The Literary Dimensions of TikTok

Jonathan Vatner

This spring, writer Michele Filgate discovered that an essay anthology she edited, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence, was trending on Amazon—a surprise given that three years had passed since the book’s release by Simon & Schuster. But Filgate would soon learn what prompted fresh interest in the volume: a one-minute TikTok video in which a user named @ceciliabereading, also known as Cecilia Beard, professed her love for the book. The clip had been viewed more than a million times when Filgate saw it. Within days the book sold out and went into a second printing.

Filgate was overjoyed. That fifty-six-second testimonial, she says, did more for sales than any traditional review: “It gave a whole new life to my book.”

Since 2020 #BookTok, the hashtag that represents the book-loving community on TikTok, has emerged as a powerful force. “For books that start trending on the app, we could go from selling fifty to a hundred copies a week to selling eight to ten thousand copies a week,” says Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, where popular #BookTok titles are displayed prominently. But while young adult genre fiction has dominated #BookTok, literary titles like Filgate’s essay collection have recently been getting a boost. Literary novels have been particularly popular: The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, and Normal People by Sally Rooney have all trended on TikTok. Literary fare is now so beloved, in fact, that it has earned its own hashtag: #literarytok.

Beard began reviewing books on Instagram (#bookstagram) in 2019 and came to TikTok in 2021. A few of her videos went viral early on, but her impassioned pitch for What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About collected more views than all her previous clips combined—1.7 million as of this summer.

“It’s very apparent how earnest I am about loving this book,” Beard says. “That’s something I admire about #BookTok: Emotion really resonates with people and pushes them to read books.”

Indeed, on TikTok strong feelings are gold. “The joke has been that if you cry about a book, it will go viral,” says Felicity Vallence, associate director of digital and social media marketing for Penguin Young Readers.

Vallence’s team joined TikTok in late 2019 and watched the platform explode in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now TikTok is part of the team’s larger social-media strategy, which involves outreach to 1,200 influencers through a newsletter and the distribution of advance reader copies, often with personal recommendations for users of TikTok and other platforms. In some cases they pay influencers to create content, Vallence says. Beard receives free books from publishers but says she is not paid.

“Our key focus is to work with influencers who want to read the book, enjoy the book, connect with the book,” says Vallence, who adds that although she focuses on young adult books, many literary titles from Penguin Random House have hit best-seller lists thanks to TikTok, including The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li.

For all their promise, #BookTok and #literarytok may be a mixed blessing for literary authors, who may welcome new attention to their work but feel burdened by the prospect of having to promote it on yet another social-media channel. Must writers invest hours a day making videos for a new digital platform? Vallence says no: “If it is not a passion for you, it will be evident in the content you create.”

Authors may also be able to effectively leverage TikTok by simply following active #BookTok users and responding to their posts. “When authors see my videos and engage with me in some way, that’s always meant a lot to me,” Beard says. “I make an effort to read their book.”

Still, some writers who were initially wary of TikTok have found success on the platform. Self-professed introvert Ayana Gray, for example, says she created a cover-reveal countdown for her young adult fantasy debut, Beasts of Prey, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers in 2021, “to show [my publisher] I was a good sport.” The video, which depicts her lip-synching to a series of songs, garnered 170,000 views. That success encouraged her, and now she uses the platform not only to promote her books, but also to educate viewers about racism.

While Gray has loved connecting with readers on TikTok, she admits there are downsides. Each clip can take hours to produce. And she has been trolled in the comments. “They forget you’re a human being when you’re on the internet,” she says of some TikTok users.

Mary Rasenberger, chief executive officer of the Authors Guild, advises writers to check with their publisher before sinking time into TikTok. She also has concerns about TikTok’s potential to enable book piracy: Some videos instruct viewers in how to read for free, she says. But overall Rasenberger is optimistic about the app.

“The more young people reading today,” she says, “the more readers there will be tomorrow.”

 

Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). He is the managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and teaches fiction writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

 

 

Telling #Stories: Can Social Media Make Us Better Writers?

by

Gila Lyons

8.12.20

It used to be that after a writer felt the spark of inspiration, she refined her idea in a period of incubation and reflection. She sat alone wrestling with her mind, wrangling phrases and plotlines and insight out of a chaos of ideas until she had something coherent, meaningful, beautiful, evocative, or affecting to share. She edited her work, and then others did, before it went out to the public. 

Now, almost as soon as an experience is had or insight flickers half-grasped, the impulse is to post a photo on social media, particularly Instagram, with a mini-essay caption to make quick wisdom and insta-meaning in service of clicks, likes, followers, and a steady online presence applauded by agents and publishers. What once might have been given weeks or years to develop into an essay or book can now be shared after five to ten minutes of photo editing and punchy writing. An agonizing process of deep work in isolation can be eschewed by posting a musing, a question, a little zygote of an essay on social media; within minutes the writer receives praise, shares, reinterpretations, questions, and—significantly—the flood of dopamine that comes from the approval of colleagues, family, friends, and strangers. 

Is this disruption from the solitary musing that has for so long characterized a writer’s life bad for literature, attention spans, and depth of inquiry, as some writers, such as Zadie Smith and Steve Almond, have argued? Or is this spontaneous, unedited expression a boon for the creative process, a further and inevitable evolution of literature as it has always grown and changed? And what of the platform it provides to writers who might not otherwise find one? Social media has democratized whose voices get heard, as young people, people of color, and writers in disabled and LGBTQ communities who may have been previously shut out of the traditional publishing world can now reach millions. 

