Lamenting the Loss of Museum Bookstores

Cafe Society
1

I know it’s an old topic, but I really do miss bookstores. We currently have Barnes and Noble and a few Books A Million/BAM stores, and a handful of independents and used bookstores (often the same thing), but it’s a far cry from what we had even ten tears ago, let alone twenty.

But, in particular, I miss the bookshops that were in museums.

It didn’t used to always be that way. The American Museum of Natural History had a tiny gift shop for many years near the 77th St. Foyer that had a few books in it. The Boston Museum of Science Giftshop back in the 70s was anemic.

But around thirty years ago the gift shops got much, much bigger, and the book sections in some cases became enormous. The Book Store at the Smithsonian , Washington, DC was damned near cavernous, running several rooms. The American Museum of Natural History built an entirely new, two-level bookstore, with stair railings made to resemble dinosaur vertebrae. The Boston Museum of Science developed a pretty hefty book section, subdivided into categories, and with surprisingly technical books in it. I actually bought a copy of Gradshteyn and Ryzhik’s Table of Integrals and Series there. And they had a “Beyond Science” section filled with weird pro- and anti- pseudoscience. I loved it.
Now that’s all gone. The Boston Museum of Science doesn’t even have a real book section any more, and only offers a handful of titles. The Smithsonian gift shop is minuscule compared to its former glory, with only a corner devoted to books.

Aside from the American Museum of Natural History, which still had its grand bookstore the last time I visited, the only museums with appreciable bookstores are Art museums – the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city still had a huge one when last I was there, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts devotes most of its gift store space to a wide and diverse selection of books.

Most museums I’ve been to have relatively small gift stores these days, it seems, and only a tiny portion given over to books in the Age of Amazon. You’re more likely to find plush stuffed animals, keychains, and the like.

2

CalMeacham, you are aware that the Smithsonian consists of 23 locations, aren’t you? Even if we don’t count the Gardens and the two buildings in New York City, that’s 20 locations in the Washington area with buildings. I’ve been to a few of them and bought stuff in their bookstores, but I can’t say how many have bookstores. Why then do you talk about the Smithsonian gift shop, as if there is only one of them?

3

Museum bookstores when they have them are great, agreed!

Sadly, in these quarantine times, even in the museums where they have good ones, even when those museums reopen, my colleagues in the museum world all tell me that the bookstores and cafes will be the very last things to reopen. Some museums may reopen in a limited way this fall. The bookstores won’t reopen until mid-2021, most likely.

4

I wonder if the decrease in the number and size of museum bookstores has some relation to a nested set of changes in shopping. Is this decrease just part of the decrease in the number and size of bookstores of all kinds? That decrease seems to be partly because it’s now so easy to buy books online. Is that decrease just part of the decrease in the number of stores of all kinds? That decrease seems to be partly because it’s now so easy to buy most things online. Is that decrease just part of the decrease in the amount of time that people use to go away from their house to do things with other people in all sorts of activities? This is less obvious to people as old as me, but I’m told that younger people socialize physically with other people less than they used to, since it’s now possible to do many kinds of socializing online. It’s useful to look at things in a larger context. The idea of no one ever having to leave their own room goes back as least as far as “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster in 1909.

5

National archives sells books in their gift shop.

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Is this really true? I’ve been inside many art and history museums within the past year (previous to the Trump Plague) in NYC, Chicago, Berlin, Dresden, and Prague, and dumped tons of hard-earned money in the gift shops on wonderful books.

The Neue Galerie in Manhattan, devoted to German and Austrian art, has one of the best. Not only art books but books on Teutonic culture, cinema, history, architecture, folklore. Plus a great selection of literature. I bought my entire library of Arthur Schnitzler there.

I used to laugh at people who bought postcards of paintings in those shops. Then I realized they make GREAT bookmarks that you can pair to appropriate fiction. Right now I have Von Stuck’s Sin in my copy of Maurice Level’s Tales of the Grand Guignol and Max Klinger’s The New Salome in a collection of Woolcott Gibbs’s best essays from The New Yorker.

7

I bought a T shirt with the picture of Elvis and Nixon at the national archives. They said it was their most requested picture. Here it is:

8

The New York Public Library has a nice one. You can sign up for a tour, so I kind of count it as a museum. The Tenement Museum does also. Their books are specialized, and there are fewer categories than the Museum of Natural History store, so they are smaller.

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I stumbled across the bookshop in the Library only a couple years ago, and was surprised that a library would have a bookshop. It’s a great one, though. Got a history of the US Army printing cheap books for the edification and entertainment of troops during WWII.

