A book club in a former speakeasy under North Broad Street

Somebody is reading a hardback on their lap, on an orange stool, in a bar, with a drink going warm on the table beside them. Harry Hayman took the photograph at his book club, which meets in a basement under North Broad Street that used to be an actual speakeasy, and the picture makes a case that is easy to miss.

Where Harry Hayman’s book club meets

Foundation sits under the Divine Lorraine Hotel at Broad and Ridge, reached by a staircase down from the pavement. It was opened by the chef Natalie Maronski and Robert Del Femine, and it is one of three basement rooms created underneath the building when it was brought back.

The room has a history that suits it. The basement of the Divine Lorraine held a real speakeasy during Prohibition, reached through a hatch in the Broad Street pavement. The current bar is built around a professional recording studio of roughly seven hundred square feet, which is a strange and excellent thing to put a cocktail bar around.

The building above it is the one everybody in Philadelphia recognises, the terracotta hulk that stood ruined and covered in graffiti for decades and became the emblem of North Broad in both of its phases, abandoned and restored.

The case for book clubs, which is not about books

A book discussion club is a strange institution when examined directly. Adults volunteer to be assigned homework, then meet on a schedule to be examined on it by their friends. Described that way nobody would join one.

What it actually is, is a standing appointment with people, wrapped around a reason to talk about something other than work. That is the part that matters and the part that is hard to build any other way once people are past a certain age.

The adult friendship problem is well documented and rarely solved. Friendships in adulthood need repetition and a shared activity, and most people have neither on a schedule. A book club supplies both: a fixed date, and a subject that is neither gossip nor careers. The book is a pretext. A good pretext, but a pretext.

The second thing it does is quieter. It makes people finish things. Almost everybody has an unfinished stack, and almost nobody feels good about it. A date in the diary and eight people who will ask is a completion mechanism that no reading app has managed to replicate.

The audiobook confession

Harry Hayman’s admission about his own reading is the honest bit, and worth repeating because it embarrasses people who should not be embarrassed: he did a chunk of it while gardening, listening rather than reading, and it did not suck.

Audiobooks still carry a faint charge of cheating, as though the words only count when they go in through the eyes. That distinction does not survive much thought. Stories were spoken for several thousand years before anybody read one silently. The book club does not care which route the story took to get into your head, only whether you turn up having taken it.

There is also a practical point about time. The reading is competing with everything else. Somebody who reads while weeding a bed or walking a dog is reading books that would otherwise not get read at all, and the group discussion is exactly the same discussion.

Why a bar is the right room

The second photograph is a sixteen ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon on a concrete table with two Godzilla themed coasters and a shot of whiskey beside it. That is not the imagined setting for a literary evening and it is the correct one.

A bar removes the two things that kill a book club. It removes hosting, which means nobody has to clean a house or provide food and nobody feels bad about the state of their kitchen. And it removes the seminar atmosphere, because nobody performs an interpretation of a novel with a shot in front of them.

Philadelphia is well supplied with rooms that do this. Foundation is a basement with good acoustics under a landmark. The surrounding stretch of North Broad now has enough places open at night to make a standing appointment easy to keep, which was not true fifteen years ago.

That is the civic version of the argument, and it is the one Harry Hayman keeps making about neighbourhood venues. A city with plenty of ordinary rooms open in the evening gets more of these small institutions, because a book club needs somewhere to meet, and a walking group needs somewhere to end, and a monthly card game needs a table.

What a standing date does over years

The most underrated thing about a group like this is duration. A book club that survives five years has produced something no single event can: a set of people who have watched each other’s lives change, in the background, one book at a time.

Somebody changed jobs between two novels. Somebody had a child. Somebody moved and kept coming anyway. None of that is the stated purpose, and all of it is the actual output.

There is also a quiet form of intellectual range in it. Left alone, most people read within a narrow band. A group forces a rotation through things nobody would have chosen, and a reasonable share of those turn out to be the ones people remember. Being made to read something is one of the few remaining ways an adult gets surprised on purpose.

The book in the photograph, deliberately unnamed

The hardback in the picture is open at a chapter headed LAND, and the visible page has a character called Liam walking towards a house. That is as much as the photograph gives up, and it is as much as this post is going to claim.

Naming the book from two blurred pages would be a guess, and a guess printed as a fact is how small errors get into circulation and stay there. Harry Hayman did not say which novel it was in the note that accompanied the photographs, so the novel goes unnamed until he does.

That restraint is worth stating out loud because the temptation runs the other way constantly. A specific title would make the post better. It would give readers something to look up, something to argue with, a reason to comment. Every incentive points towards filling the gap with something plausible.

The gap stays. A post that gets a book title wrong is a post that has quietly told its readers that its other details are also approximate, and the other details in this one are not.

The recommendation

Join one, or start one. The bar for starting is lower than it looks: four people, a date every month, and a book nobody gets to veto.

Meet somewhere that is not anybody’s house. Let people listen to it if that is what fits their week. And do not be precious about whether everybody finished, because the ones who did not still turn up, and turning up was the point.