Bemoaning changes in our technology as being bad for literature, attention, and writing is nothing new. In a 2008 article for the Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writer and professor of sociology Nicholas Carr reminded us that people once feared that writing itself would destroy intelligence and erode critical thinking skills; Socrates lamented its weakening of memory and worried that reading engendered a false sense of mastery of information. Many hundreds of years later, in 1882, when Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter to save him the migraines and muscle pains caused from writing by hand, one of his friends noticed his writing style had changed. “You are right,” Nietzsche wrote to his friend, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” According to Carr, media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler described that Nietzsche’s writing had changed from “arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” Sounds familiar.

While Instagram may threaten writers’ and readers’ sustained attention, proffering shallow truisms that lack nuance by design, in some ways maintaining a social media account can also help us pay more granular attention to our lives the way writing does, inspiring us to strive to capture the light falling just so on our green juice, or steam rising from the subway grates, as if we were Emily Dickinson gazing at a fly bumbling around her room. It can encourage us to give voice to the flashes of insight that alight in the grocery line—insights perhaps not meaty enough for a full essay (or that we might lack the time or stamina to develop into such) but plenty substantial for a post. 

A friend told me that only minutes after her other-worldly and completely immersive experience giving birth, while holding her brand-new daughter, her mind began to wander to how and when she’d compose the social media post describing the experience. Hours after her child was born, she was on Instagram. But, if not for Instagram, perhaps the experience would have gone undescribed, lost to the chaos of hospital visitors, leaking breasts, the first exhausting days, then weeks, then months of parenthood. 

Constructing the narrative of our lives through an Instagram account can help us to savor the beautiful mundanity of the quotidian and make meaning of the ceaseless flow of events, perceptions, and people that make up our lives. Less committal than a blog, quicker than an e-mail, and farther reaching than a newsletter, social media offers people who never wrote before a medium and incentive to pause, reflect, describe, and analyze, at least a little. Even if it’s dictating into a notes app on the phone rather than writing with paper and pencil, isn’t the act of stopping, of viewing life from a slightly removed perspective, of taking the time to translate something private and nascent for the public, the same no matter the medium or form or length? It’s a hard question to answer, as Instagram invites more of us to tell stories about our lives but can siphon our storytelling energies, creating a leak in the creative reservoir that used to build up enough pressure inside a writer to compel them to write. 

Social media can also narrow down our perspective to a screen six inches by three inches, causing us to miss the very things we as writers hope to capture. With our heads perpetually bent over our phones on the bus, in waiting rooms, in lines, we miss out on observing what’s around us, connecting with others, indulging in our own daydreams where boredom used to spark creativity. When we fill up previously empty time by scrolling the content of others, we escape our own anxieties, imaginings, desires, and heartaches, all of which are the fodder for writing. 

Recent studies have shown the value in boredom and daydreaming, when the brain, in the absence of external stimuli, digs through its own reserves. In William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life (Ig Publishing, 2019), author Steve Almond argues that “the abrupt proliferation of technological devices has offered us the illusion of a mass confessional. But our phones and laptops more often represent a refuge from the tribulation of our internal experience. We turn to them in moments of anguish, rewiring our brains to seek diversionary stimulations. The frantic beckoning of our feeds has thus become another market for distraction, an array of ‘platforms’ upon which we perform a market-ready version of our lives.” 

Another way social media can cause us to technologically bypass potentially rich thoughts and emotions is by encouraging us to view our experiences, notions, and feelings and even loved ones as “content,” branding our musings and inner truths rather than challenging or deepening them. In the stories of people I follow on Instagram, E brings her phone to an anniversary dinner and records her husband ordering his food. M videos guests at her son’s birthday party singing “Happy Birthday” to him as he leans over a strawberry with a candle in it (he doesn’t eat sugar). W stands in her bedroom in matching black underwear during her “me” time and shows her four hundred sixty-seven thousand followers how she dry-brushes her body to promote lymphatic drainage. I see these photos (in my own erstwhile “dead time,” now used for peering into the lives of others) and try to determine: Is capitalizing on every Instagram-able moment eroding our ability to engage deeply with our lives, which is so essential to good writing? But then I also know that we writers are already in the business of selling our inner experience, commodifying our inner lives by publishing work culled from private passions, bitterest disappointments, stealing away from wedding receptions, child-rearing, and hospital bedsides to compose our stories.  

I certainly didn’t start writing for money, or public recognition, or anyone else. I started keeping a diary when I was eight years old because it was how I talked to myself, understood my life and the world. Later it was how I slogged through existential anguish, sorted out what had meaning to me and what didn’t, and constructed a self I loved and whose perceptions I trusted. 

But when I started making money on my writing as a personal essayist, a shift in how I experienced my life began. A horrible case of poison oak had value if it would make a good essay, a devastating breakup could be turned into exposure and a few hundred dollars if I spun it right. Life’s blows were buffered by the creation of narrative. As Isak Dinesen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.” As a writing teacher once said, “Bad for life, good for writing.” 

