At its height Baker Books hosted more than half a dozen reading groups, all meeting monthly in the Bean & Leaf Café. The store published what they were reading, on the reasonable theory that a title good enough for one group is worth suggesting to another.
How the store supported them
The support was mostly practical and cost the shop very little.
- A room, free. The café had tables and closed later than the shop floor got busy. A group needs somewhere that is not somebody's living room and not a chain coffee shop; a bookshop café is exactly right.
- A discount tier. Book groups were given the same discount the store extended to teachers and non-profit organisations — a straightforward recognition that a group buying eight copies of the same title every month is a different customer from a browser.
- Stock planning. This is the invisible one and the one that matters most. If a shop knows in September what six groups are reading in March, it can have the copies. A group that cannot get eight copies of its chosen title in time chooses a different book, and eventually stops choosing.
- Suggestions. The published lists doubled as a recommendation engine — a group stuck for a next title could see what the others had picked.
What they read
The published selections were dominated by contemporary literary fiction of the kind that rewards discussion: novels built around a moral question or a divided family rather than a plot. Colum McCann's Dancer, which tells Rudolf Nureyev's story entirely through the people around him, is a characteristic choice — a book whose structure is itself worth an hour's argument. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is another kind of characteristic choice: a novel about a woman's doubts over her own capacity to mother, which is precisely the sort of subject a group of people who know each other well will take apart properly.
The pattern across the lists is consistent. Groups chose books with an argument in them — inheritance, obligation, class, illness, migration, the distance between parents and children — and largely avoided both genre plotting and the difficult experimental end. That is not a failure of ambition; it is a correct reading of what a group of eight people can usefully do in ninety minutes.
Starting one
The practical shape that worked here is worth writing down, because groups fail for boringly consistent reasons. Six to ten people, which is small enough that everyone speaks and large enough to survive absences. A fixed monthly date rather than a negotiated one. A venue that belongs to nobody in the group. Titles chosen at least two months ahead so the copies can be got. And a rotating chair, so the same person is not permanently responsible for having something to say.
The commonest failure is choosing the next book at the end of the meeting, when everyone is tired and agrees to whatever is suggested loudest. The second commonest is choosing something too long. The store's published selections were, almost without exception, novels of moderate length with an argument in them — which is not a coincidence.
Why bookshop groups work
Library book groups and bookshop book groups both work, and they work differently. A library group is free, open and often large; a bookshop group is small, self-selected and buys its books. What the bookshop version gains is continuity of supply and the presence of booksellers who can suggest the next title from actual knowledge — and what the shop gained, beyond the sales, was six or eight groups of committed readers with a standing monthly reason to walk through the door.
The American Library Association publishes the standard guidance on running reading groups, and the American Booksellers Association covers the bookseller side of supporting them. Both are worth reading if you are starting one.
Related programmes
Book groups were the participatory end of a spectrum that also included the Open Book Series discussions with authors, the Hot Topics non-fiction evenings, and the favourite-books lists, which were explicitly compiled with book groups in mind as a source of next titles.