In 1998, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan dramatized the Darwinian struggle in You’ve Got Mail, where Hanks’s massive book chain Fox Books opens a location near Ryan’s quaint Shop Around the Corner, soon to shutter its doors as its customers, dazzled by wider selection, migrate to the evil competitor.

But if the timeline of the movie stretched into the future, the picture would look much different—signaled by something in the title. If you can send and receive messages online, why not books? In the sequel, Fox Books would be going out of business, beaten at the selection game by a new and fearsome online competitor.

Amazon went live in 1995, and while its prospects appeared rocky at the start, it boasted inventories vastly bigger than the best-stocked B&N locations, more than a million titles and always expanding. Didn’t matter how old, weird, or specialized—for any given title a customer had a better shot at finding it while sitting at home on their duff than scanning the shelves at B&N—and usually at a lower price.

At its peak in 2009, Barnes & Noble boasted more than 700 locations. But competition with Amazon over the next decade and change chipped that number down below 600 and brought the company to the edge of ruin. Goliath met a bigger Goliath.

Then came new investors and a new CEO, James Daunt, with a radical idea: What if Goliath behaved more like David? It helps that Daunt got his start in indie bookselling.

Building a Serendipity Engine

In its Goliath days, Barnes & Noble operated on the assumption that a bookstore should stock whatever a buyer came looking for. The assumption behind that assumption? A customer knows what they want; the bookseller’s job is to simply point them to the right shelf. The business strategy that accompanies those two assumptions is obvious: get a big-ass building and pack it with as many titles as possible—less a bookshop than a warehouse.

But David wouldn’t play that game, nor does Daunt.

“That is so fundamentally to misunderstand what physical bookstores are about and what they need to be doing in the modern world,” Daunt told a room packed with publishing executives for the 2026 ECPA C-Suite Symposium in September, a gathering held in Asheville, North Carolina. I spoke at the event and, as someone concerned about the infrastructure of reading and all things bookish, stayed to hear Daunt speak.

A brick-and-mortar retailer can’t out-Amazon Amazon, but a bookshop has a different job. “Our role in life is,” said Daunt, “to have the best curated array of books that will most interest the community that we are serving.” That’s a different strategy resting on a different idea of the customer.

For the new B&N, the ideal buyer is not only the one who arrives knowing what book they want; it’s the one who arrives wanting a book, curious, and open to whatever the serendipity engine of good curation and merchandising might supply.

The warehouse model provides more selection than a smaller indie shop but nowhere near what Amazon can supply, while consuming space that could showcase newer and more appealing books. To succeed in the new environment requires a far different approach—five smooth stones, carefully chosen, as it were.

“Our belief is that we have too many books in our stores and not the right books,” Daunt said. Hardcovers present a particular problem. “If you don’t move through your new title publishing, particularly your new hardcover titles, you don’t have enough space for the new to ever find and be given the visibility that it requires.”

The problem is twofold. The warehouse model leads to poor merchandising, so the best books get swallowed up by the meh books, don’t stand out, and don’t move. And then that sclerotic mass just sits there, occupying space that might allow other books to be faced out, put on tables, or otherwise brought to a customer’s attention. If you’ve got too many books on the shelves and they don’t move, said Daunt, “they might as well be wallpaper.”

For a serendipity engine, you need fewer, better curated books. “The irony is that the less you carry and the more focused you are about that, the more you sell of what you do carry,” he said.

Friction in the Gears

“All machines,” said Thoreau, “have their friction.” That’s as true for Daunt’s serendipity engine as anything else, in this case rubbing up against the expectations of publishers, starting with their initial orders. Gone are the days when B&N would order huge quantities of everything, hope for the best, and then just ship back to the publisher whatever didn’t move—“returns” in industry parlance, spoken with a shudder.

A bookseller determined to carry fewer, better books has to say no more often. To keep inventory moving and returns low, B&N now places smaller, more selective orders, which publisher’s aren’t thrilled about. But it works. Under Daunt’s leadership, UK bookseller Waterstones cut returns from about 25 percent to just 3 or 4 percent, concentrated in new hardcovers with backlist close to zero. Daunt wants Barnes & Noble moving in the same direction.

“Returns has long been the curse of our industry,” he said. “As we’re able to buy better and as we’re able to assort better, we should be able to eliminate returns.”

But there are tensions here. Fewer books in stores may mean that some titles never get a chance to break out. What’s more, a book can fail at publication and find readers years later. But this is where online life creates interesting synergies. Online retail can’t compete with physical bookstores for serendipity, but online communities excel at it.

“The act of reading, and how we perceive readers, has changed,” said actor and longtime Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton in GQ’s recent State of Books survey of writers, editors, publishers, and readers. “What was once seen as a solitary act has become a social one.” With the decline in traditional book coverage from mainstream media, readers have turned to social platforms like Substack, TikTok, and Instagram to share and discover what literature excites them. “I think they [BookTok and Bookstagram] function best as reader spaces and as spaces where readers and critics and reviewers are talking to each other,” novelist R.F. Kuang told GQ.