In my experience as a nonfiction writer, ideas and creative impulses are now divided between fodder for in-depth reflective essays and posts to social media, which my agent encourages since we are shopping my memoir to publishers. Right now posts are easier than essays, especially as we’ve been quarantined without childcare for our one-year-old for the past several months. Last week I posted some photos of walking my baby into a lake for the first time and wrote about how much it meant to me to have the respite of that natural place. If not for the existence of social media, that might have been an essay, perhaps more deeply explored, more keenly observed, more fully thought through. But since Instagram was an option, I used it. I took six pictures, jotted some thoughts while my baby was playing next to me with a yellow ball, and posted it before he got tired of throwing and chasing the ball across our living room. Maybe it would have been a better piece, with more revelation, nuance, detail, and plot as an essay. Something aspiring toward Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse” or Barbara Kingsolver’s “High Tide in Tucson.” Or maybe it wouldn’t have been anything at all, lost to reheating black beans for dinner, moving the load of cloth diapers from washer to dryer, napping on the couch at the end of an exhausting day.  

Whether good or bad for writing—and the answer, for me, is likely a “both and”—social media isn’t going anywhere, and most writers aren’t staying off of it, especially now that we’re physically distancing. In fact almost no one is staying away, and perhaps because of that, more people are writing, are noticing, are observing and documenting than ever before. Now not just writers but entrepreneurs, high school students, sneaker influencers, exercise enthusiasts, cake artists, and empowerment coaches are telling their stories, and sharing theories and dreams, in their profiles online. 

Whether this changes literature as did the typewriter, printing press, and personal computer, or spurs a new genre of caption literature—micro essays that smack of an influencer’s intention to sell, the character development and plotline arcing toward a perfect solution that happens to be the thing being sold by that Instagram account—remains to be seen. Already we’ve encountered stories written in one-hundred-forty-character installments on Twitter (David Mitchell’s The Right Sort, published in two hundred eighty tweets over the course of a week in 2014) and novels written in daily text messages designed to be read on a cell phone (popularized in Japan, keitai shousetsu, Japanese for “cell phone novel,” are characterized by daily or weekly chapters of sometimes no more than fifty words of minimalist yet emotion-laden haiku-like prose). And still, books are being published on paper and becoming best-sellers, essays are opening minds, and poems are restoring souls. 

The medium evolves. Styles change. But the impetus behind writing, behind literature, stays the same. Day after day, as people log on to their social media accounts composing little treatises as tweets and captions and status updates, they are trying to explain, as every writer is at their core: This is who I am; this is what I’ve seen; this is what I think and feel; this is what has made me me.

 

Gila Lyons’s writing about health and social justice has appeared in the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; Cosmopolitan; Health; Salon; and other publications.  

An Indie Alternative to Amazon?

by

Gila Lyons

12.11.19

The past few years have been rocky for Chris Doeblin, owner and cofounder of Book Culture, four beloved independent bookstores in New York City. “Before Amazon we had a viable company. I made a decent living in New York City. We bought an apartment,” he says. “Twenty-five years later I’m on the verge of bankruptcy. Our stores can go out of business any minute.” Doeblin’s story is all too familiar to many bookstore owners, and if America’s online book-buying trends—specifically the retail dominance of Amazon—continue as they are, some industry forecasts suggest that the stress on independent bookstores will only increase. 

Entrepreneur and publisher Andy Hunter has a new idea for how to reclaim some of the ground lost to Amazon and direct it to support independent bookstores. In January, in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association and Ingram, he and a small staff will launch Bookshop (bookshop.org), a site that will offer indie bookstores, authors, and publishers a way to competitively sell their books online. Bookshop will also enable anyone—from “bookstagrammers” and celebrity book club hosts to book-review editors and authors themselves—to link to a point of purchase for a book without linking to Amazon. Hunter, who is cofounder of Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, and CrimeReads, hopes the site will provide independent bookstores with “a unified e-commerce strategy that is as fast and user-friendly as Amazon” and, with it, a means of continued survival.

Here’s how Bookshop plans to work: Interested parties will sign up as affiliates with the site. Anyone can be an affiliate, including authors, reviewers, publishers, and media sources. There will be no cost to participate. When affiliates link to a title on Bookshop, they will receive 10 percent of any sales that come from clicking through to Bookshop from their site. (Amazon gives 4.5 percent of sales to their partners). Another 10 percent of sales will go into a pool to be distributed equally among participating independent bookstores semiannually. “For example, if Bookshop’s sales are $4 million in six months, and we have two hundred partners,” Hunter says, “each partner will receive $2,000.” If independent bookstores link to Bookshop—the bigger site promises a larger audience than the shop would connect with on its own, as well as other conveniences—they will receive a 25 percent commission of a sale directly. (Most bookstores typically make 40 to 45 percent when they sell a book online themselves.)

Of the rest of the revenue on a sale, Hunter says the publisher gets about 50 percent, Bookshop gets 5 to 10 percent to cover costs, and the rest goes toward processing and shipping the book. Ingram, the country’s largest wholesaler, will fulfill all orders and provide two- or three-day shipping, customer service, and a competitive return policy. Hunter uses his own experience at Literary Hub to speak to the site’s benefits for its partners: “All publications who review books need affiliate revenue for their coverage. Literary Hub’s network has 3.5 million visitors per month,” Hunter says, “and we don’t have affiliate revenue because we won’t link the books we write about to Amazon. So we’re leaving tens of thousands of affiliate dollars on the table.” 

