Read with A Deeper South

And Support the South's Local Bookshops

If you’ve been loitering around The DETOURIST for a while wondering when it’s going to open back up, then you’re probably aware what a passionate—nay, fanatical—evangelist for independent bookstores I am. You will know that I served several tours of duty in the magazine section of Oxford Book Store (of Blessed Memory) in Atlanta. If the Catholic Church canonized bookstores, Oxford would be among the saints in eternity.¹

Oxford may have gone on to its heavenly reward, but there remain among us those way-stations of paradise in this world, where pilgrims may find our rest from the incessant deluge of intellectual flatulence that it is increasingly difficult to escape in this vale of sorrows.²

I’m going to get right to the point, but if you want to read my rationale and the backstory, it’s further down.

I am a huge fan of bookshop.org, one of the best things ever to hit the internet. It is an online bookseller that supports independent bookshops. Imagine buying books online from people who love and know a lot about books instead of some billionaire who neither reads nor needs your money. Local booksellers do both, and the brilliance of bookshop.org is that a portion of every sale goes to a local bookshop, and the site has raised over $42 million in support of these beloved institutions. So you can support local booksellers even if you can’t visit them in person.

And what’s even cooler than that? A Deeper South is an affiliate of bookshop.org, which means we have our own storefront on the website. You can buy any book you want through the ADS Storefront, and proceeds from ever sale will support both ADS and one special bookstore.

So next week, we are rolling out a new feature at ADS: Bookshop of the Month!Each month, we will spotlight one bookshop at the ADS Storefront at bookshop dot org. If you haven’t already, subscribe to The DETOURIST to hear who the first ADS BOTM will be!

There is also a special section devoted to the books that have shaped and continue to shape the ADS journey. You can browse the titles and order any of them for yourself, if you want. I am updating this list all the time.

The beginning of the ADS journey coincided with the demise of the South’s greatest bookstore in 1997, which seemed to presage doom for the independent bookselling business—and maybe the Atlanta I knew and loved along with it. That was before the internet really got going, and since then the prospects for bookshops have seemed more dire by the day. The news across publishing has not been good at all for several decades: local newspapers have been gutted, national newspapers consolidated and bought out by billionaires, the print magazine industry rendered practically non-existent apart from in grocery store checkout lanes, book publishing increasingly monopolized by a handful of corporate behemoths, small independent presses’ budgetary limitations now requiring authors to become marketing whizzes, the general attention span of the once-reading public dwindlinmg to mere nanoseconds, and on and on. And I haven’t even mentioned amazon.

In 1997, John Hayes and I began to witness the “doughnut hole effect” in Atlanta and other major American cities, through which ordinary life had virtually vacated the urban core for the exurbs and suburbs. I did not see then how this outward trend was connected with patterns of white resistance to integration going back decades, including the design of interstates themselves and the white flight they facilitated.

At the same time, habits of regular commerce were becoming homogenized, as the exchange of goods and services shifted from city centers to interstate exits and the new communities that grew up around them. In the late 1990s what was disappearing were those expressions of local character in the form of small businesses like Oxford Books, Aleck’s Barbecue, and many other casualties of Atlanta’s rapid outward expansion, its transient population, and its chronic amnesia. Atlanta was quickly becoming No Place, a commercial center without any real identity. And the same thing was happening all over the country, especially in the South.

But then a funny thing happened. Once people realized what we had forsaken, we began to realize what we had in the first place, and willingly given up for something that seemed better to us at the time. Some people began to understand that a world built entirely around cars might not be that great after all, that walking to your local pub or grocery store or cafe is actually a real advantage, and that pedestrian life is in fact pretty essential for the creation of community. Many people realized that there is a connection between the built environment and human social health—to say nothing of how good walking is for your physical and mental well-being. We realized that buying books at a Barnes & Noble in Marietta is not a qualitatively different experience than buying books at one in Spokane or El Paso. Which, of course, is the point for that McDonald’s school of capitalism: you visit any one of these chain stores anywhere, you know what you are getting.

It turns out that a lot of us don’t exactly want to know what we are getting, or at least don’t want more of the same identically repeatable experience that American capitalism excels at.

Slowly, life began to return to the city centers. And bookstores have been a huge part of that trend. In 2024, the American Booksellers Association reported a 31% increase in new bookstore openings compared with the previous year. Last year, 247 new independent brick-and-mortar bookstores opened for business. And only 37 closed (a 61% decrease from 2023). It would have surprised me in 1997 to know that thirty years in the future indie bookstores would be experiencing something of a revival.

I can confirm from my own wanderings around the Southeast that this is true. Atlanta now has a new independent bookshop in Virginia-Highland, to go along with the stalwart A Cappella Books in Decatur. New Orleans can boast an outstanding new Black-owned bookshop in The Faubourg Marigny. A new independent, community-owned bookshop opened in the heart of downtown Durham, North Carolina several years ago, which would have been inconceivable in 1997. There are thriving bookstores in Birmingham, Memphis, Charleston, Augusta, Chattanooga.

I hold it as a sort of religious duty to patronize the local bookshop whenever I am in a new place (if there is one). And there are some truly outstanding ones in the South, including what is arguably the best bookstore in the country. I wish I could visit them all, all of the time. In the meantime, there’s bookshop.org.

P.S. They also have an app if you like reading e-books, and they have an amazing service for listening to audiobooks, but I’ll talk about that more later!

1. The Church does not, as far as I am aware, canonize book shops per se, but it does have a patron saint of booksellers. St. John of God was a sixteenth-century Iberian convert to Christianity who founded the Brothers Hospitallers. After trying to save a drowning man in Granada in 1540, he died in the hospital he founded, where his relics remain. It is said that St. John is venerated as the patron saint of booksellers. And also of the mentally ill.

2. I should add a special note to public libraries, which belong to a higher category of moral virtue, of course, since they are free to everyone. But, in my experience at least, they are not especially well-suited for casual browsing in the way that bookstores are (are at least should be). And browsing on bookstores is still generally free to everyone.