookseller and it says... Waterstones says, that is a bookseller who has reviewed. And then there will be other Waterstones booksellers, which is an entirely voluntary process, but now quite well populated.

And our view is that the bookseller can give you a sense of what that book is like. We have shied away from the stars rating, as you said. We kind of have to do enough of it because you want Google to pick you up and get you up the search rankings and there are things that you have to do.

But what we hope and believe that our customers are increasingly doing is appreciating the book, the recommendation of the book within the context with which we're recommending it. And it's pretty nonsensical to have a star rating review on classic literature. Is Middlemarch better than Anna Karenina?

I mean, for goodness sake. But the ability of the bookseller to articulate why you might want to read this book. Now, obviously, if you're online, then you've arrived at that, either because we've done something to cause you to come there or somebody else says, Neil recommended me this, I look it up and here I am.

But then we seek to give an intelligent, bookseller-driven interpretation of why we think you should read this book and what the merits of it is. At Waterstones, our online sales have been dramatically increased over the COVID period but have carried on growing. Oh, great.

At B&N, they grew in the COVID period and then they just dropped back down again and they're pretty awful. And that's simply, I think, on the calibre of the recommendation that's being delivered in the respective websites. And yes, Goodreads and any other myriad of LitHub or whoever it might be, there are so many places in which you can aggregate readers' experiences.

And I think all of that is valuable. But actually getting a sensible interpretation around why you're looking at this book and how do you, within the context of a website, replicate what I think we do beautifully within a bookstore, which is just nudge you to the side. That's why you come in for discovery.

We've always found books through review process, be it the newspaper reviews and the good old days, magazines, podcasts, whatever, whatever. And it's great that you're inspired to read a book and buy a book. And one wants to sort of bottle that and capture it.

And the enthusiasm of that recommendation to attach itself to the book and off you go because a push into the reading, it makes a book inherently more enjoyable, actually, if it comes with a recommendation that you like. The amalgam of short little nuggets that all add up to 4.8 rather than 4.6, I don't understand how that really propels true engagement with a book. Whereas a bookseller or a friend or a podcast or something intelligently recommending you a book, that propels you.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. I don't look, personally, I don't look at the number.

I look at the number of reviews as a proxy for the volume of sales. But that itself can be quite misleading in other ways as well. But if you see a book with 100,000 reviews, you're like, oh my God, everyone's reading this.

There's a social signal here. You know?

James:

And people love all reading the same book, which is why we have these again and again and again, these several times a year. You'll have this bushfire of sales and enthusiasm around a book. And the merit of the book that underpins it may be quite slight.

But the great thing is everyone's reading it.

Neil:

Everyone's talking about it. Exactly, yeah. Or it gets a big, you know, Tim Ferriss or the Today Show or, you know, some bigger, some bigger megaphone talked about it in some way, you know?

And of course, as an author, everyone's trying to figure out how to get somebody to talk about your book. Right? But that new website sounds fantastic.

And I love the focus on bookseller-oriented recommendations that makes it so differentiated. And if you have a bookseller that's really well-written and they have pithy reviews and you start to follow them and, you know, I start to see what Brandon suggests or whatever it is, and then I'm digging that. I think that sounds wonderful.

I can't wait to see it. I got like five more questions on this one book, but I think in the interest of time we should probably move to your second book. Alistair Horne was a spy.

I was going to ask you about that and the organizing. But, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. So let's move on to your second book here.

Maybe if we have time we can come back to some of those. And it is the one and only Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, G-O-O-D-W-I-N, published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster. This is a, the cover's like a cool sepia-toned painting of Abraham Lincoln at a table surrounded by serious-looking men in dark jackets, bow ties, and long beards.

There's a gold ribbon at the top reading now a major motion picture, Lincoln, by Steven Spielberg, along with tons of other hype material like a number one New York Times bestseller, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize under Doris' name, and a blurb from none other than President Barack Obama saying a remarkable study in leadership on a gold burst. Doris Kearns Goodwin is an 81-year-old American biographer who's taught history at Harvard, also written books about Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kennedys. In this book, she illuminates Lincoln's political genius as the prairie lawyer rising from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president.

And then, in bringing his disgruntled opponents together to create the most unusual cabinet in history and marshal their talents to preserving the Union and winning the war. File this under, for Dewey Decimal Heads, 973.7092 History and Geography, this is a funny one here, James, slash United States slash Administration of Abraham Lincoln slash 1861-1865 Civil War. I did not know there would be such a subcategory, but sure enough, there is.

So please, James, tell us about your relationship with Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

James:

Again, it's another page-turner. I mean, you just, it reads like a political novel. You just flick your way through it in seconds.

It also has Lincoln at the heart of it Everyone knows Lincoln. Everyone's read lots about Lincoln, but I think she captures the humanity of him exceptionally well and then places it in this really rich development of how he intersected with these key political rivals who not for one second thought they would ever be serving under him or be vested by him, but through his ability to empathize with their positions, restrain his own sense of self-importance to use them effectively and then develop, in not all cases, he remained a deep rival to a couple of them throughout, but nonetheless benefited from their expertise and achieved this extraordinarily strong, as you said, sort of team of rivals to get the United States through a moment of sort of existential horror of the Civil War, of all of these sort of currents of race and identity and ideology and religion and all the rest. And he did that, you know, obviously tragically cut short in this sort of appalling way, but it's absolutely masterfully rendered in the book and an example of leadership, which Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol.

Neil:

Oh, don't be. Yes, okay, of course, compared to Obama, but you are definitely a leader in a big capacity. This is a big book.

Like this is big. I mean, it's 916 pages. So I like read all the front matter, read all the back matter.

Sorry, I read the first chapter and then I read the last chapter. Then I downloaded. I went on Libro FM.

I use Libro FM because I can pick my local independent bookstore to support. And then I started listing. It's 42 and a half hours, you know, so that I'm like, OK, I'm going to listen to chapter two on like a long walk.

So I'm like, I'm a book fan. I'm a reader. I read a lot of books.

How do you think about as a bookseller and as the CEO of a couple of big book chains, making big books more accessible in this era of well-documented, shortening attention spans and endless distraction? David Brooks is now calling it, you know, we've gone from entertainment to distraction, from distraction to junk. You know, like we're just getting like our amygdalas like teased or something like, oh, this is a hard thing to sell to people.