Bookstores with successful online sales platforms, like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, will likely not participate, and Hunter says Bookshop will do all it can to avoid competing with them. Instead, Bookshop intends to target Amazon customers who are not currently buying from independent bookstores and to direct them there, particularly by working with major media outlets to link to their site rather than to Amazon. “We are actively doing everything we can to drive people to independent bookstores,” Hunter says, noting that every Bookshop receipt will include information about local bookstores based on zip code. When customers log in to Bookshop.org, they can choose to  subscribe to a local bookstore’s newsletter. Hunter posits that if Bookshop captures just 1 percent of the $3.1 billion in annual U.S. book sales going to Amazon, that would represent $31 million, a cut of which would represent a substantial payback to struggling brick-and-mortar stores. 

The owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, Danny Caine, says he is excited to have a centralized outlet that is not Amazon to which to link. “Anything we can do to resist Amazon and fight back, we’re going to enthusiastically participate in,” he says. “It seems like a tall order to compete with Amazon without competing with indie bookstores, but if they can do it, I’m all for it.” 

Doeblin of Book Culture is a little more cautious. “It’s a nice gesture, but I’m skeptical of their ability to produce the results they’re talking about based on the limits of the market,” he says. “Amazon has closed tens of thousands of retail stores in America, and before that, Walmart did the same thing. American consumers shop with price in mind more than anything else. Still, we struggle on because just enough people choose to shop indie and shop local.”

Hunter remains steadfast. “I’m trying to create sustainable models for advocating for the culture that I love and feel indebted to, which is the culture around books. We need to make sure the people selling books are safe and strong.” 

 

Gila Lyons writes about mental health and social justice for the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; Cosmopolitan; Salon; Vox; and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, and on her website, gilalyons.com.

Bookshop founder Andy Hunter.

(Credit: Idris Solomon)

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

4.28.17

Inside Indie Bookstores, a series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, ran in all six issues of 2010, celebrating the passion, ingenuity, determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of the entrepeneurs who run the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Below we revisit the unique personalities, the expert perspectives, and that intoxicating new- and used-book atmosphere of Inside Indie Bookstores.

 

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
1.01.10
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with independent booksellers across the country, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
3.01.10
In the second installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Portland, Oregon, to talk with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there.

Women & Children First in Chicago

by Jeremiah Chamberlin
5.01.10
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First, which was conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago and has grown into a neighborhood shop popular with families and young professionals. Still, books related to women and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus. 

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
7.01.10
In the fourth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Milwaukee to talk with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, which is named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, and is located on Downer Avenue in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. 

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
9.01.10
In the fifth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover Book Store, which as become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers. From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital, vigorous.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
11.01.10
In the sixth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books, located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants.

How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

1.1.14

In the spring of 2009, Michael Gustafson’s cousin e-mailed him to say she was granting him permission to date her best friend, Hilary Lowe. He was grateful, but there was one problem: He had never heard of Lowe, let alone met her. “I had no idea who this person was, but I e-mailed her and said, ‘I’ve been given permission to date you,’” Gustafson recalls.

“That was your opening line?” I ask. It’s February 2013, and Gustafson, Lowe, and I are sitting in a café in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, just up the block from the gutted storefront that the couple is trying to turn into a new community-minded independent venture: Literati Bookstore.

“Pretty much,” Lowe replies. Gustafson smiles, a bit bashful behind his glasses. She continues: “It was weird and goofy. What was I going to say? I loved it!”

At the time, Gustafson was living with his parents in Michigan, just outside Grand Rapids, having decided to leave Los Angeles, where he’d worked as an assistant on several television programs after finishing a film degree at Northwestern. But a few seasons in the business made him realize that his future wasn’t in Hollywood. Lowe, meanwhile, was living in New York City, working as a sales rep for Simon & Schuster. After their initial contact they began corresponding by e-mail, and within a few weeks they were sending each other books.

“That was our way of courting,” Lowe says. “We would just send each other books. I had never read Harry Potter, and so he sent me Harry Potter. And my favorite book was Too Loud a Solitude. It’s by Bohumil Hrabal—a book about loving books.” Six weeks passed before they ever spoke on the phone, while the words of authors—from Kittredge to Camus—passed back and forth between them.

“I fell in love with the way we communicated before I even knew what you looked like,” Gustafson says, the conversation shifting away from me and settling between the two of them.

“And it was never small talk,” Lowe tells him. “It was always just weird, nerd rants to each other.” She laughs. It’s a laugh that makes Gustafson smile again.

Sitting in a cozy café, a swirl of snow outside the 
frost-glazed windows and this young couple across the table from me, I suddenly feel as though I’ve stumbled into a Nora Ephron movie. The casting and plot are spot-on: Attractive, intellectual twentysomethings—of the earnest, nonhipster variety—fall for each other via an epistolary romance. Cue the film montage: Gustafson arrives in Manhattan a few months later, he and Lowe spend a romantic fall dating in New York City, and the following year they move in together. In November 2011 they get engaged (close-up of the ring), in July 2012 they move to Ann Arbor with the sole purpose of opening a bookstore together (long shot of a U-Haul on the highway heading west), and in January 2013 they sign a lease and begin construction (dial up the sounds of saws and hammers).

