At the beginning of the year, a new bookstore opened in Denver. It caused something of a stir locally because one of its founding owners was Kwame Spearman, a widely reviled figure in the area who is best known for helping to scuttle the (admittedly already sinking) grand old ship that was Tattered Cover, once the state’s largest independent bookstore, now a Barnes & Noble joint. A moment of silence for Tattered Cover.

I love books and I love gossip, so I feasted on stories, posts, and comment section tea about the new bookstore for a good week. During this time I stumbled on a newsletter by McKenzie Watson-Fore, a fellow Colorado writer, in which she responded to Denver Book Society positioning itself as a “community hub” and explored why businesses claiming to be third spaces rankled her.

In the newsletter, she asked:

To what extent do we require our commercial entities to weigh in on matters of morality? I mean, a bookstore is not a public institution—and maybe this is one of my problems with the thoughtless embrace of “third space” language. A bookstore is a business, and I worry about the ways we’ve projected demands for moral purity onto businesses.

I nodded along to most of her arguments. On one hand, she was skeptical of business owners making baseless claims about community leadership for cultural capital: “I want a bookstore that’s actually rooted in community, not just masquerading as such,” she wrote. On the other hand, she was critical of consumers who demand moral correctness from local businesses, and who “shop their values” as a way of performing that correctness themselves. “[D]ollars are dollars,” she wrote. “They’re not Morality Tokens. They’re not betting chips we can stash away to barter for a better world.”

Yes, I found myself thinking, but.

But what? I agree that it’s illogical and hypocritical to hold our local businesses to impossible ethical standards when we are all, ultimately, participants in the same rotten system. I agree that the primary function of, say, a hardware store should be to sell tools, and that any positive contribution the store’s owners make to the community will not be through selling tools but through their non-capitalist participation in civic life. But.

But books are different.

When I buy a screwdriver, its value is exercised only during the purchase (in the money it costs) and while it is in use (in the tasks it helps me perform). For most of its existence, a screwdriver sits dormant in a toolbox, a vaguely positive presence in terms of its potential uses but otherwise, functionally, nonexistent. When I buy a book, however, its value is unquantifiable. Before I read it, the book contains the promise of a story or an idea I will soon get to explore. While I read it, the book beams knowledge, images, questions, and emotions directly into my head. And when I’m done reading, those impressions don’t get slurped back into the book to sit neatly contained on the shelf—they stay with me. They are mine to keep.

While a screwdriver augments the functions of my body during a specific task, a book augments the boundaries of my imagination forever. I will always carry the emotional scars inflicted on me by Manda Scott’s gorgeous Boudica novels. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth has permanently altered the way I think about writing. My approach to climate action has the indelible mark of Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up a Pipeline. In different ways, when I read a good book I am changed, changed utterly.

There is a reason why book burnings and book bannings elicit strong emotional responses from people, why recent reports of Anthropic destructively scanning books to train its AI models have generated such widespread disgust. Books carry profound meaning. The objects—just a bunch of paper glued together—are themselves powerful symbols. To destroy a book is to enact violence on the ideas it carries, to snuff out the entire world contained within its pages.

Likewise, there is a reason why the mere act of entering a bookstore can feel so thrilling. If each book contains a new world to explore, then the shelves are laden with uncounted universes. Running my fingers along the spines of a bookshelf is, I think, the closest I’ll ever get to direct contact with the infinite—what some might call God.

Books change the people who read them, for better or worse. People who like reading and who appreciate the value of books are going to seek out friends, colleagues, and lovers who share their taste: A girl currently working her way through bell hooks’s oeuvre is not likely to hit it off with a guy who says The Fountainhead is one of his favorite books of all time. I think we readers feel the same way about bookstores. We want booksellers to share our values, not because we get morality points for patronizing their business but because they’re selling stories, ideas, and viewpoints that augment the imaginations of our community for the better.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that my preferred kind of bookseller is someone who only sells queer feminist environmentalist anticapitalist literature, that it’s bell hooks or bust. Every bookstore everywhere is probably going to sell The Fountainhead, and that’s fine. But the stores I fall in love with, that I make a point of returning to, are the ones that highlight and celebrate books that invite readers to imagine a better world. They’ve got Black History Month displays; they’ve got Pride Month displays; they showcase translated works by authors of color just because; they help bring bell hooks back onto the bestseller list as a fun little fuck-you to J.D. Vance. They know that books change the people who read them, and they try to use this power for good.

It took a while, but I finally paid a visit to Denver Book Society last month. Taped to the front door was a poster promoting an event with the cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was performing in Denver. I suspected this bookstore and I were not going to be friends, and a quick perusal confirmed that suspicion. The layout was strange, the selection was a bit limited, and in the back of the shop was a sizable display of Harry Potter books. (Listen, like The Fountainhead, I know bookstores will never stop selling J.K. Rowling’s work completely. But to feature it so prominently was a clear signal that the booksellers were indifferent to the material harm Rowling has inflicted on trans people in the UK. That was a big turnoff for me, and I can only imagine it would be, at minimum, a source of discomfort for any trans people who came to the store.)

I left within five minutes. Partially because I didn’t find the specific books I was looking for, but mostly because the space felt empty to me. Not vibrating with the potential of new worlds to explore, not humming with the siren song of stories to lose myself within. I have brushed against the edges of infinity in many bookstores, but not this one. Its vision for the future was dull, cynical, commercial. It did not invite me to change, only to consume.

Perhaps there’s a bit of virtue signaling involved. Perhaps being choosy about bookstores is a way of performing moral correctness, of making myself feel better through frictionless and ultimately meaningless acts of capitalist “activism.” But there is also that un-ignorable feeling. The sense that a bookstore is either welcoming to marginalized people or not; that it’s owned by people who love and respect books or it’s not; that the worlds contained within are either compelling to me or not. Most of the time, the simple fact that a place contains a large number of books will be enough to tip it comfortably into the former category. It is hard for a bookstore to fail this vibe check. But when it does, there’s no reason for me to come back and try again. Not when there are so many other shelves to browse and so little time to do it in.

recommended reading

• “The extent to which the human heart seeks to create splendor in a place of certain doom cannot be hyperbolized.”

• On the (inevitable) enshittification of Airbnb: “[T]hese days, the average nightly cost in many cities is now within the range of a three-star hotel room. And for that, guests usually get worse service, worse bedding, and a side of uncertainty over what they might arrive to.”

• Underrated ways to change the world