916 pages, even though it is a page turner. It's very gripping. It's a wonderfully told story.

So I'd love your commentary on attention spans and distraction and combined with that, how you think about the deeper, more succulent aspects of rich, dense reading and how you market that or how you sell that as a bookseller.

James:

I sort of take a sort of view that these are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something. So I've predated really the internet.

I certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things. And nothing seems to change.

Neil:

And TikTok.

James:

And TikTok and all of those things. And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Neil:

Oh, interesting.

James:

The girls read more than boys. There are a few things that are just sort of stereotypical and have remained the case. We as booksellers need to really focus on those who are more reluctant to read.

But we can do it and publishers do it also when you get Jeff Keeney and Dogman and Pilkey and those kind of things. And boys start reading some more and we get going on that. And it all sort of levels its way up.

It's every year gets a little better than the preceding year. Reading and getting absolutely immersed in the excitement of books by young adults as obviously Harry Potter did change that, J.K. Rowling. But now it still goes on.

And we had Twilight and we've now got, let's say, Sarah J. Maas and we've got other things going on. Sarah J.

Maas's books are massive. And there are lots of them. And the kids can buy the whole bang lot.

Neil:

That's a good point. Yeah. They're practicing at a young age.

James:

But when people come into their working phase of life, particularly men, they're just working too hard that they don't read and they never did read and they don't read now. Interestingly for us, is they're now engaging with podcasts in particular, engaging in this short form. And those are often attached to ideas and attached to books.

So we're seeing a growth even from them. Most of these trends are underpinning more engagement with books, more engagement with ideas. And it's always been tough to sell Time, Team of Rivals or the latest big book.

But there is an appetite for it and there's a time for it. And there is an enduring engagement with these great books. We sell Team of Rivals today in the tens of thousands still.

Robert Caro's Power Broker was the book of the pandemic. That makes Team of Rivals look like a short novella. But again, that...

Neil:

I have Infinite Jest right beside me. I've been playing with this for years but I read like 100 pages a year but I love it. When you fall into it, you really fall deep into it.

James:

You fall deep. And if you happen to stick your nose into Team of Rivals and get gripped by it, you spend a couple of hours a day and we can all find a couple of hours a day. You will get through it pretty quickly.

If it takes 42 hours to listen to, it takes 22 hours to read.

Neil:

And it feels good. Like at the end of binging a season of a TV show, you don't feel good at the end of that. But at the end of finishing a big book, you feel great.

It feels like such an achievement.

James:

And book clubs have been, again, something I started bookselling before book clubs became the thing and then book clubs became the thing. But they still endure. And I think, again, if you read Team of Rivals with two or three other people or four or five if you're lucky enough to, you have a subject of conversation which is superior and more engaged and more developed than almost anything else that you can easily access.

And there are a lot of people, that's actually what drives a lot of the sales of these big books is you will sell in a store suddenly 10 copies. And you think, why does that happen? It's because there's a book club.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then you've got people and that then has an echo in that store which will carry on because they will be talking to their friends at the barbecue, at this and that, and then we sell more and more. And you just see these things flare up and it's the great books that do that the best.

Neil:

Have you ever been into Left Bank Books in St. Louis?

James:

I have not.

Neil:

I chant.

So when you walk in the front door there, there's a great wall of like, you know, four by 10 books and it says at the top, book clubs. And, you know, it says like gay men's book club, gay women's book club, trans book club. And then as you keep going on, you realize that the first two or three shelves are created by the bookstore.

But then as you keep going on, it's like, you know, the YMCA book club and Donna Marie's Kitchen Party book club. And you're like, what's going on here? And what they've done is they've just figured out which book clubs in the community over the years have enduring quality and the book club itself, just the woman comes in or Donna Marie comes in, she tells them what it's going to be.

They keep that stocked at the front and they have their own book clubs and it's this powerful wall. I can send you some pictures. It's like amazing.

It's a really cool treat in Left Bank Books in St. Louis.

James:

Yeah, a little digression. We do a walking book club at Daunt Books, which is great where you, obviously it's the same thing, but you go for a walk. So obviously in a park and you're in twos on your walk, just discussing and then you've stopped under a tree if it's raining, is it always in London or on the grass and then have it as a group discussion and then you walk off again.

But the pairings shift and you get a nice lot of exercise, a couple of hours walk and you've discussed a book.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, I love this. And Daunt Books is choosing the titles? Like it's a walking club as part of the bookstore?

James:

And then by the end of each book, then the group agree on the next book. But there is a bookseller there who is the curator of it all.

Neil:

Daunt Books is creative, right? I was on the website and I'm like, you know, living in Canada, I have not been there, but I'm noticing you have, you curate libraries for people, you've got the wedding registries, you've got the mystery, you've got the mystery book subscriptions. There's like, I'm presuming there's a nimbleness and an agility there and independent book world that you can't mimic at the larger chains.

But when I hear things like that, I'm like, wow, like that would be amazing to have. So I've never experienced that at a bookstore here. You know, the mystery subscription.

James:

It's fun. Well, we do lots of those. You basically give us some money and we'll send you a book once a month.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Our choice, not yours. And it's really fun as a bookseller because each subscription is unique to the individual.

Neil:

Well, I saw that. You have open captions, like what kind of, tell us about what kinds of books you like. It's like, you can write an essay in there.

James:

It's fun. It's really fun.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then there's, as booksellers, you know, these nice conversations where she's like, you know, he said he didn't like this book. What's wrong with him? What are we going to send him now?

Let's send him this. That'll get him back on track. Those kind of discussions.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Oh, that's amazing. Well, that is like, kudos to you.

What a brilliant idea. It sounds like with The Walking Club and some of these conversations we're talking about, you know, you have this strong belief in the third place. On page seven of Team of Rivals, I'm going to read you this quote.

She says, because she's discussing Springfield, Illinois, where the opening scene of the book takes place and Lincoln is sort of nervously waiting for the results of the Republican primary or the nomination. And she writes, I was like, wow. Like, I was just picturing this community.

Our guest in chapter 66 of three books was Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has put out a 2020 through report called Our Nation's Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, where he says, one in ten people loneliness now, which is worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I wanted to zoom up from Barnes & Noble and Waterstones for a second to ask you, what do you think are the elements of community? And then zooming back down, what role can bookstores play?