There’s also plenty of dramatic tension to this tale. Remember that Ann Arbor is the birthplace of Borders, which brothers Tom and Louis Borders opened in 1971, while students at the University of Michigan. In 2011, when the company went bankrupt, it closed hundreds of stores, including the forty-thousand-square-foot flagship in Ann Arbor. The city was also home to iconic independent bookstore Shaman Drum—the Drum, as it’s known to the locals—which closed in the summer of 2009 after nearly thirty years in business. Six years earlier, a small plaque had been erected by the membership of the State Street Area Improvement Project to honor the Drum’s owner, Karl Pohrt, stating with simple thanks: “He kept our eyes on the prize….” The plaque still remains, a bittersweet reminder that Pohrt was able to help revitalize this downtown, but unable to weather the increasingly harsh climate of bookselling, which over the course of the past two decades has swept away nearly 75 percent of the seven thousand independent bookstores that once existed nationwide—more than a thousand of which closed between 2000 and 2007. In the years since, hundreds more have gone out of business, including the Drum.

Perhaps the economic tide of the country as a whole has turned. Or perhaps, more likely, Lowe and Gustafson have chosen exactly the right city at exactly the right time with exactly the right sort of store to succeed. As of Literati’s six-month anniversary, they seem to be making a go of it. But for the couple, whose initial meeting and blossoming relationship seemed somehow preordained, the success of their store up to this point has been no accident. The owners of Literati Bookstore are filled not only with exuberant optimism and staunch idealism, but also with practical determination. And most important, they have a business model to back up each step of the process.

Last February, however, Lowe and Gustafson’s vision of the bookstore was still forming, and the success of Literati Bookstore, much less its opening, was far from certain. After finishing our coffee, we hike through the snow to check out the progress on the renovation of the twenty-six-hundred-square-foot storefront at 124 East Washington Street—most recently the 2010 campaign offices for Republican Governor Rick Snyder—a space split equally between two floors: street-level and basement. Prior to Gustafson and Lowe’s negotiating their lease, the building stood empty for several years. (When they first showed it to me, in mid-January 2013, it was a wreck—particularly the basement, which was to account for half their floor space. Torn-up carpeting lay heaped in piles of debris, an exposed gas meter poked out of the fieldstone wall by the stairwell, and the uneven concrete floor looked like something you’d find in an old barn. No matter how long I listened to the couple describe their vision for this space, when I looked around all I saw was a basement.)

When we arrive at the store a month after that first visit, kicking the snow off our boots, the changes are dramatic. The basement joists are painted a fresh matte black, recessed lighting is in place along with new ductwork, and installation has begun on the first bookcases of the fifty such units they salvaged from the downtown Borders. The look is urban and chic, and I realize that these two not only have a precise dream for their store, but also a healthy dose of the midwestern work ethic needed to make it happen.  

Of course, not everything is going according to plan. The wood floors upstairs have had to be torn out and are being replaced. Not only does this represent a significant cost that Gustafson and Lowe haven’t budgeted, but it’s also meant they’re having to push back their early-March opening. And with each delay, the complex calculus of how long they can stretch their seed money until the first book sales begin to provide even a modest cash flow is enough to make the most seasoned businessperson a bit fidgety. Inventory alone will account for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars of their start-up costs—which they are paying for with a significant loan from Ann Arbor State Bank plus smaller, but no less significant, loans from family and friends—and that’s a modest number of books for a store this size (a number they will try to nearly double over the summer as they begin to sell and are able to increase their stock), to say nothing of the overall costs associated with building out the store.

The couple is also aware of the fact that in addition to trying to make a go of it in a town where neither Borders nor Shaman Drum was able to succeed, it’s not as though it’s an open market. Ann Arbor is home to specialty bookshops like Common Language Bookstore, Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop, Vault of Midnight, Bookbound, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room; used-book stores like Dawn Treader, West Side Book Shop, and Motte & Bailey Booksellers; and even a general indie bookstore, Nicola’s Books, on the west side of town. Plus, there’s a Barnes & Noble. Each of these stores has loyal customers. So despite months of outreach to the local community, there’s no guarantee that, as a general (albeit well-curated) bookshop, their enterprise will see customers materialize when the doors open.

What, then, does Literati hope to be known for? How will it distinguish itself from these other places of business? “The goal is that every book in our store is carefully selected,” Gustafson says. “And that it would be a great book for whatever it is: a great kids’ tale, or a great biography, whatever. I often ask Hilary, ‘Do you want to read this?’ And if she says no, I’ll say, ‘Well, why are we ordering it then?’”

“Of course it’s not just my taste,” Lowe clarifies. “It’s balancing what’s selling and what I think the community would want with what I like. Those are the three things I base my decisions on. I’ve tried to go through every single title that we’re going to have.” When I ask how many titles they’ve ordered so far, Lowe estimates seven or eight thousand. It’s still only February.

Over the next month and a half I visit periodically to chat about progress and to take pictures of some of the milestones: the day the new floors are put in, the day the bookcases arrive upstairs, even the night Lowe and Gustafson paint the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the floor, the two of them, in stocking feet, stepping carefully between each square they’ve mapped using blue painter’s tape, as they cover the entire grid, foot by square foot. When I drop in I typically find them in the basement: Lowe working on a laptop, placing orders, in what will one day be a sitting area; Gustafson in their small, six-by-eight-foot office in the back corner, working on the website or dealing with other business issues, such as the botched order of fifteen thousand book-marks that need to be returned. Or their proposal for an exterior sign for the storefront that was denied by Ann Arbor’s Historic District Commission, sending them back to the drawing board. But worst of all, they are informed by the city that their entire street will be torn up and closed for sewer and utility repairs during the month of June and part of July.