I found the Tenement Museum a kind of dreary, as one of my first apartments in the city was only a couple blocks away, so it was uncomfortably familiar. Good bookstore, anyway. Considered buying one of the immigrant cookbooks, but I already have enough of that sort of thing.

10

Here’s an anecdote.

The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester used to have half a long wall dedicated to a phenomenal selection of art books, mostly on art history because it’s a teaching museum. In the past couple of years that’s been eliminated and replaced by a few books on display.

I make a point of visiting museum bookstores because, well, because they have books in them. (Put me down anywhere and I’ll find the nearest shelf of books.) But also because they had books that I would never see anywhere else. I haven’t been finding them as interesting lately. I don’t doubt for a moment that what Cal says is a general occurrence.

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I would like to see some numbers though. I want to know facts like (in the U.S.) the number of museum bookstores in year N as opposed to the number of museum bookstores as of the beginning of the year 2020. I want to know facts like (in the U.S.) the total number of books in those bookstores in year N as opposed to the total number of books in those bookstores at the beginning of the year 2020. Yes, I know that this would be hard to determine. Still, that’s what we do here on the SDMb - we determine the hard facts about things that otherwise there’s only anecdotes about. Incidentally, there’s a group called the American Alliance of Museums:

https://www.aam-us.org/

12

The Art Institute of Chicago has a huge one. The National Gallery (London) has a huge main bookstore with a few small satellite ones throughout the building.

It’s been a couple years since I’ve been at the bookstore at the Field museum, but they had a very good general bookstore along with a couple of satellites which were more souvenir shops than bookstore.

Not doubting the OP, but they’re not extinct yet and probably a good money maker, I can see a correlation between museum goer and reader.

13

Haven’t been to MOMA since the remodeling, but it had a pretty good bookshop before.

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My anecdote challenges your anecdote! Pistols at dawn!

In other words…yeah, what WW said.

It’s possible that fine museums in smaller cities have cut back on the book selection, but I doubt it in Paris or Vienna or London.

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I notice that the museums that people say have lots of books are Art Museums, which pretty much confirms what I’d written in the OP – I’ve observed that big Art Museums still seem to have big bookstores. But it’s the other museums that scaled back very significantly. The only exception I’m personally aware of is the AMNH. (Exapno – sorry to hear about the Rochester String Memorial Art Gallery cutting back. Although, when I lived there, they didn’t have much of a bookstore. )

And, Uke – I certainly know that the Smithsonian is a complex. The cavernous bookstore I recall from the early 90s was the History museum. On recent visits the same museum has only a couple of racks of books, a far cry from its earlier status. Do any of the other museums (aside, possibly, from the art museums) still have bookstores of any size?
I haven’t been to a lot of the other museums in large cities recently – the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, the Field in Chicago, the LA Science Museums, and so on. But the ones I’ve visited have been pretty anemic in their bookstore offerings:

Boston Museum of SCience
The McAuliffe-Carpenter Planetarium in Concord NH
The NY Science CEnter (in New Jersey)
The National Park Visitors CEnter in Salem MA
The National Park Vistors CEnter at the Old State House Boston
The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia
The Smithsonian (National History) Museum
The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Other museums had bookstores that never were that big. A very few have actually increased, but they were really small (The Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem MA)

16

I’m not the only one noticing this, apparently:

The article is from 2011. And I notice that they’re concentrating on art museums, not the science and history museum bookstore that I have seen as particularly devastated.

17

I can’t compare because the only time I was there was a couple years ago but I indeed don’t even remember seeing the gift shop let alone any books in it.

The Museum of Science, on the other hand, does have a physically-small yet variety-filled gift shop, but I don’t remember how many books there were as I was looking for a gift for my 2-year-old nieces.

18

The Houston Museum of Natural Science reopens today(with distancing, face masks, etc.) - don’t know about the gift shop. But I can’t see why not. They won’t have bus loads of kids on field trips so there’s no way they would be crowded, and buying a gewgaw at a gift shop is no more dangerous than getting a gallon of milk at Kroger.

In the late 90s they had a decent book aisle, though almost half were kids books about dinosaurs. When I went back two or three years ago they had just a few books on one table and everything else was T-shirts and trinkets.

19

Art vs. History.

The Imperial War Museum in London has a spectacular bookshop. Bought a bunch of fascinating Great War histories there in 2018, the Armistice centennial.

Didja know the British Army imported millions of fierce Cossacks so quickly that they still had snow on their boots when they entered the English trains? Didja know the German Army actually believed that bullshit?

20

National Gallery of Art in DC has a big gift shop with lots of books.