But what are the principles that you think we need as people to build back the community and connection that appears to be, well, we've lost a lot from that sentence in the book.

James:

We have lost a lot. And, you know, the nature of modern life, be it how we travel, if you travel by car rather than by public transport, you're isolating yourself and all the rest. I do think it's immensely complicated and obviously starts at a political and administrative level.

The extent to which we make our choices as to what we invest in. There has been an unfortunate trend, I think, to consolidate rather than localize. You reduce the number of small libraries and have one big library.

Neil:

I see.

James:

Bigger schools, they're more efficient, they're cheaper to run. Bigger hospitals, they can give more expert care, but then you lose the local. Quite important, I think, to understand what we're doing both at the start of life and at the end of life.

It matters how you educate people clearly, how you nurture from earliest childcare through the education system, and then how do we look after our elderly? And then how do we look after the vulnerable? And I speak as a European, you're a Canadian, very different in the different countries, very, very different in the United States and in different worlds.

But we probably, from every sort of happiness indicator, the more inclusive and the more supportive the society is, generally the happier people are within it. And do bookstores have a role within that? I very much think they do.

Again, we're nowhere near as important as libraries, public libraries. But nonetheless, we do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it. We don't ask you to spend any money.

We let you browse the books within the store. It's a place that kids come after school. If you're a latchkey kid, you're waiting for your parents to come home, come to a bookstore.

It's safe. It's unthreatening. But it's also a place in which all ages have a place.

And that's unusual as a retail space. We appeal to the youngest kid. We've got books for them, the oldest citizen, we've got books for them, and everybody in between.

Everybody can interact and everybody can actually sort of kill time in a bookstore. But also they can come to meet. I mean, we are the greatest dating place that there is.

Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore. Meet people, see people.

And that's also important.

Neil:

We are the greatest date. You remind me of that vulgar quote that is often repeated, that if you go to his house and he doesn't have books on the bookshelf, don't F him. You've heard that classic phrase.

Everybody can kill time. It's safe. It's unthreatening.

It's inherently democratic. It's community space. I've interviewed a lot of people in bookstores.

Mitchell Kaplan is the owner of Books and Books, the Florida bookstore independent chain. About the same number, I think, as Daunt Books. Judy Bloom's got one.

Hers is non-profit in Key West. Mitchell jokes, I'm not in the non-profit business. I'm in the no-profit business.

But when I walk through that, when I walk through his bookstore, yeah, there's like book clubs sitting right there talking. Everybody's walking through. He has an outdoor magazine stand, as you can only have in Coral Gables, Florida.

And it feels like so convivial and yet I just know from growing up in the suburbs of... I grew up in a 100,000-person suburb, one hour east of Toronto, with zero bookstores my entire life. So I had to go to this town or this town to find them.

And when I went to this town or this town, there were independents in the mall. And then there became big box stores, chapters, before they were purchased by Indigo. And they were open until like 11pm.

So we started going as teenagers. But then of course, post-merger and post-whatever, it's like now they're closing at eight. And I was like, oh man, we used to go after the movies.

Nothing better than after the movies before your parents pick you up to go to the bookstore. And I interviewed Quentin Tarantino. He said the same thing.

He'd go to the movie, then he'd go to B. Dalton's in the mall and then always trace back. There's nothing like visiting a bookstore after a movie.

So it's like even in the communities we have with 100,000 people to this day, there's no bookstore in that town. It has affluence, it has education, it just doesn't have a bookstore.

James:

Yeah, we've started opening up a lot of bookstores in the US. And it's been completely fascinating to do so. And you open up these stores.

We're doing about, we'll do 65 this year. So a lot, just a real lot. And the day you open, you have a queue of 400 people in a place which didn't have a bookstore and where we were nervous about kind of like, how are we going to find things here?

The appetite is astonishing. And the more extreme the reaction is directly correlated to how isolated the location and the absence of existing bookstores. Oh, interesting.

If we're opening one that's 20 minutes away from an existing bookstore, yeah, you get a nice queue. Everybody's excited and everything. But you open up one in a more...

Neil:

Give us some of the town or city names where you're opening these.

James:

We opened in Visalia, California, which is not fancy California.

Neil:

I don't know that, yeah.

James:

It's inland California.

It's Agricultural Worker California. It's blue collar California. It had a bookstore, it had a Borders back in, closed in 2009 or whenever it closed.

Nothing ever since. We think, well, we'll try one there. 400 people line up every day.

It's like you're absolutely packed. Been a spectacular success. And it's just really heartwarming actually to find these stores being received so enthusiastically.

And when I do mall stores, same thing. Very, very heartening.

Neil:

I love that. This is what we want to hear. The podcast is all about books, so this is beautiful.

And opening bookstores in cities like this, the community gets to come together and see each other and have a place. I love the adage of this. There's no better dating place than a bookstore.

Of course, you're connecting over an intellectual connection, which is ultimately what relationship's going to be. You mentioned beginning of life and end of life. And I thought that was really astute.

In Canada, of course, we have a one-year maternity leave here instead of the six or 12 weeks that is in the US. There's hospices down the street from where I live in downtown Toronto. They always have long lineups now.

And I'm sort of thinking about this. The death scene in this book is so vivid. I didn't know it.

Of course, you heard about how Lincoln died. But it just made me feel closer to death than I had felt in a long time. And I was reading it at night and so on.

And I was kind of just thinking about death so much. My parents are currently 79, 73 years old. My mom's from Nairobi, Kenya.

My dad's from Amritsar, India. I came to Canada in the 60s. And I think I read that.

I don't know if it's accurate that you maybe sadly lost your parents recently. And I guess I just happen to have a compulsion about thinking about my own final years. I wonder if you might pontificate for us what a good death looks like.

James:

Oh, Lord. I mean, old ages and the healthcare systems and generally either through family or the wider society, how we support people through that. And obviously everybody's lifespan is individual to them.

But collectively, we are grappling with much longer lives, which in many respects is great, but also dementia and Alzheimer's and all of these afflictions and endless further medical afflictions. And that makes old age a challenge. None of us know what our future is to be.