Despite these setbacks, by mid-March they’re excited about their progress—staffing, in particular. More than one hundred fifty people applied to work at the store, and they’ve brought in a range of talents and experience: several longtime Borders employees, one of whom, Jeanne Joesten, worked for the company for nearly twenty-five years; the former manager of Shaman Drum; two recent grads from the University of Michigan’s MFA program; and the executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, who plans to work part-time so as to stay in touch with what’s happening day-to-day in independent stores.

“Every employee is doing something extra,” Lowe says—from finding used furniture at nearby Treasure Mart, to helping write store policies and procedures addressing issues such as shoplifting.

“Apparently you can’t tackle [people] until they get out of the store,” Gustafson says.

“You can’t even accuse them!” Lowe adds. “That was news to us.”

On March 26 Literati passes the city inspection, and a few days later, on March 30, the store debuts with a private party for members of the literary community. Despite the long hours, on this night Gustafson and Lowe both glow. She wears a black-and-white checked sleeveless dress with a black, bolero-style shrug, and her hair up in a bun. He wears a blue oxford. And the two never stop smiling. The store, too, has the soft, yellowed warmth that you imagine a bookstore having. Like burnished oak. Like varnished maple.

The vibe is equally homey. Writers and members of the university community, as well as local business owners and supporters, arrive for their first glimpse of the new bookstore. There is food and wine and good spirits. There are bright books filling the shelves. And for the first time, the community that Gustafson and Lowe have spent so much time talking with me about—a community of book lovers and readers—is no longer an abstract concept. It is here. I’m not sure what might be going through people’s minds, but all I can envision is the fact that a little over two months ago this space was vacant, and in the ensuing weeks it has been utterly transformed.

The following day is Easter, which comes early this year, as does the unexpected spring weather. It was forecast to be cool and rainy, but instead the day dawns feeling more like May. That evening I drop by Literati to check on preparations for next week’s opening, and when I arrive I encounter another surprise: a store full of people. Gustafson and Lowe have decided at the last minute to have a “soft opening” today. I find them in the downstairs office, ordering more books, and they are positively giddy. I ask what prompted this decision. “At noon we opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon that was dropped off last night,” Gustafson tells me, “and we had a toast with the employees who were here. Then we just decided to flip the sign to Open to see what would happen. We figured we could get some practice swiping a credit card or two. But in a minute and a half there were three people in here. In just ninety seconds! It’s been a steady stream of people since.”

“I’m just so happy we’re open and talking to people,” Lowe tells me.

“Today was absolutely incredible,” Gustafson says.

“Making recommendations, talking about books,” Lowe adds. “That’s why I wanted to do this.” I haven’t seen the two so energized since January, when they first showed me around the empty space and were explaining the vision of the store. The last few months have been hard ones for them, filled with endless financial calculations and guesses. They’ve been living on energy bars and take-out, leaving the store most nights after midnight. But here, finally, their business is a reality.

Gustafson says, “My favorite thing that happened today? Two college girls walked in. One of them said, ‘This is the best day.’ She didn’t say ‘of the week,’ or ‘of the year.’ She just said, ‘This is the best day.’ I loved that.”

It didn’t hurt that within the first six hours of being open, without any advertising whatsoever, the store sold more than two hundred books, bringing in over thirty-four hundred dollars in sales. In the middle of it all they ran out of receipt paper and Gustafson had to drive to OfficeMax.

A little more than a week later, however, Literati would come close to nearly losing the entirety of its first week’s sales—more than twenty thousand dollars—an amount far exceeding the figures for a normal week, as it includes the revenue from the grand opening and the store’s inaugural event with poet Keith Taylor, a reading that drew more than a hundred people. Such a loss would have almost certainly forced it to close.

Nine days after opening for business the store’s Internet went down. Thinking the router simply needed to be reset, Gustafson did so. But in the process he knocked out both the cash registers, causing the credit card processing machines to malfunction. Worried they might have lost that morning’s sales in the process, Gustafson called their credit card authorization company to double-check that the previous day’s transactions had cleared and were successfully deposited. What he learned was that there had been no deposits the previous night; in fact, there hadn’t been a single deposit since the store had opened.

“We’re engaged. So this isn’t just the business, it’s our relationship—and Hilary is furious,” Gustafson recalls.

“Meanwhile,” Lowe says, “customers are coming in, and regulars are coming down to chat.” They both laugh about trying to keep up a good front, about Lowe sobbing in the bathroom at one point, about Gustafson envisioning them bankrupt and on the street. It’s clear just how terrifying this moment must have been after nearly a year of solid work, how fragile the entire endeavor must have suddenly felt. 

It all turned out to be, of course, a simple mistake. The credit card company discovered that Literati had failed to complete the protocol necessary to send the transactions in for processing at the end of each night. “The directions were at the bottom of an ALL-CAPS e-mail that had no punctuation, something you could totally miss,” Gustafson explains. And the instructions had come in an account-set-up 
e-mail they’d received from the company nearly two months before they’d even opened.

But despite the ease with which the problem was solved, it was nearly an irrevocable loss. The credit card processing company explained that any transactions not submitted within ten days are void. They were on Day Nine.