All that talk can turn readers on to neglected books. “BookTok sells books in sometimes surprising directions,” Emma Straub, a novelist and co-owner of Books Are Magic, told GQ. “Just this week, my husband, who does our reorders at the store, said to me, ‘We’ve been selling a lot of copies of Stoner.’ And it’s BookTok!” John Williams’s 1965 novel of a seemingly unremarkable professor has received a whole new life because of social media chatter; I regularly see it in my X feed. Powell’s store manager Bryanne Hoeg pointed to a similar effect with novelist Larry McMurtry: “Lonesome Dove is having a real hot moment right now. That book was published 40 years ago.”

Bookstores and online communities work through the same basic mechanism: one human being placing a book in front of another and saying, Give this a go. Here’s a shorthand way of understanding the bookselling landscape at the moment; this overstates and understates, but it’s directionally right: Amazon fulfills demand, but local bookstore merchandising and online communities work together to stoke it in the first place.

Inside the bookstore, especially Daunt’s B&N, that means not simply rows of titles filed A to Z, but tables and sections designed for readers to browse and find something worthwhile. Doing it well is how physical bookstores keep the sale in-house instead of someone seeing what they like and buying on their phone (always a risk).

Build Nationally, Shelve Locally

One of the ways Barnes & Noble makes selling fewer and selling better work is to give its local stores more autonomy in curating their own inventory. Contrary to popular accounts, it’s not fully decentralized. But it’s not like the Goliath days of B&N, either, when central buyers in New York set the inventory for the entire nation.

“The PR is that we have happy, informed, lovely, brilliant booksellers in every single one of our stores who buy absolutely whatever they like,” Daunt told the ECPA gathering, “and they fill up their stores with beautiful and wonderful books, and everything is just roses.” After a pause, he added: “That isn’t the case.”

Said Daunt, “The initial stocking is a central decision.” The decentralization comes next. Once a centrally approved title is in the system, the local store gets much more say over whether to restock it, whether to bring in approved titles performing elsewhere, how much space a category deserves, and how the section is presented. And there’s a feedback loop; success in a handful of stores can also persuade the central team to expand a title more widely.

The result is neither old-fashioned Goliath-style retail nor 700-plus independent bookstores. It’s more like centralized gatekeeping with decentralized learning, and since every bookstore is located in a different community, over time those stores take on a local feel while remaining identifiably B&N.

In a world where Goliath acts more like David, the religion section at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York will look different than the same section in Cool Springs, Tennessee. More Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam in Manhattan; more evangelical Christianity in Nashville, reflecting the community interest, even when those local interests run counter to what B&N corporate might prefer.

In his profile of Daunt for the New Yorker, offers a politically charged example. Barnes & Noble supported a Cheyenne, Wyoming, store that mounted a display of MAGA books because that reflected local taste. “We can’t believe in free speech and the importance of resisting censorship and then censor ourselves,” Daunt told Heller. For Daunt, local autonomy and pluralism play together; a national bookseller should not claim to respect a community and then refuse to stock the books that community wants.

This sort of approach requires careful selection and management of store sections. “Curating is not about racking up books A to Z,” said Daunt. Especially in nonfiction, he wants booksellers to decide which books belong together, how customers will understand the section, which titles deserve display, and which ones should get the boot. That sounds simple until you ask who is capable of doing it. An algorithm can’t do it, and neither can most people.

The Human Infrastructure of Reading

There is a lot of talk now about the infrastructure of reading, usually focused on schools, libraries, phones, and literacy. Bookstores and booksellers are part of that infrastructure too.

An algorithm can identify correlations among purchases. But a bookseller can spend years developing critical taste, notice that a section feels somehow “wrong,” learn that a customer who likes one strange book might like another, or understand that a book nobody knows needs to sit beside one everybody does. A well-run bookstore becomes a serendipity engine because the people running it accumulate judgment. Unfortunately, humans don’t come ready-made with those instincts; they come at high cost.

At ECPA Daunt freely admitted that Barnes & Noble does not yet have enough of those people. “We have highly variable knowledge sets within our stores, and we have highly variable execution within our stores,” he said. Leaning on his Waterstones experience, Daunt is slowly building the necessary expertise at B&N, targeting about 100 to 150 subject specialists across the chain who can each support five or six individual stores.

The difficulty caused by this lack of expertise came to the fore during the Q&A session at ECPA. One attendee challenged Daunt over what she saw as a bias against Christian books in Barnes & Noble stores. Her concern? Some Christian titles were being left out, and the books that did make it into stores were often poorly presented.