But one hopes that we all, I'm sure, aspire to families that will support us and friendship groups that will support us. And a society that will support us. And I can't speak for Canada remotely, for the United Kingdom, the stresses upon the national health system, which we revere, but is a post-war creation and now under considerable stress.

Where is the money and where are the priorities of expenditure? And where does keeping and looking after old age fit within that? I think it's something that different political parties will espouse clearly different strategies against, but it seems hugely important to us.

And I'm fortunate personally to come now to enjoy good, solid middle-class affluence, which makes it much easier than if one lacks that. But if one lacks that, there has to be some form of safety net, which creates a humane support and guidance for people through all their phases of life. And it's extremely noticeable in the United States as you travel around, the number of people that are excluded from proper support, either because of mental health issues or living on the street or drugs or all these other catastrophes that can inflict themselves upon individuals.

A prison population, what are we doing in our prison? How are we looking after that part of our society? Which again, if we don't put enough money in it, if it's cruel and uncaring, it's going to have very adverse long-term consequences.

Neil:

Well, exactly, exactly. Do you have a book or two that when people walk into the bookstore and ask you for books on grief or that they have told you that they've lost somebody, I feel like I get this question a lot. I don't have any good go-tos.

I've personally read Christopher Hitchens' book, those essays he wrote before he died, and I know there's A Year of Magical Thinking. That book comes up a lot. But do you have any grief books that you suggest?

James:

There's a reasonably strong body of work that's come out relatively recently that I think has been very effective, particularly from practitioners themselves. A nurse did a wonderful sort of best-selling book in the UK, which I lost it. I'm going to have to bring it to you in a second.

Sort of coming back to thinking about also taking the books from sort of different religions, and there is a lovely book sort of called On Kaddish, and you don't have to be Jewish, and I'm not Jewish, to read it and sort of see through the prison of Kaddish. Amongst our books on sort of Buddhism and reflection, there are, again, lovely books. And so I quite like as a bookseller sort of to take people through sort of how different cultures are approaching this.

And again, it's something where the curation that goes on within a store, you were saying Left Bank Books had their sort of book club, but you can also create a nice bay of books which just take people through the reflections around, if it's grief, though I think also just dementia, which is something that impacts so many families and so many people. Again, really nice body of work, which is, well, you know, here are 12 books that give you different insights into this, if it's entered into your life in whatever shape or form, and which will help you reflect on it and think about it. And I think good booksellers are just grasping onto all of these moments of life and moments of reflection and trying to bring an assembly of books across different disciplines, not necessarily head-on, but obliquely as well.

Neil:

Yeah, it's not everything solved by a how-to. It's touching on these difficult-to-articulate emotions and feelings and ways that are unique to us. I can't jump off this book without asking the most obvious question, of course, from Team of Rivals, which is how do you think about organizing your teams?

You're the CEO of a couple massive companies here. Do you follow Lincoln's kind of idea? Are you setting up boardroom meetings where there's a lot of conflicting opinions?

Or how do you think about forming an executive team?

James:

I think it's having the right people in the roles and playing to their strengths. And you can and should be able to tolerate divergences of opinions, but try and have people locked onto their skill sets and their core capabilities, which he does sort of beautifully. He can see their values.

He had this sort of very adversarial time with Chase in the Treasury, but knew he was brilliant at him and kept him at it and would absorb some of the antagonisms because the outputs were so fantastic. But equally, when Cameron, isn't it, who is his initial war secretary, is not good enough, he replaces him with Stanton, which is one of the great relationships also in the book. So unfortunately, or necessarily, there are moments when you, when executives need to be changed, ideally, as soon as possible.

I've certainly, in coming into both companies, had a lot of change initially and then settled down and the same people then run it for a decade or so.

Neil:

Okay, cool, wonderful.

James:

I wasn't knocked off my perch, as poor Mr. Lincoln was.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And the epilogue is kind of fascinating to read in this book. You know, I am, you know, William C on page 751, William Seward remained Secretary of State through President Andrew Johnson's term and took great pride in what was originally lampooned as Seward's Folly, the purchase of Alaska.

And I thought that was so interesting because your dad was Lieutenant Governor to the Isle of Man. And I thought I might ask what landmass you might purchase if you were a head of state. And also this guy went on 1872, he went on a trip around the world before he died, Japan, China, India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France.

I thought, wow, for a Cambridge student of history who's created a travel-oriented bookshop, I just had to ask you, what would your last trip around the world look like? What would it or what doesn't? Yeah, what would it?

Not does it, not this is going to happen for 30 years, but, so what unremarkable landmass might you purchase? And then what would your last dying trip around the world look like? You can say today or it could be in 1872.

I just found this fascinating that in 1872 this guy was like, I'm going to hit these like 10 different countries before I die. And I thought that was fascinating.

James:

Yeah, he's rather more cultured. I think the landmass, if anyone can preserve the environment, well, since I'm looking at a Canadian, I think I would, having unimaginable wealth, I would buy all the tar lands and exclude anybody from doing anything environmental within them.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, yeah. Well, the forests are getting dead seas, dead lakes, the wildfires, it's just we're pillaging our land.

James:

We are pillaging our land. We are pillaging our land and to the extent that one can leave it pristine and present that, I think that would be the ideal thing. And then if I was going to go on, I think I would travel through all of the former Soviet countries one after another because they're probably the countries that would have changed the least.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans.

Neil:

Changed the least?

James:

Yeah.

Neil:

What do you mean?

James:

Well, that one of the, it probably wasn't the best thing to have been within the Soviet orbit, be you in South America or Africa or Asia or wherever you are. But the legacy of that is that you're probably less developed now than you would otherwise be and therefore is a place in which to visit.

It will be much more authentic and agreeable and less uniform because everywhere that was within a US orbit tended to homogenize.

Neil:

Wow. What a fascinating way to think about it. I love that.

Less uniform. Yeah. Avoid the homogenization of culture around the world.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans. What else is on this list? This is I might come back to this.

James:

I mean, some of them, Libya has gone through probably a fairly unhelpful phase and I'm not going to be traveling there. But again, Ethiopia is actually somewhere that I have been but is a fabulous country. Now has developed subsequently and now is going through troubles.

But those are the countries that are going to probably be the most insightful to visit or inspiring to me.

Neil:

I like that. I like that. What a unique way to approach the question.

I had that written down. I was like, well, should I ask him this? I was like, I have a feeling you'd have a really good answer.

