'The Very Model of the Bookstore'

Shelf Awareness

On Facebook yesterday, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore noted: "Renowned legal scholar/former UChicago professor/Co-Op member Cass Sunstein wrote what he calls a 'love letter' to our store for the Chicago Tribune. Touched, honored, misty-eyed--we are all of these things and more."

Cass Sunstein at Seminary Co-Op

Sunstein stated that "Hyde Park's Seminary Co-op Bookstore is not merely a bookstore. It is a community. It is a small town. It is a church, a sacred place. The air is cleaner there, and the people are more gracious, and they move more slowly. It is defined by quiet, and by gentleness, and by respect. No one disturbs anyone there. When they talk, they tend to whisper."

Recalling his introduction to the bookshop in 1981, Sunstein noted that a colleague had recommended the "Sem Co-op" as the best thing about the University of Chicago: "Of course I had no idea what a 'Sem Co-op' might be, and I had never heard of Jack Cella--and I was properly intimidated by both. A week later, I discovered the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, and I was able to see, at his small desk on the right as you enter the store, the famous Jack Cella....

"After a few years, I was privileged to get to know Cella, who retired just last year. He was the general manager of the Seminary Co-op, but he was (and is) much more. The gentleness of the store--its humility, its civility, its seriousness, its importance without self-importance, its absence of self-display, even its calm air--seemed a direct extension of the man, a part of his soul....

"The Seminary Co-op was, and is, a place of refuge, a port in a storm. Whenever I have been away from Chicago for a period, it is among my first destinations, and the one I look forward to most.... It's the very model of the bookstore, and in its quiet way, it's also a house of worship."