“If you don’t batch out within ten days…” Gustafson begins.

“You lose everything,” Lowe finishes.

There are other missteps and disappointments throughout the summer—the books that don’t arrive for an author event, forcing Gustafson to drive to Barnes & Noble to pick up copies; the occasional angry customer who writes on Literati’s Facebook page that the store is “snooty”; the unexpected bust of football Saturdays—yet when we sit down in mid-October for our final talk, just after the six-month anniversary of the store’s opening, things are going pretty well. Although Lowe admits to being conservative with the business plan, sales have exceeded expectations. Both are realistic in acknowledging that some of this might have to do with the novelty of the store, that the goodwill from the community might not last. But already they have a solid community of regulars whose tastes in reading and whose personalities they’ve begun to get to know. And publishers are starting to reach out to them about events with notable authors.

They’re also aware that this is a particular cultural moment they’ve found themselves in. The independent bookstore dovetails nicely with the craft movement currently afoot in cities like Ann Arbor. It’s not simply because books are crafted, physical objects, but because in addition to a hand-selected inventory, quite literally everything in Literati has been touched by human hands. The hand-lettered window signs were drawn by a local artist, the chalkboard’s painted section headings were done by Gustafson’s mother, the shopping bags bearing the Literati logo were hand-stamped by employees, and the secondhand tables were picked up at thrift stores by the staff.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this cultural moment more than the manual typewriter in the sitting area in the basement. Each morning Gustafson adds paper to it, and throughout the day people come down to type. Some come to the store to type. They leave love notes, dirty jokes, and the occasional anonymous plea for help. They leave poems and to-do lists and affirmations. One woman even proposed to her partner using it. Here, again, it’s about something tangible—something we can feel with our hands. And though the notes are seemingly ephemera, Gustafson reads them all and saves many, posting them on their basement wall—a record of the store’s days.

So the practice of curation at Literati is about more than just picking books. It’s about handcrafting an experience, from selecting the people who work for you and who bring their personalities and tastes to the store to the look and feel of the place. When I speak with Lori Tucker-Sullivan, the executive director of the Independent Booksellers Consortium, about why Literati is succeeding, she points to two factors: “First, they came into the market not only willing to work in the midst of other booksellers in town, but also actually reaching out to them and structuring their business in light of what those already established bookstores do well. Second, Hilary and Mike have a remarkable understanding of the Ann Arbor market, and it is well reflected in their inventory and events, which are a near-perfect mix of literary, scholarly, and popular titles. When bookstore owners are that smart it shows, and they tend to be successful. They also have a very good understanding of what they can be—and online cannot—in terms of the shopping experience, and they’ve done a wonderful job of developing that sense of discovery and adventure in a small space.”

In a sense, Literati is the opposite of Amazon: Lowe and Gustafson don’t carry everything, intentionally; their selectivity is a service. By carefully curating their selection, they save their customers the toil of having to wade upstream through an endless torrent of book marketing and hyperbole. After all, can every novel really be a tour de force? The recommendations here are genuine as well; there’s no algorithm that can determine what book you might like. Instead, each book appears on the shelf because someone believes it’s worth reading.

When I ask Lowe and Gustafson what additional advice they have for someone thinking about opening a bookstore, their suggestions range from the practical (make sure you have enough money; the cheapest option is not always the best; be tough on lease negotiations) to the more esoteric (maximize the talent of your employees; invest in what will pay off for the life of your business; trust your gut).

“Anybody who tries to open a business is going to be called a fool,” Lowe says, “no matter the endeavor. Yeah, a bookstore is risky. But if you’ve done your homework, you should feel comfortable with what you’re doing.”

Gustafson elaborates on Lowe’s extensive research into the bookselling market, the months she volunteered at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, in exchange for shadowing the owners, her extensive business plan, and her unwavering vision for the store. There’s pride in his voice, and I watch her watching him as he tries to convey the scope of this to me. They’ve been married three months. The two days they took for their honeymoon in June were the first consecutive days away from the business since beginning this process a year ago.

Then, after a pause, Gustafson says, “We were talking recently about whether we would do this again, knowing—”

“God, no!” Lowe interrupts. “You couldn’t pay me enough.”

Both of them are roaring with laughter now.

“Neither of us would ever go through this again,” Gustafson says.

“Nope,” Lowe says. “I’d work as a waitress.”

“The nerves, the anxiety…we really did feel like we had one shot. We still do feel like we have just one shot. And we know we’re not out of the woods yet.”

But they both admit they’re happy. “We’re not ever going to have a lot of money,” Lowe says. “But that’s fine. I love our regulars. Just having conversations with them brightens my day. I wouldn’t have had these sorts of interactions with people sitting at my desk at Simon & Schuster.”

