We sat down with Mike Gustafson, co-owner of Michigan’s favorite book store

When you think of the University of Michigan, a variety of different spaces come to mind. Maybe you picture the Big House, the Union, maybe even Rick’s. But for a lot of students, there’s a somewhat new institution that’s quickly becoming an essential part of the Michigan experience.

It’s called Literati Bookstore, located at 124 E Washington St., and it’s become a haven for readers and writers alike, hosting greats like Marlon James, Angela Flournoy and so many more. You might know it as the place with the free-to-use typewriter, or the trendy Espresso Bar, but for many, Literati cannot be defined as simply bookstore. It’s a safe, calming space, where curiosity and a love of books are encouraged, and a symbol of the resilience of pen and paper in the face of a rapidly changing, increasingly technological world.

I sat down with co-owner Mike Gustafson to talk about what makes this local bookstore such an integral part of campus culture.

Talk me through your decision to open up Literati.

In 2011, I was living in Brooklyn with my then-fiance, Hillary, whom I’m now married to, and she was working for a publisher, Simon and Schuster, as an independent sales rep. I was a freelance writer and video producer, and she grew up in Ann Arbor and I have family in Ann Arbor and grew up in Michigan. Right about the time that we got engaged was also the time that Borders closed nationally, and part of our lifestyle in Brooklyn was going to independent bookstores for readings. And when Borders closed we thought that there would be an opportunity to open a bookstore that specialized in new, general books and did a lot of readings and author events and book clubs, right in the downtown area. Ann Arbor at the time had a lot of used bookstores and niche bookstores, but they didn’t have a store selling new books across a broad array of categories. So we thought there was a market opportunity, and Hillary began researching and working on her business proposal for about a year and then we moved to Ann Arbor in the middle part of 2012. It took us about six months to find a space downtown.

How do you think that your bookstore interacts with campus culture and Michigan students in general?

If the University of Michigan wasn’t here, I don’t think we would be very successful. And I say that because the University of Michigan has created a culture of curiosity and a culture of learning, a culture of social activism and a culture of localism that a lot of towns, especially in the Midwest, don’t have… We’re just a chapter in a very, very long book that Ann Arbor has written about its own culture of learning. What we do now is we try to partner with as many University of Michigan departments as possible. We try to reach out to as many undergraduates and graduate students as possible, whether that means partnering for events in the Humanities Institute, or we have a really good relationship with the Helen Zell Writer’s Program… That kind of outreach is invaluable for us. And the university attracts so many people who are interested in the written word.

What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your store or book selling in general?

I think a lot of our customer base already knows this, but I wish many more people in general—and this is something I’m guilty of as well—I wish people knew more about where their money goes when they purchase something. When people come in to buy a book at an independent bookstore—and it doesn’t matter if it’s in Ann Arbor or Seattle or Boston or wherever—much more of their money stays local. It helps create jobs. We started three years ago with seven employees and now we’re up to 16. We pay tens of thousands of dollars in local and state taxes. And I wish the public knew how much of their money actually stays in the community vs. when you buy a book online. There’s a really great study called “Amazon and Empty Storefronts” and basically what they determined was that either in 2014 or 2015 Amazon skirted around paying something like $685 million of state and local taxes, and they’ve created a net job loss of 135,000 jobs lost throughout the retail sector. When somebody buys a book from Literati, their money stays as much as possible within the community, whether that means hosting free events or giving back to local charities, or just job creation or taxes here, or creating the vibrant community that we’re so fortunate to be a part of.

You got over 300 candidates for positions at the store when you first opened. What do you look for when you hire?

It changes. Our bookstore constantly changes. It’s different now than it was six months ago and totally different now than it was two or three years ago, and so our needs change and what we look for in candidates change. We try to hire a broad array of different people with different reading interests. We try to hire people who can be experts in different categories. If we all were only poetry readers, we would have the best poetry section in the country but when somebody comes in and wants to browse our science section, we wouldn’t be able to help them.

Is there a book out on your shelves right now that you would recommend to Michigan students?

Just one, huh? I can’t give you three?

You can give me three.

That’s a great question. I want to get the right recommendation. When I was a student I was reading so much for different responsibilities I rarely read for fun. The first book I would recommend is called A Tale for the Time Being, and what I really liked about that book is it’s about a writer who lives on the Pacific coast, and she finds a bag holding a diary and the diary is written by a teenage girl who lives in Japan… It’s a beautiful book about living in the moment and it has a lot of Buddhist and zen themes that are prevalent throughout, but I think for a college-age student who can get so wrapped up in the pressures of being a student and the pressures of finding out who you are, A Tale for the Time Being is a great novel to read.

There’s also this great book called Sand County Almanac. What I love about that book is I think that we can all get caught up in wanting to see the world and wanting to travel and wanting to explore different regions, and wanting to just have a taste of everything out there, everything possible… What I love about a Sand County Almanac is it teaches you to look very, very closely at your immediate surroundings and observe. It’s about this conservationist Aldo Leopald and his observations walking around in the sand counties of Wisconsin, and primarily his backyard and the woods that are surrounding his house. The observations and the stories that he writes about in this book taught me that maybe you don’t have to necessarily travel the world in order to see the world. If you look very closely at a particular region over time, all you need is an eye to evoke adventure and story. I love that book and I wish I had read it earlier in my life.

A third book that I would recommend to anyone is a book called Desert Boys, and it’s by an MFA graduate here named Chris McCormick. What I love about Desert Boys is it’s a beautiful reflection about growing up, of both where you came from and maybe where you want to go, and feeling torn between those two places. I think it really hits home, especially for readers of a certain age. When I was in college, I was always torn between feeling sort of homesick and also wanting to get away from home as much as possible, and this book is about just that.

Your store has been extremely successful over the past few years in an economy that many people would say is really bad for bookstores and bad for paper books in general. How have you managed that?

First, I want to tackle the notion that book sales are decreasing; they’re actually increasing… That’s not a sustained trend, that’s just within the last two years. And then the amount of independent bookstores that are opening has also increased… Right around 2011 was when the nationwide story-line that the bookstore was dead was very prevalent. We were in our late twenties and we were looking around at our friends and ourselves and we were thinking, wait a second, no, the bookstore’s not dead. We’re still going to bookstores and we’re reading physical books and buying from independent bookstores, and our friends are doing that. We believed that there was this audience out there that maybe were as tired of looking at screens as we were.

Obviously looking forward for the next five to ten years, Amazon is opening up bookstores. We’re apprehensive about that, to see if that would affect our sales or not, but really we can only focus on what we do, and that’s providing a free space for people to go and browse books they might not otherwise discover through an online algorithm, or through what data research tells corporations about your shopping habits. We aim to be a place where people can surprise themselves, where people can meet their friends and talk about books and hear some of the best writers and authors in the entire world.