Okay, let's jump into your third and last book. It is De Gaulle. Both The Rebel, 1890-1944, which is the book I have, but there's also, it's a two-part book, there's also De Gaulle, The Ruler, 1945-1970.

Now it was originally a three-part book and so the author has written a little note in the front of this one saying I'm really sad to inform you the publisher squeezed books two and three into just book two. I like that they put that right in there. This is written by Jean LaCouture, if I said that right. L-A-C-O-U-T-U-R-E translated by Alan Sheridan. Originally published as three volumes in France in 1984, 1985, 1986 and then in the U.S. in 1990 and 1991 by Norton. Both covers feature black and white photos of Charles De Gaulle.

This one has him in a military uniform with a small mustache and a hat, but there's also one with him in a black suit with his arms listed above his head in the second. The title is in like a giant hundred point all caps gold font with a red drop shadow. De Gaulle.

He was, by the way, for those that don't know, a French military officer and statesman who led three free French forces, or led the French forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, chaired the provisional government of the French Republic from 44 to 46 to restore democracy in France and in 1958, amid the Algerian War, came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He then rewrote the Constitution, founded the Fifth Republic, and was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until he resigned in 1969. Jean LaCouture was a French journalist, historian and author who lived from 1921 to 2015 who also wrote famed biographies about a lot of people like Ho Chi Min, Montan, and Kennedy. So, I could go into a lot more details here about De Gaulle, but why don't we just turn it over to you, James. Would you tell us about your relationship with De Gaulle, the rebel and that's the first half, and the ruler by Jean LaCouture.

James:

De Gaulle is, again, he's a really, really good story. He's clearly an impossible individual in many respects.

Neil:

I got that sense. It sounded like very ornery.

James:

A level of arrogance and self-importance. But actually, throughout it all, one can't but admire what he achieved through adhering to this obstinate sense of his own destiny, but also, and one can be extremely critical of him very easily in terms of his own sense of his own self-aggrandizement, but actually his focus was on France, and in taking over and leading the Free French, and he was not remotely in a position to make that claim. It was accident that he happened to be all the more senior generals and leaders in France had either stayed in France or gone to North Africa or, and he was in London, was able to firmly establish himself, causing Winston Churchill no end of trouble as he did so.

And one has that leadership through the war, the manner in which he constantly articulated the grandeur of France and the importance of France, even when, let's face it, they'd been invaded by the Germans. They had a Vichy government which was collaborating. It was absolutely the darkest hour, and he ignored it all, and he articulated this grand vision of la France and defiance and Free French, and it is inspiring.

He also writes magically. De Gaulle was an instinctive and creative writer, and that is truly inspiring.

Neil:

You have all these letters that he wrote when he was a little kid published in here.

James:

Astonishing.

Neil:

Like, when I'm older, I'm ruling the army.

Here's what I'm going to do. It was just captivating to read.

James:

A little obnoxious. You just want to slap him figuratively around, but when he's articulating it in terms of where he wants to lead the country and the sense of self-sacrifice and adherence to a vision, it's brilliant. And on a personal level, he had a daughter who was disabled and who he kept close to him throughout.

She was generally, throughout the war years, she spent most of her time under his desk. She wanted to be close to him, and he absolutely devoted himself to her. So there was a human side to him that was obscured, but it was there.

He went through considerable trials and tribulations throughout, but maintained. And then, I think, as you say, when he actually came back to power, rather unexpectedly, the Fifth Republic and able to make a settlement particularly over Algeria that only somebody of his stature was capable to do and effectively surrender all that it would have been expected, I think, of him to protect. He gave up Algeria.

He found a way of navigating through what was looking a catastrophic situation. He yielded up not all of the French Empire, and he's by no means a saint and by no means perfect. But nonetheless, he did navigate France through an extraordinary period, as well as being, and this is true to my heart, as well as being difficult about it.

One of the key creators of the European Union, and the sense that international cooperation was important. He was deeply suspicious of the English, the Brits, but again, not without reason. But he welded France to Germany, and that is crucial for the stability of Europe, and I think was deeply insightful and forward-thinking in a way that is easily masked by his sense of la grandeur de la France.

Neil:

Yeah, welding France to Germany in a way that, yeah, it calls to mind the famous trip you made as Waterstones' CEO to Amazon to sell the Kindles in the shop.

James:

Maybe I'm summoning my inner de Gaulle.

Neil:

Yeah, I mean, yeah, but there's, he's a man of, you talked about his writing, there's a ton of quotes that I wanted to just play back to you and get your reflection on them.

You can agree, you can disagree, you can tell me if you interpret them differently. Here's a few of things that he said. Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

James:

Which is absolutely classic de Gaulle. It's, it causes you just to stop, doesn't it? Silence, it's, it makes you think, and as you think, you think, hmm, this man has actually got it and he can express it.

It's not some huge long sentence, it's short, it's precise, it's deeply challenging. And you reflect upon it, and I think that is constant through de Gaulle. The windbag, Winston Churchill was something of a windbag, very lyrical, he could write beautifully, but he just went on and on.

De Gaulle isn't, it's short, sharp, they're challenging, and there's a lot of wisdom in them.

Neil:

Donald Trump is a windbag. He's a windbag, you know? The way that the dialogue happens now, we have both the windbaggedness and we have the sort of pithy phrases that go viral because they're controversial, like you have both extremes now in the discourse.

Anyway, silence is the ultimate weapon of power. How about this one? A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he realizes his potential.

James:

Again, classic de Gaulle. Much to reflect on in that. Much to say, oh for goodness sake, you are so up yourself.

Because it is intended to amplify his own extraordinariness. But it also has some significant element of truth to it, and it's framed in this amazing language. It's a translation you have, but the French is even more so.

This absolute precision, and evoking something far larger than seems remotely reasonable for somebody to do, but he can do it again and again and again and again and again.

Neil:

It's interesting that it's become a dictum in society today, that the obstacle is the way, the hard way is the right way. I've said and written some of these phrases myself, but it seems like we have this bent in society sort of chasing the difficult path, and at the same time, our instincts are probably not to do that.

James:

And most of what he was done was in the context of trying to lead a nation through a period of extreme contradiction and difficulty, as the leader of the Free French. Just a vassal to the Allies. No power, no influence.

