We Booked Jeff Deutsch: The Director of the Seminary Co-Op Talks About His New Volume Celebrating Bookstores, Including The Hyde Park Institution

Jeff Deutsch/Photo: Anne Ryan

From NewCity Lit

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park is one of the world’s great academic bookstores. It has tens of thousands of volumes in stock. In 2018, the Sem Co-op sold 28,000 books. Of those, over 16,000 were titles that sold only one copy that year. “That means it’s one book, one title to one customer for the year,” says Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op who steered the flagship shop and its sister store, 57th Street Books (one of the city’s great neighborhood bookstores), from its former, unsustainable cooperative structure to not-for-profit status, effective in 2019. In the wake of competition from Amazon and other pressures, the famous store proved unviable as a business. University of Chicago President (now Chancellor) Robert Zimmer believed the store essential to the school’s place as a world-leading institution and committed the university to the Co-op’s retooling and financial rescue. Private donors also helped prop up the business. And the store’s co-op board voted to end its status as a cooperative and begin life as ...

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