Daunt agreed that the execution could be poor but rejected the idea that bias or hostility was the cause. People tend to be more stupid than malicious, as Karl Popper somewhere said. It’s the same at B&N. A young workforce, hopped up on fantasy and romantasy, might know next to nothing about religious titles. Put a twenty-one-year-old unfamiliar with the category in charge of that section and, said Daunt, “They really won’t have a clue.” The same problem afflicts other sections, such as business. But the remedy is not another corporate planogram; it’s more knowledgeable people: training them, retaining them, and moving that expertise among stores.

That requires investment, and Daunt is game for it. “We’re investing hugely more in pay and promotions, so [we] are able to employ more full-timers and retain good talent,” he said. “Book selling skill, particularly at the subject level, takes time to develop.” A good bookstore is not simply a set of inventory rules. It depends on people who cultivate expertise around subjects, customer desires, and connecting the two.

Building a Literary Culture

Near the end of the ECPA session, Daunt was asked about political polarization, technology, declining reading, and the future of bookselling. He rejected the premise of decline, which I was personally glad to hear. He earlier brushed aside the worry that nonfiction reading was collapsing as “absolute stuff and nonsense.” Daunt was similarly skeptical of larger claims that people no longer read. Instead, he pointed especially to readers from their late teens through their mid-twenties. “They’re in our stores,” he said. “They’re buying physical books.”

Heller’s reporting for the New Yorker points the same direction; the booksellers he interviewed consistently described stronger book-buying among younger customers. And GQ heard much the same thing from elsewhere in Booklandia. “What we know at the bookstore is that people are reading—people of all ages,” said Straub. “Young people in particular are interested in an analog lifestyle.” Kuang highlighted the same thing: “I’m honestly excited by the younger readers I encounter. That’s what gives me hope—seeing my students get really excited about the stories I assign them.”

Daunt thinks bookstores invigorate and enliven this culture of reading. “We are, broadly speaking, a positive civilizing institution within the communities in which we represent ourselves,” he said. “We’re committed to carrying the opinions and the voices of all the complete spectrum of opinion,” Daunt said. “But we are also committed to kindness and to the fact that knowledge and engagement with ideas generally will improve and civilize our communities.”

Having founded Daunt Books in London, Daunt’s an independent bookseller at heart. But he also knows there can be drawbacks with independent stores for this sort of culture building. A small shop can unintentionally signal it only exists for a particular kind of reader; outsiders might feel unwelcome. But a large B&N can do something different.

“These huge, great, big, all-embracing stores where everybody piles into them,” he said, “I think are doing something much more important within our communities.” B&N’s scale gives its stores a unique sort of accessibility: teenagers can drop in after school, meet friends, wander the aisles, and leave without buying anything. “That’s fine,” said Daunt.

All it’s done is work. The rebound took years after Daunt’s arrival, but Barnes & Noble has climbed from a low of about 580 stores to more than 730 at the most recent count. Had B&N tried out-competing Amazon, that wouldn’t have happened. Instead, Daunt reminded the chain that it was in a different business. Rather than merely fulfilling demand, B&N’s serendipity engine fulfills curiosity.

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“I was surprised to discover,” Mandel told Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, “that if you write literary fiction with a crime in it, it turns out you’ve written a crime novel.” The problem? “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a crime writer.”

Unsuccessfully Shaking Labels

So, for her fourth book, Station Eleven (2014), she penned a post-apocalyptic story about life on the front and back end of a near-future viral pandemic in which a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors tries to bring solace to survivors, and a psychopathic cult leader manipulates his followers and grasps for power.

Success! Not a crime novel. But argh! Readers had another label for it. “I was surprised to discover that if you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer,” she told Charles.

Part of Mandel’s ambivalence involves a concern that readers looking for crime or sci-fi might be disappointed because she doesn’t lean into the genre far enough to satisfy their expectations. She needn’t have worried. Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke award, given to the best sci-fi novel, in 2015.

Mandel seems to have made peace with it all. After a lengthy hiatus (compared to her prior pace), she published The Glass Hotel in 2020, which concerns a Bernie Madoff-style swindle and the lives affected by it (more crime), and then followed it up in 2022 with Sea of Tranquility, which involves a moon colony, alternate realities, and another speculative leap into the future (more sci-fi). Ye shall know them by their publishing history.

Now she offers us her literary fiction take on a dystopian thriller set in the multiverse, Exit Party (2026). But before I tell you about it, I want to revisit her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, because that’s exactly what Mandel does. Exit Party stands on its own, but Mandel enjoys the narrative possibilities of interleaving characters and elements of her several novels—as if they exist in one world where aspects from one corner may jimmy loose and bump into another; there’s interplay across her books.

One Last Job

Anton Waker has grown up in a family comfortably living on the wrong side of the law, trafficking in refurbished stolen art. His cousin Aria folds right in when she comes to live with them, and she and Anton start selling phony passports.

