contact@bigdealbooks.com

Mission Statement (2005)

Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience -- the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the individual artist's absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others. It's what makes a director insist on a retake even when he knows he's going to be penalized for it; it's what makes young dancers drop from exhaustion; it's what made Caruso burst his throat. You have to believe in the audience, and believe that your peak effort just barely makes you worthy of it. That's implicit when an artist says he does it "because he has to," and even when he says he did it "just for himself."

An artist's sense of honor is founded on the honor due others. Honor in the arts -- and in show business, too -- is giving of one's utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic. The audience one must believe in is the great audience, the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work -- the audience one is still a part of. As soon as an artist ceases to see himself as part of the audience -- when he begins to believe that what matters is to satisfy the jerk audience out there -- he stops being an artist.

(so much for the art of the thing, we'll cover the business part later -- with grateful acknowledgement to Pauline Kael)    

Who We Are.

Thanks for visiting bigdealbooks.com. We've not reopened for business yet, but we are busy getting ready.

We're a loose knit team of hard working, passionate people with a broad range of experience and interests. We're laying bricks of another sort and we're going to leave the place better than we found it, where we can (working on a novel data/web development platform that will improve the human condition, etc.)

After multiple interuptions, we're continuing work on the format originally begun in 2005. We believe that bigdealbooks.com will bring with it a new community oriented and interactive way of book selling, sharing of interests, and idea exchange -- those very qualities arguably imperiled by the vast sea change in publishing and conventional bookselling over recent years.

We aspire to offer another way of doing things with a category whose form is in some need of revalidation :

"The driving force of all of this is the acceleration of our culture. The old days of browsing, the old days of a person coming in for three or four hours on a Saturday and slowly meandering, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems they wanted, are pretty much over. If you go to the Strand or Micawber Books today, it's a whole different gear, where society wants satisfaction and fulfillment now."

-- Logan Fox, formerly of Micawber Books in Princeton, N.J.

 Things are changing --

  -- updates on this page 

Our Business

The foundation of Big Deal Book Store and bigdealbooks.com is volume online book selling which supports ongoing market and media research as well as media production and web development.

We buy and sell books wholesale and retail
   -- new, used, rare and collectible --
with concentration and emphasis on volume,
quality content, and value pricing.

We are evolving with and adapting to dramatic and well publicized industry change with broad aims including publishing web-to-print and quality print-on-demand as long term objectives, among others.

Offices and distribution (including international shipping) from Madison WI, Minneapolis, and Chicago.

Walk-in retail space formerly located in Madison is currently undergoing relocation and reconstruction.

Implicit to this major transition is deliberation on a strong, committed, and definitive local and regional identity in service to an esteemed universal audience.