Good Things Happen in Book Stores

Which is why we should spend more time in them

It was in Athens in the 4th Century BC that a man named Zeno walked into a bookshop. He had been a successful merchant, but suffered a terrible shipwreck on a journey out of Phoenicia, losing a priceless cargo of the world’s finest dye. He was 30 years old and facing financial ruin, but this catastrophe stirred his soul to find something new, though he didn’t quite know what.

One day, immersed in browsing a bookstore collection, many volumes of which have been lost to history forever, Zeno heard the bookseller reading out loud a passage from a book by Xenophon about Socrates. It was like nothing he had ever heard before. With some trepidation, he approached the owner and asked, “Where can I find a man like that?” and in so doing, began a philosophical journey that would literally change the history of the world. That book recommendation led to the founding of Stoicism and then, to the brilliant works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — which, not lost to history, are beginning to find a new life on bookshelves today. From those heirs to Zeno’s bookshop conversion, there is a straight line to many of the world’s greatest thinkers, and even to the Founding Fathers of America.

All from a chance encounter in a bookshop.

It would be an understatement to say that great things begin in bookstores, and that countless lives have been changed inside them.

Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful book The Swerve was inspired by a chance discovery of Lucretius at the Yale Co-Op almost fifty years ago. George Raveling, the Hall of Fame basketball coach, stops at the local indie in every town he visits and leaves with a bag or two for that reason. He discovers authors and subjects he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to at home or online. In 2012, a woman tweeted her adoration for whoever was behind the Twitter account for the Waterstones Bookstore in London; the two were married four years later.

In my own life, I remember quite fondly where I came across certain books and the effect they had on my life. There were the Louis L’amour books I got at Bookworm in Sacramento when I was in elementary school. I remember reading Flint under my desk instead of paying attention to my…