Though successful, Anton eventually wants out; the risks become too great for his nerves, and he seems to have something of a moral awakening, even if his eyelids are still half shut.

Having built a business on fake identities, he creates another version of himself (one that graduated from Harvard), takes a prestigious job, and lands a fiancée. Aria resents his move toward a life on the right side of the law and blackmails him into taking one last job, working as a go-between on one of Aria’s deals, while he’s on his honeymoon in Italy. If he doesn’t do it, she’ll expose his past. Poof! There goes the life of legitimacy he’s so diligently been trying to maintain.

Seeing no other option, he agrees. And the job goes horribly wrong, for all involved. I won’t say anything more except that it’s a perfectly constructed, complex story that warrants reading on its own. But it also lays the foundation for Exit Party, which begins decades later, now in 2031, with Aria—now just Ari—released from prison and living in Los Angeles with her roommate Gloria.

When Reality Fractures

By 2031, the United States isn’t united. It’s fractured into several regional powers, ranging from functional to anything but. As Ari busies herself trying to rebuild her life, a party thrown by Gloria’s friend Kareem—to celebrate the curfew being lifted in a still-recovering Republic of California—seems like just the thing. It takes some cajoling to get Gloria to leave the apartment, but off they go.

And then everything gets weird. People start seeing doubles at the party, and Kareem, shaken, wanders off and goes missing. He’s never seen again. Except he is, just not where he’s supposed to be.

Because Mandel doesn’t give us just one version of the future. She offers two. In the first, the political structure has fallen down around its ankles. In the second, the U.S. is radically centralized under despotic, constant surveillance. Any one of your neighbors might work for Service, and troublemakers are exiled to camps beyond the margins of society. These two futures exist in parallel worlds, and the real trouble begins when people from one inadvertently traipse into the other—beginning with those doubles at the party.

Mandel gives us action on both sides of the divide. Ari, for instance, leaves Los Angeles and ends up for a time in Ohio, working as an operative for a slightly criminal enterprise (so much for the straight and narrow). But as the North American situation deteriorates, she makes her way to Europe and starts a new life in Paris, one in which her fortunes turn, but her past won’t leave her alone.

Gloria makes an appearance with her son Sebastian, fathered by the missing Kareem but parented by Gloria’s double Nico, stranded after the party in Gloria and Ari’s world. Meanwhile, Ari’s double in the other world, Ibari, has her own problems.

What Outlasts Countries

If Ari has lived her whole life flouting the law, Ibari seems roughly the opposite. She’s had a long and successful career in Service, the consolidated, overarching law-enforcement entity that maintains an iron grip on society. But she has her own reservations about it—and her own subtle moments of rebellion, including making sure Nico’s children in her native world are taken care of, despite the laws she must break to manage it.

“Countries don’t last forever,” someone says at the party that starts the action. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What Mandel does is remind us that whatever happens across the wider political landscape, various as it may be, its futures as undetermined as they are, the bonds between people can be stronger, more resilient, and persist whatever comes.

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I had the pleasure of hearing James Daunt speak at the ECPA C-Suite Symposium in September. He was brilliant. Anyone who could pull B&N out of its nosedive must be, and Daunt had worked similar magic before with Waterstones in the UK after launching his own successful bookstores, Daunt Books. The man is a force.

I’m thinking of writing up my reflections on Daunt’s talk. I think y’all would enjoy hearing his thoughts on the bookstore’s cultural role and successful bookselling. But in the meantime read ’s profile of Daunt, which far outstrips anything I could offer. Heller’s vibrant prose and robust reporting (the article is more than 10,000 words long) guide the reader down a meandering path through Daunt’s life from childhood to bookseller.

It’s not an easy trade. I’ve worked in two bookstores and, though I disclaim any responsibility, both have since gone belly up. But Daunt is a rare bird: someone obsessed with literature and possessed of remarkable business savvy and managerial ability. Those last two qualities might lack sex appeal, but they make a lot of good happen in the world, including resuscitating a dying national book chain.

Maybe I’m a sucker for a story that improbably combines innovation, capitalism, and literature, but I found Heller’s profile of Daunt . . . exciting. Here’s one bit out of the many that struck me:

Daunt holds that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. “Books aren’t a fixed market,” he told me in his office. “The more bookshops there are, the more people will read. The better bookshops are, the more people discover things. Online is an efficient place, but it’s not a place that can excite in itself.” He paused, and added, “I believe that we make our own luck.”

And, at the risk of sounding too self-pluggy, Heller quotes me in the piece! We talked about the non-decline of nonfiction sales and the threat posed to publishing by AI—the focus of my ECPA talk. If you haven’t already clicked, here’s Heller’s piece.

¶ Paperback writer, RIP. continues doing the Lord’s work in correcting specious stories about the reading crisis, most recently Ned Rust’s article in Jacobin blaming a decline in reading on publishers. How so? For killing the most affordable format around: mass market paperbacks. “Unfortunately,” says Henderson, “Rust’s article is not particularly convincing.”