You've got all the great of France is collaborating with the Germans. No military prowess at all. Total abject defeat, and yet an ability to evoke in a language an alternative reality and enable people to coalesce and rebuild themselves around that.

Neil:

I mean, this is sounding... We're getting... James Daunt and Charles De Gaulle are getting closer and closer now here with these examples. How about this one? This is going to sound like you a little bit too. Don't ask me who's influenced me.

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

James:

Did he really write that?

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

James:

I mean, he is utterly obnoxious sometimes.

Neil:

I'll give you one last one. In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant.

James:

There is much of truth in that, and that back to Lincoln. Lincoln was par excellence the practitioner of that.

Neil:

Do you hold on to that? I mean, you're a bookseller from England, and you're leading the largest book chain in the world here in the US.

James:

I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is I think generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality. And I think there are heroic leaders, and then there are people who are reliant entirely upon their teams, and if they have any skill, it is cajoling and persuading and encouraging that team to work at its best.

Neil:

Beautiful. We're lucky that the larger world of readers, the Republic of Letters as David Mitchell calls it, is lucky to have you at the helm with its growth and what you're doing for book chains around the world. Got a ton more questions on de Gaulle.

In the interest of time, I wonder if we might just transfer over to our closing Fast Money Round questions to kind of end this wonderful conversation. I will go with, these are a couple obvious ones for you. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

James:

Personally, hardcover, but I understand that most people are paperback, and I don't understand the rest.

Neil:

I know, I got in trouble for having a value on the show as audiobooks and ebooks are beautiful mutants, I once said, and it got me into some hot water.

James:

Just for myself, I've never managed to get to grips with either e. I can never remember what I've read on e.

Neil:

You can't highlight it, you can't fold the corners, you can't give it to somebody. Do you have a book lending policy?

James:

Personally?

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Yeah, I know I will lend any book all the time, and it gets me in less trouble with my wife because otherwise the place overflows with books.

Neil:

So it's very generous, you're trying to always outlay. I do normally ask people how they organize the books on their bookshelf, but you've already suggested that you organize them by country. I do.

Other than the ones you have personally overseen, do you have one or two favorite bookstores, living or dead?

James:

All the time. Here in New York, McNally Jackson is the best bookstore. In London, John Sandow.

I could go on.

Neil:

Keep going, keep going.

James:

Books and books. There is a bookstore.

Neil:

Books and books in Florida? Oh, great.

James:

I think there are fabulous bookstores around the world. Less than there should be, but you know, the thing that I actually find is the moment of genius in a bookstore, and there are very few, is when they have new and used, and it's small, and it's really curated. The interesting thing about those is that you can go in, they tend to be stores of a moment in time, and they don't tend to sustain themselves particularly easily, but they create genius.

But the ones I like are the ones with somebody's name across the front of them, and somebody inside them is buying all the books and is curating them, and it's theirs, and there's a personality to it, and you don't even need to meet the person you know what it's like. I mean, you walk into books and books, you know what Mitch Kaplan's going to be like. And when he turns up and you meet him, it's like, uh-huh, oh, I knew you were going to be this.

Because you do not know Mitch Kaplan. He's a personality, and his bookstore is also one. It's just...

Neil:

Absolutely. He's a wonderful, wonderful...

James:

It's welcoming, it's all of the things. But each of these stores is a different thing.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. I've got to ask, when you walk into a bookstore you haven't walked into for the first time, where do your eyes and brain go? What do you...

You've mentioned the name outside, the person inside that's buying it, so you walk in, and I used to work for a British leader named Dave Cheesewright, and I'd walk with him inside Walmart all the time, and I'd always be interested, like, what's Dave looking at? When you walk into a bookstore, what are the first few things you're looking at?

James:

Obviously, I'm walking mainly into my own stores, one way or the other.

Neil:

I mean, a new one.

James:

I can come in and walk into the store, and I do, and I just sort of look to begin with. I don't actually advance beyond the front. I would generally expect to know exactly what their receiving room looks like, having absorbed what I'm looking at at the front of the store.

But that's because I'm an operator. These are the stores I've got to run and figure out what's right and what's wrong in them. You can also, without moving off that front moment, you know the personality.

You can see it. It's writ large, and then you may have further surprises as you go through. You may find the kids' section, which obviously you can't see from the front.

You may find, ah, there's a fabulous kids' bookseller in here, or there's somebody who really gets philosophy, or whatever it might be. The overall harmony of the store presents itself the minute you walk in it.

Neil:

Nice. Beautiful. What should bookstores never sell?

Because I'm asking that specifically because bookstores have obviously massively expanded the range of what they sell, and I've heard you talk about some things that you've pulled out of bookstores. Bookshops tend to sell lots of non-books these days. What should bookstores not be into?

James:

Well, I would have sort of I would want to say much, but actually what I think is if the bookstore is a true bookstore, you can sell pretty much anything else in it, but you definitely shouldn't have much of it. And the very best at this are Japanese. And you can go into a Japanese bookstore and it's a fabulous bookstore.

And they will have a little model with a scarf on it. That's it. And the scarf is amazingly beautiful.

Now, it shouldn't be in that bookstore because it's the only thing that isn't a book. And it's exquisite. It represents the values of the bookstore.

But my own view is bookstores should be, if they want to be bookstores, should be about books. Unequivocally about books. You should come into books and see books and focus on books.

And actually a percentage of sales should come from books. And I really worry when our sales drop below 80%. And quite a lot of Barnes & Noble are lower than 80%.

All of our new stores are about 80%. But we've got a ton of older stores where they are, and they are unbalanced. And the problem with them is they are still full of books.

They've got, you know, on the face of it, they're good bookstores. But they've become too much of other things. And it changes the nature of customers' engagement with the store.

And it really undermines their credibility and authenticity as a bookstore. Even though they have the books in them. And they have as many books in them as the little store down the road which has only got books in it.

But they don't make us good bookstores. And that's something we're kind of figuring out is how do we change them and evolve them to make them true bookstores if they've departed from that path because they sell too much that isn't. I slung out an immense amount of things that weren't books out of BNN to make them better bookstores even though it hurt us because they were things that we were selling perfectly well.

And they obviously made some sense to all the people who were buying water. Just bottled water. We had a little thing of bottled water.