As I’ve argued before, books are in many ways quite cheap when you account for inflation.

¶ Cottage industry. As I’ve made clear before, I’m not a fan of ’s framing of our contemporary challenges around technology, economics, and cultural decay. But I’d like to pause the gripe long enough to register my enthusiasm for his new publishing venture, Hermit Crab Press, which almost literally puts the cottage back into industry. Here’s his description:

Our little home publishing house is based in our garden cabin here in County Galway. It’s a family operation: a home economy. My wife Navjyoat and I will be running it, while my daughter Leela, who is currently studying for a degree in bookbinding, will be our in-house binder and leatherworker, making us special editions, bookmarks and other goodies to come . . . We try to produce really good-looking—and good-feeling, and good-smelling—books. All our books are printed on high quality paper, with woodcut cover illustrations by the Abbey’s in-house artist Ewan Craig. They’re old fashioned, like us.

How old fashioned? If Jeff Bezos wants to take one on his next Blue Origin flight, he’ll have to buy it direct from Kingsnorth’s website; Hermit Crab Press eschews Amazon. They’re even eschewing ISBNs.

I love things quirky and idiosyncratic, especially when driven by a clear vision and done with excellence. That’s exactly what’s on offer from Hermit Crab Press. I wish Kingsnorth gobs of luck with this.

¶ Indie indeed. And speaking of great news out of indie publishing land, Gaskovski’s new book, The Last Upheaval, is out. I’m eagerly awaiting my copy. If you missed my review, you can read it here, along with some reflections about what makes sci-fi (and speculative fiction more broadly) so rewarding. If you want to support indie publishing ventures, one easy way is to buy Peco’s book!

¶ Clearing the Eyre? The People’s Republic of China is a totalitarian regime that actually warrants the label machine, but at least the tyrants have good taste. No, that’s giving them too much credit. But they do have a thing for Charlotte Brontë.

“This fall,” according to the New York Times, “ninth-grade students across the country are being required to read [Jane Eyre] in full, according to Chinese state media. One report in an official newspaper held it up as an anti-materialistic love story that young people could learn from.”

First translated into Chinese in 1925, Brontë’s Victorian classic has long been popular in the country and approved for students. But why make it mandatory, and why now? More from the Times:

Ping Zhu, a literature professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches Chinese feminism and literature, said the novel is compatible with the Chinese government’s vision of women’s equality—one that can coexist with traditional gender roles and the heterosexual nuclear family. Its inclusion in the ninth grade textbook comes as China struggles with population decline and the government encourages young people to marry and have children, she said.

I guess it might be worth passing that message along to another republic, that of Texas, where schools have placed the book on their restricted lists. Sorry. If you need to clean up after spitting out your coffee, I’ll wait.

Ready? Four Texas school districts have taken a stand for decency and the protection of our kids by canceling Jane Eyre. Perhaps not surprising since, as most people know, it’s riddled with sex, violence, mayhem, and other horrors; MBR readers love that kind of smut, ranking it No. 7 of the best English novels ever. But since none of that is true (except the excellent ranking), what could possess a school district to keep young eyes off one of the greats?

“The 19th century’s favorite orphan is likely a casualty of the Texas legislature,” according to PEN America,

Since the passage of the SB 13 law in 2025, school administrators and librarians have found it impossible to confidently interpret the labels “profane” and “indecent”—part of the new, lower bar for what makes a book bannable in Texas. As a result, some districts have placed restrictions on anything written for adults, including classics.

PEN told Newsweek that schools have started using AI to decide what books to restrict: “Public records reviewed by PEN show that some AI systems were recommending books for removal simply because they had already been banned in other districts, rather than because they failed to meet the legal standard for obscenity.” What could possibly go wrong?

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But it seems impossible to separate an interest in books from at least an occasional nod toward America’s diverse cast of presidents. It goes back to the beginning.

¶ George Washington, reader. We’re inclined to think of founders like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as particularly bookish. The lives and legends of the second, third, and fourth U.S. presidents provide plenty of reasons to think so.

Jefferson found himself under mountains of debt amassing his personal library and had to sell the whole lot, thousands of volumes, to Congress to quiet his creditors—a sale that laid the foundation for the Library of Congress. For his part, Madison signed the bill that authorized the purchase. In my book, The Idea Machine, I devote an entire chapter to Jefferson and Madison’s mutually beneficial bibliomania, using their letters and papers to show how they built and employed their own libraries.

But it wasn’t just those luminaries. When George Washington returned like Cincinnatus to the plow, he also returned to a decently stocked personal library at Mount Vernon. Kevin J. Hayes explores Washington’s love and use of books in his study, George Washington: A Life in Books. His affection for books began in childhood when his mother Mary read to her children such riveting classics as Matthew Hale’s Contemplations Moral and Divine, but the appeal lasted through the rest of his life.

Hayes points to, for instance, the books on agriculture Washington acquired as a planter—including rare volumes, such as Duhamel du Monceau’s Practical Treatise on Husbandry, dotted with Washington’s notes and marginalia, helping him to apply the advice to his own practice.

Washington’s collection ranged far beyond the farmyard, however. He held copies of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s radical Whig works, The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters. He possessed Tobias Smollett’s multivolume Complete History of England, Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin’s History of the Bucaniers of America, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and a broken set of Alexander Pope’s Poetical Works, including his “Essay on Man,” plus standbys like Homer and Aesop and less reputable fare, such as Theophilus Lucas’s Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures of the Most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers. So, basically radicals and rogues, interspersed with the old reliables—exactly what you’d hope America’s first president would enjoy of an evening.

¶ Policy by the pages. One doesn’t have to look long or earnestly for references to the role books and authors play in the lives of politicians. Just browse any magazine about public affairs and the references sneak up on you, as with this tidbit from a James Parker piece on Ian Fleming:

Fame as the creator of James Bond, in combination with his old elite connections, would project Fleming back into the center of events. Senator John F. Kennedy, a huge fan, sought his counsel about Cuba.

Explains a lot.1

Back in 2011, Tevi Troy examined the literary legacies of presidents in the pages of the Washington Post. He looked at the bookish habits of founding presidents, such as Jefferson and Adams, but he also flipped the calendar to the present, including such notable chief executive readers as Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, all the way down to Barack Obama.

Partisans will bicker over the result, but Kennedy soon graduated from spy thrillers. In the White House, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. suggested weightier books for the president to read, and Michael Harrington’s The Other America galvanized Kennedy’s decision to create federal programs to combat poverty. Kennedy’s speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorenson read Dwight McDonald’s lengthy review in the New Yorker and began hyping the book. Copies of The Other America started buzzing around the office, along with its possible policy implications.

Moved by Harrington’s work—and possibly to defray liberal ill will over his tax cuts—Kennedy pushed his team to examine the issue. But with the president gunned down in Dealey Plaza just days later, the eventual War on Poverty fell to his successor, Lyndon Johnson (himself motivated by yet another book, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations by economist Barbara Ward).

Books regularly steer their readers into contentious and complicated waters, as President Nixon discovered—arguably too late.

¶ “I am not a book!” Nixon may not have a reputation as a reader; he’s famous for other reasons. But he was a dedicated bookworm. “I am not educated,” he told his staff during his farewell address in 1974, “but I do read books.” Lots of them, as it happens.

Citing the presidents memoirs, Troy mentions that Nixon “read Tolstoy extensively in his youth and even called himself as a ‘Tolstoyan,’” though some might regard him more like a character from Dostoevsky. We rarely live up to our aspirations, and sometimes, of course, we inadvertently live down to them.

Some years ago, journalist Andrew Ferguson undertook the fascinating project of reading through Nixon’s marginalia, annotations left in the books he owned. Historians have probed every nook and cranny of Nixon’s life for fodder, but Ferguson realized they’d ignored one trove of possible insight. “From what I could tell,” he says,

no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind.

Sure enough, Ferguson found a heavily inked biography of Tolstoy in the collection, along with other surprises. Nixon underlined as he read. “Marking up books was . . . a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read,” says Ferguson. “He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.”

Books whose marks reveal extensive engagement include a Charles de Gaulle treatise on statesmanship (not surprising) and “a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art” (more surprising). “Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading,” reports Ferguson.

Unlike John Adams, who bickered with his books in the margins—for instance, filling his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft‘s An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution with 10,000 words of his own—Nixon didn’t argue with authors. Instead, says, Ferguson,

he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).

Why one mark and not another? No one can say. “A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as ‘Why didn’t he burn the tapes?’”

Like all of us perhaps, Nixon tended to look for himself in his reading. One particular example from Ferguson’s adventures in the boxes stands out. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future U.S. senator and Nixon’s top domestic policy advisor, gave his boss a copy of Robert Blake’s 1966 biography Disraeli about one of Britain’s most remembered prime ministers from the Victorian era, Benjamin Disraeli.

Nixon devoured it and deeply identified with its subject, labeling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” It’s easy to see why, as Ferguson’s reading of the president’s marginalia attests. While Nixon publicly claimed the label for policy reasons, the deeper reason seems more personal.

Disraeli’s contemporaries viewed him as an outsider. Nixon felt that in his bones. When Blake’s biography discusses the disdain of Disraeli’s peers, Nixon’s pen went to work, bracketing and underling entire passages. “Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy,” wrote Blake, “inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.”