You could just buy bottled water from us. And we sold one of our best selling items every single day. But you don't need that in a bookstore.

So we slung them out. And I do think it's something that is very difficult as a chain bookseller to work how you evolve. Given also there are commercial imperatives to make some money.

And you make quite a lot of money on these things without books.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been in some sense chasing the longest?

James:

I chased a book on Ethiopia by Paul Henzer. And I just couldn't find it. It wasn't on Abe.

Occasionally they came on Abe and it was like $1,000 and I refused to pay $1,000 for a book.

Neil:

Oh, Abe books. Right, right, right. I was like, what's Abe?

Right, Abe books. Or Amazon, which is part of Amazon.

James:

Yeah. And I looked and really wanted to read this book and I read others of his and I wanted this one. And there's a little used bookstore in the village next to where I live.

Terrible store. It's one of the worst used bookstores that you can go into. It just has grubby, dirty paperbacks in it of mass market rubbish.

And I walked in there and it was sitting there. I mean, just sitting there. And I was just like, I actually must be dreaming.

This cannot be possible. And it was two pounds. No way.

I solved a search that had gone on for about a decade.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, what a great story. And the last question of all, you know, usually we're talking to a legion globally of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians. I often close by asking people what's one hard-fought piece of wisdom or advice you would leave to this group.

I could tie it to page 752 of Team of Rivals where it's reported that on Seward's deathbed, his daughter-in-law Jenny asked him if he had any final advice before he died. And he said, love one another. So I thought, if you don't mind, I know it's a bit dark, but maybe close with me asking you for what your deathbed advice may be to all the people who've stuck with us for the hour and a half conversation that I found very rich and stimulating personally.

James:

Seward is right. If there is any genuine advice of this sort, it has to be about kindness and tolerance and love in some shape or form. It should be part of all of our lives.

We burst our way through professional endeavors and educational endeavors and there's competitiveness and there's management and there's all these sort of things going on, but if you can absolutely endeavor always to be reasonable and kind and appreciative. And yes, sort of, actually that is the book that I failed to remember since I've just done it. It was called The Language of Kindness.

Ah! So, there we go. I needed the jog.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. The Language of Kindness. Endeavor to be reasonable and kind.

James Daunt, it has been a real honor and a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. Thank you so much for your generosity of time, of spirit, of giving us these books and sharing so much of your wisdom. Really, really grateful to you.

Thank you so much. Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again listening back to The Wise and Wonderful. So eloquent.

Mr. James Daunt, as he gave us the three daunting books that were... Actually, before we get into these, should I do my quotes? I was just about to forget my quotes, guys.

You've got to help me remember my quotes. Every single show, I try to highlight a few good quotes that I wrote down as I was going through. How about this one?

Books are in a very good place. He said that right at the beginning. I worry about literature, in a sense.

The Anna Kareninas of the world. Are we reading those still? Is our reading changing into more of the book talk and the self-help universe and the Colleen Hoovers?

I don't know. But just hearing the guy who runs more bookstores in the world more than anybody say books are in a very good place is heartening. It's a great, great sign for all of us.

This might be my favorite quote in the whole day. Bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice. I just love the words.

The serendipity of illogical choice. What a great, magical way of putting it. It's kind of like Chapter 99 with Doug Miller over at Doug Miller Books when he says, Amazon's great for finding what you want.

Bookstores are great for finding what you don't know you want. How about this one? Bookstores provide a community space that is inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.

That is such a good point. We talk a lot about community on this show. There is, of course, the famous Putnam book, Bowling Alone, but most of the things that we talk about are just for adults or just for kids and so on.

Bookstores have, as he put it, they're inherently democratic. I'll throw one more quote in here just for fun. The reality through all of this, because he's talking about 35 years being a bookseller, is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Which is a wonderful perspective to have from the, I was going to say septuagenarian, but I don't think he's that old. I think he's in his early 60s. 61!

He's only 61. What am I talking about? James Daunt, thank you so much for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 589, A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horn, H-O-R-N-E.

Number 588, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I really do recommend. It's a massive book. It's so daunting.

Like I said to James, the audiobook's like 42 and a half hours, but it is gripping. I mean, it really does take you into the 1800s, Springfield, Illinois. You feel like you're right there.

If you have an interest in US politics or kind of the highest sort of echelons of leadership, then this is a good book for you. And number 587, which is kind of two books. It's like a two-book set.

De Gaulle, The Rebel and De Gaulle, The Ruler by Jean LaCouture, okay? L-E-C-O-U-T-U-R-E. Thank you so much to James Daunt for coming on three books, and thank you to all of you for listening.

Are you still here? Did you make it past the three-second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is where I kind of lean back on the couch now, put my arms above my head now, and I say, hey, it's time for the after party. It's one of three clubs we have on three books. We also have the cover-to-cover club.

That's people that attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show from 2018 to 2040. I was in my 30s when I started. I'll be in my 60s when I'm done, and I know I'm hanging out with a lot of you around the world with me.

And by the way, as I mentioned, if you are part of the cover-to-cover club, drop me a line, let me know. We'll add you to our FAQ if you want to be. A lot of people don't want their name on there.

That's fine, but we can add you to the threebooks.co FAQ if you like. And, of course, the secret club. All I can tell you about the secret club is the way you find out how to join is by calling our phone number.

Yes, we have a real phone number. It is 1-833-READALOT. R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

You can drop that last T while dialing if you're having trouble getting to go through. I love hearing your voice. It's so wonderful hearing from you.

Let's go to the phones to kick off the end of the podcast club now.

Caitlin:

Phone ringing. Hey, Neal. It's Caitlin Beekhouse from Edmonton, Alberta.

I just got home from a run listening to Chapter 93, and it felt like you and Chris Hatfield were running right beside me. I love that there's no commercials, so no interruptions as I'm running and just great conversation and inspiration of what to read next. Another way that I love to learn about great reads is from friends and family, and I'm actually hosting at my community week next week the first ever book swab, which combines the best parts of a book swap and a book club, which is why we call it a swab.

As a sustainably minded professional organizer, I love to see books re-homed and re-loved and to explore the relationship that we have with physically owning and possessing books. There's no way for you to know this unless I throw it out into the universe, but one of my three-year goals is to be able to discuss with you the sustainability side of books, our relationship with books, and my three, four-minute book. Thanks so much for the inspiring podcast and for introducing me to so many great people, Neil.