Nixon both bracketed and underlined that bit. Says Ferguson,

The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”

Nixon acted on what he read as well, going so far as to sack his entire cabinet after his rousing 1972 reelection because he feared his staff would grow complacent and ineffective. Disraeli warned of “exhausted volcanoes” and his biographer noted the danger of an “energetic administration“ beset by “accidents, scandals and blunders.” Nixon underlined it all and asked the whole lot to resign.

Books can remedy our character defects; they can also amplify them. “A book is like a mirror,” said German scientist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. “If a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” In trying to avoid “accidents, scandals and blunders,” Nixon wandered into them like a figure from Greek myth.

¶ Advocates for literacy. For better or worse (often worse), presidents are figureheads whose moves and moods influence the nation. As such, our chief executives have been roped into playing the role of reading advocate to the country’s children.

President Barack Obama leaned into the role. He made much of reading before taking office, made recommended reading lists during his time in office, and has kept it up in his post-presidency. Though less readerly than many others, President Trump also has a list of favorite books and indirectly gave us a wonderful hat.

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Bonus: Presidential Reading

The best biography I’ve read on Jefferson is ’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale University Press, 2022), which I reviewed shortly after it came out. Kidd’s book is chockfull of references to Jefferson’s bookishness. And, of course, there are several others that might scratch a similar itch for readers. For paid subscribers, here’s a little extra: a list of books on presidential intellectual life, centered on Jefferson and the founders.

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In the first …

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While I loved the libraries of my hometown and my public schools, I loved even more having my own books and keeping them. I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait for the big box from the Scholastic Book Fair to arrive on my teacher’s desk and for the teacher to pull my order out of the box, where they would sit in a pile on the corner of my desk until the school day was over.

My library-building had just begun.

Building Libraries

Just before I graduated from college as an English major, having already been accepted into a Ph.D. program, one of my English professors retired. She invited me to her house to take many—so many—of her books. Forty years later, I still have some of those books. They have been hauled from apartment to apartment, house to house, across state lines, and they now rest in my new library. More on that in a moment.

This was the start of my professional library. As a Ph.D. student, I didn’t have a permanent office, so most of my books were at home. When my husband, Roy, built a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our small home, I filled the shelves right away. When I received my first academic appointment and an office of my own, most of my books found a home in my office. As it turned out, that office wasn’t permanent either because my institution kept building and moving departments and offices. Still my books moved from office to office, being boxed and unboxed, time and time again.

Here are a just a few treasured books I own:

• A pop-up book my parents got me when I was five and getting my tonsils out

• The cheap paperback copy of Jane Eyre I read in high school

• Ditto for Great Expectations

• An abridged copy of Les Misérables in French from my high school French class.

• A 1776 two-volume, first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (given to me by professor when I completed my Ph.D.)

• An 1890 leather-bound edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

• 1907 editions of McGuffy’s Fifth and Sixth Readers

• A first edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

• Antiquarian sets of books by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, all given to me by friends

• A beautiful Oxford University Press two-volume set of the poetry of John Donne

• A first edition of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, given to me by a student

• A sizable collection of works by Vladimir Nabokov

It’s so nice to have these and a number of other collections finally together in one place!

By the time I finished twenty-four years of full-time teaching, half of my books were at home, and half were in my school office. Once again, at home (a different home by now), my husband had built me more floor-to-ceiling bookcases. In fact, we made one small room into a library. But even before I left my last academic position (and my last office), my books at home were piling up on the floor in the library we built in the house. Then in the spare room. Then everywhere.

When I left my last office, we hurriedly threw all the books in boxes where they sat in a trailer until we could make room for them at home. It was a big trailer.

The plan was to turn our spare bedroom into a second library. Roy started sizing things up and talking about things like “load-bearing walls” and “can’t attach a bookcase here” and “can’t attach a bookcase there,” and the dream died a little.

A Better Plan

Worried about space, I had one of my former students come over and we spent a day in the trailer sorting through all the boxes of books, putting some in boxes labeled “keep,” others labeled “sell.” My former student was as ruthless in helping me put many in the “sell” box as I needed her to be. I had about fifteen boxes marked “sell.” Most of them ended up at Goodwill.

In the midst of all this, a friend sent me one of those ubiquitous TikToks featuring a “she-shed” made into a library. “Roy needs to build one of these for you,” she said.

I showed it to my husband. “Wouldn’t you rather just build me a stand-alone library than renovate the room upstairs?” I asked, sort of kidding and sort of not. To my surprise, he said, “Yes.” As any builder will tell you, it’s easier to start from scratch than to remodel an old structure.

Coincidentally and conveniently, there was a large concrete slab on the side of our old house that had been used by previous owners as some kind of gardening work station. We had talked now and then about turning it into a patio of some sort, but had not done anything with yet, so it had mostly overgrown with foliage and weeds.

It was a perfect foundation for a shed. A large shed. A library.

My husband began drawing plans.

Extra Space

Now, when most people think of these shed libraries, they think of the videos showing cozy chairs or daybeds, frilly curtains, throw rugs, reading lamps, and a few bookshelves. These libraries are adorable. I get it.

But I needed shelves. Lots of shelves. Even when I had an office and more space for books, my books were never all together, so I didn’t always know if this particular book or that one was at home or at the office. I don’t even want to know how many minutes and hours I have spent looking for a book I knew I had but did not know where it was. It’s a lot. (I have a lot of duplicates for that reason.) I needed space to put my books in an organized way so I would know where they are.

Making space for a reading chair or working desk would take away precious shelf space. Moreover, my seating and workspace needs are very particular since being in an accident several years ago. And besides all that, when I work, my dogs are with me. So that requires room for me and room for them. I have plenty of places in my house for me, but not enough for my books. This library is for the books.

Because my books had never been in one location for all these years, I could only guess how much space would be needed for which categories. And now I would have not just the new library but the first one my husband built me in the house which had been long outgrown and needed to be repainted. This was all very daunting. Overwhelming, to be honest.

My husband designed and built. I picked out flooring and paint and lights and finish for the wood ceiling. That part was fun. My husband had planned to build the shelves, too, and we came up with a shelf-maximizing plan that would be aesthetically pleasing. (That wasn’t easy.) But then my husband’s school, which was undergoing a major renovation, was getting rid of some of their library shelves (solid wood, adjustable shelves), and we snagged them. My husband even surprised me completely by putting our long-discussed patio in front!

Building (and Arranging) the Priory

The physical moving and arranging of the books was the paralyzing part. (I have now estimated that my library has between 3,000 and 3,500 books. My next project will be building a digital database!)

All told, the project took more than two years. One year to build and finish (in my husband’s spare time), which was from approximately June 2024 to June 2025. It took me another year to organize and shelve the books (in my spare time).

Here are some of the steps we went through once the physical library was done.

1. July 2025. I have to empty the trailer of the boxed books because my husband needs the trailer back. I invite a neighbor kid over and we quickly unbox the books and put on the shelves in no order, just to get them unboxed and get the trailer empty.

2. August 2025. I move all the books off the shelves in my inside upstairs library into another upstairs room, stacked in piles, so my husband can repaint those shelves, and I can begin to see how many books I have in various categories and where they need to go.

3. I move all the books in my downstairs library into boxes to be moved either upstairs or into the outside library. (Did I forget to tell you I also have a very small library downstairs? That’s three separate spaces. I hope you see now why I was so overwhelmed!)

4. December 2025. I get another neighborhood kid to move the books from upstairs that need to go in the outside library out there, as well as moving the books downstairs that need to go upstairs. (Thank God for strapping young men!)

5. Now all my books are in the room (or at least the floor) where they need to be—at last.

6. I finally start to have a sense of how much space is needed for each category of books. (I will get to the categories below.) I know that the small space in my downstairs room will hold my antiquarian books because they are safest there and the aesthetics of the wood paneled room matches the books. Beyond that, I am stymied about how to divide my books between the outside shed library and the indoor upstairs library. This paralyzes me for a long time.

7. Finally, I decide to put all my novels, plays, poetry, and anthologies in the upstairs library. A friend gives me the word for this. She calls it my “leisure library.” Yes! That’s it. This means the outdoor library is my “research library.” There is some overlap, quite a bit actually, but in the end, I decide based on use and aesthetics. (Are my Norton Critical editions research or leisure? It could go either way, but I decide on leisure based on use and aesthetics.)

8. January 2026: I visit my brother in Florida and my husband paints the shelves in the upstairs library while I’m gone.

9. January 2026. I spend a winter day putting all my fiction (that takes up a wall in my upstairs library) in alphabetical order in the leisure library. That’s fun. In that same library, I group smaller collections of poetry and drama and particular, special authors (like Flannery O’Connor) on the other wall, in groups but not in alphabetical order.

10. May 2026. I enlist two former students (both English majors) to come over one day to unbox, organize, and shelve the books that are sitting in the research library. I use subject groupings because this is how I use the books and think about them. Here are the categories, roughly, not exhaustive but close:

• Literary criticism

• Reading (books on books and on reading)

• Aesthetics, art, and beauty

• Writing (technique, craft)

• English literature: Old English, Middle English, Renaissance, seventeenth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, the novel (history and criticism), Victorian, Modern

• Classical literature and philosophy

• Church fathers

• Virtue ethics

• Philosophy

• Biblical studies

• Theology

• Cultural criticism

• Animal welfare and creation care

• Vocation

• Newer, uncategorized Christian living books (all lumped together for now)

11. July 2026. Roy hangs things on the wall. I place an antique chair I buy on a whim in a local shop in the corner and a little secretary desk I found online in the other corner.

12. September 2026. Roy makes and hangs a sign above the door of my library, now named The Priory.

Welcome to The Priory. It took a village and a lifetime to make.

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