Keep it up.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Caitlin from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for calling in and for shouting out Chris Hatfield chapter 93. That was a fun one. I remember going to Chris's house and his whole table was just full of Christmas cards, and I was amazed that this guy was sending out 500 Christmas cards and personally writing notes in each one of them when I got there.

When I went over that day, it was around the time of his first novel, The Apollo Murders, that had come out. And since then, he's so prolific. It's unbelievable.

He's got another novel called The Defector, I guess part two of that same Apollo Murders series. So if you're interested in, I want to say Tom Clancy-esque type of books, then that would be for you. He, of course, has also a really famous memoir called An Astronaut's Guide to Life, and a kid's book that my kids still enjoy called The Darkest Dark.

And he's got a lot of wonderful books. I also love that you were running while listening to it because like Chris, I guess being the astronaut, it's just in such physical shape. One of the memory takeaways I have of that conversation was the idea of doing 20 push-ups before you ever get into the shower.

Just drop and give me 20 every time. I love some of the other topics you raise. I love the book swab idea.

A book swap and a book club. A mixture of the two. Wonderful.

I love the idea of talking about the sustainability side of books. I will endeavor to give you a call or to reach out to you so that we can have a short chat about the sustainability side of books. I don't think about it much, but of course, we should.

Absolutely. Once we solve all the things, of course, like fracking and carbon emissions and so on. Books are printed on paper, right?

We're chopping down trees for them. How does that all work? That's what we need to talk about, Caitlin.

Thank you so much for calling in. If you're listening to this, by the way, please give me a call. Drop me a line.

1-833-READALOT. There's no pressure to be eloquent or as articulate as Caitlin was. Just drop me a line.

Let me know a formative book, a dream guest. Any reflection or bit. It's always wonderful hearing from you.

Thank you so much. Now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter. This chapter's letter comes from Marge.

Oh, yeah. We love Marge down in Antioch, Illinois. Marge says, on Jonathan Franzen's podcast, I'm not finished the conversation yet, but what a great guest.

His descriptions of books were so interesting and thoughtful. I now want to read A Christmas Carol. My daughter wants to read Prince Caspian, and I will recommend his books to my son since Franzen said he writes so people will have good books to read.

Thank you for your efforts to get him on the show. Well, thank you, Marge. I also think, you know what we should do?

We should head on over to YouTube because there's been a lot of comments on that one. And I'm just going to pull it up right now. Basically, you know how it is on YouTube.

Everyone's got their opinions. And so there was, I won't say like a salty comment, but you know, somebody wrote and said, the sheer amount of pretension that comes from Franzen should be a scientific quantity. His youthful arrogance has continued to add all arrogance.

That was from David Watson. I replied, sorry, David. Another friend texted me after listening to this chat saying something similar.

I will say for my end, I didn't perceive John that way at all in our chats leading up to the interview and before and after the interview. My sense was he was incredibly kind, thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, self-wondering, you know, basically a person to try and show up and do their best like any of us are. And that is my experience.

And I hope that other people felt that way. But of course, we're open to other people's opinions. Jonathan Henderson also wrote, I just read the corrections earlier this month.

I loved it so much. I basically inhaled it over a period of two days. Being a middle-aged man who's now in the unenviable position of taking care of my elderly parents, I really felt like for the first time in ages an author was writing my life.

It has that painful but powerful combination that happens when the ugly truth meets the poetically beautiful. That's a great way to put it, Jonathan. And by the way, in the top 100 books of all time, or the books of the 20th century from the New York Times, the corrections is in the top 10.

In the top 10. Here's the last comment I'll give you, last letter of the chapter, we'll say, from Jules Seghetti. I liked the conversation, although some of the reactions of the interviewer were a bit too much.

Wow! For my taste. So then I wrote back, and then the person wrote, it was worth the two hours.

Two and a half hours. And I said, worth the two and a half hours is a great compliment. Sorry for my hyperbolic reactions.

And then Jules wrote back, sorry, I didn't mean to offend. Hope I didn't. The important thing is that it's so rare to have the time to watch a 2.5 hour interview. And that was amazing. And I said, no, you definitely didn't offend me. That's the thing about YouTube, it gets you like, there's like a more unfiltered nature of the comments over there, so it's nice to combine those with Marge's comments.

Alright, and now let's head over to the word of the chapter. And for this chapter's word, we will of course have a nice word cloud from the eloquent Mr. James Daunt. Let's cue over to him now.

James:

Hesitate to pine some awful denouement Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol the national health system which we revere but obliquely as well. This obstinate sense of his own destiny, a vassal to the allies total abject defeat it's writ large and it's exquisite

Neil:

So many interesting words to choose from there, but let's go with denouement

Neil:

denouement

Neil:

d-e-n-o-u-e-m-e-n-t which I will confess I did not know what it meant at all but Miriam Webster comes in to help us tell us that it is the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a novel, play, film, etc. Or the outcome of a complex sequence of events.

For example, in the novel's denouement the two hostages escape to freedom. Huh. That's wonderful.

So the denouement is kind of like the ending. Well, where does it come from? It comes from the French and what it means is untying.

Untying. From old French de, you know, to undo nouer is a tie. To untie.

So think about denouement as like the untying of the complex strands of a plot. Wonderful word from of course the very eloquent James Daunt the world's largest bookseller running the biggest chain in England, the biggest chain in the U.S. which are gotta be two of the top five markets in the world for books. I know the U.S. is number one. England is, I think, I think it's the number two English speaking market, but I don't know if it's up around, you know, China and India and so on. So let's say two top five markets and then of course he's still running his nine store independent bookstore chain in London Daunt Books, which of course having a bag from is apparently like the thing to do if you're over there. I gotta visit when I'm over in England.

When am I gonna be over in England? I do not know, but I want to visit Daunt Books and see how they're organized by country and where they put Harry Potter. It was a wonderful conversation with James, with you, with me all the way up here in chapter 141.

We've been intersplicing classic chapters with new chapters now. You just heard Judy Bloom on the new moon. We'll have Vishwas Aggrawal and David Sedaris coming to visit over the next couple months, which will be fun and until next time remember everybody that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

Listen to the chapter here!