On my way out, I linger for a bit, browsing the fiction section. Two employees have finished their shift and are headed out. I watch Lowe come around the side of the cash register to hug each of them, thanking them for their work that day. It seems obvious that the employees are just as thankful to be there, to have found their bookstore.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is the assistant director of the English Department Writing Program. He is the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review as well as a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
 

Literati Bookstore

Beginning in January 2013, Michael Gustafson and Hilary Lowe spent nearly three months renovating a twenty-six-hundred-square-foot storefront in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to prepare for the grand opening of Literati Bookstore. Not everything went according to plan: Unforeseen expenses and delays, a botched order of fifteen thousand bookmarks, and a near total loss of their first week’s sales threatened the bookstore’s success. But over a hundred members of the Ann Arbor community turned up for Literati’s inaugural reading, and now, more than eight months after the store’s grand opening, Gustafson and Lowe have built a successful community around their literary dream. The following images offer a behind the scenes look at the couple’s journey, which contributing editor Jeremiah Chamberlin chronicles in “How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living: Opening an Independent Bookstore” in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

1. Basement of Literati Bookstore Pre-Renovation

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January 2013: The basement, which accounts for half the store’s floor space, covered in torn-up carpeting and debris prior to renovations. “No matter how long I listened to the couple describe their vision for this space,” Jeremiah Chamberlin writes, “when I looked around all I saw was a basement.”

3. Painting the Floor

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Gustafson and Lowe paint the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the top floor of the store by hand, stepping carefully between each square they’ve mapped using blue painter’s tape.

4. The Store Makes its Debut

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March 2013: The store debuts with a private party. Writers, members of the University of Michigan community, as well as local business owners and supporters, arrive for their first glimpse of the new bookstore.

5. Literati’s Inaugural Event

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Over a hundred people show up to hear Michigan-based poet Keith Taylor read at Literati Bookstore, the first of what the owners hope will be many future readings and events.

6. Gustafson and Lowe Glow

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Despite the long hours, Gustafson and Lowe never stop smiling at the Literati Bookstore’s debut party for members of the community.

7. The Bookstore’s Manual Typewriter

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Each morning Gustafson adds paper to the manual typewriter in the basement’s sitting area, and throughout the day people come down to type. They leave love notes, dirty jokes, pleas, poems, to-do lists, affirmations, even marriage proposals.

8. Literati Bookstore Open For Business

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April 2013: The bookstore officially opens. A local artist draws the hand-lettered window signs, Gustafson’s mother paints section headings, and the employees hand-stamp the Literati logo on shopping bags. Chamberlin writes, “Quite literally everything in Literati has been touched by human hands.”

9. Gustafson and Lowe Outside Literati

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After many long and difficult months filled with endless financial calculations and guesses, overwhelming challenges, and a lot of hard work, Gustafson and Lowe stand outside their bookstore looking happy, energized, and inspired.

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Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

7.1.10

In 1927 Harry Schwartz opened Casanova Booksellers and Importers on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee. Ten years later he bought out his partner, Paul Romaine, moved the store downtown, and renamed it Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop. Over the next seventy-two years, the independent bookstore would operate as many as six branch locations in southeastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, all the while remaining family owned and managed. In 1972, Harry’s son, A. David Schwartz, took over the business. And when David died, in 2004, David’s daughter, Rebecca Schwartz, and his wife, Carol Grossmeyer, retained ownership until the remaining four stores finally closed in March 2009.

During its many years in business, the iconic bookstore was notable not only for its longevity but also for its strong opposition to censorship. In the 1960s, under Harry’s stewardship, the store stocked titles like Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, despite the fact that they had been deemed legally obscene. Similarly, even before David was running the business, he was an early proponent of civil rights, and years later he also took a prominent and vocal position against the section of the Patriot Act that could force bookstores to turn over customer records of book purchases to the government. Because of his long-standing advocacy, as well as his record of charitable giving, in 2004 Publishers Weekly honored Schwartz with its Bookseller of the Year Award. Yet, despite these laurels and the store’s lauded history, the business could not weather the recent economic storm.

However, the spirit of bookselling that Schwartz embodied hasn’t disappeared from the Milwaukee area. The Promethean fire has simply been passed on. Lanora Hurley, who once managed Schwartz’s Mequon, Wisconsin, branch, bought the store and reopened it as Next Chapter Bookshop in April 2009. That same month, Daniel Goldin, who worked as Schwartz’s longtime book buyer, reopened the Downer Avenue location as Boswell Book Company, named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, whose image graced the Schwartz logo, which Goldin retained for his store.

Downer Avenue is located in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. As such, it’s also home to multimillion-dollar lakefront mansions and cheap college rental houses, beautiful Arts and Crafts homes and college dorms. So the two-block commercial strip where Boswell is located—a mix of boutiques, trendy pubs, hip coffee shops, an independent theater, and a locally owned hardware store—is the hub where the lives of many different kinds of people intersect.

Goldin’s tastes as a bookseller—and the selection at Boswell—are just as eclectic. His interests range from urban planning to personal finance, fiction to photography, and he’s as comfortable talking about Cheever as children’s books. Likewise, the floor plan of the eight-thousand-square-foot store is almost completely open. There are comfortable nooks along the periphery, and the children’s room has its own area, but otherwise you can survey the broad expanse of the store from nearly any spot. This does not mean that the store feels overwhelming, however. Quite the contrary—it draws you in, and you soon find yourself winding past antique library card catalogues that display books about birds, and spindly legged side tables featuring literature about Africa. This is another characteristic of Boswell: Every part of the store feels cared for and hand selected; in every corner is an oddity or surprise you could easily miss. You come to a store like this to find what you didn’t realize you were looking for.

The same could be said for Goldin’s experience of Milwaukee. He grew up in New York City, majored in mathematics at Dartmouth College, and got interested in advertising after working at a college radio station. In the early 1980s, he took a job as a publicist for Warner Books. But after four years he felt he needed a break from Manhattan, so he decided he would move to a Midwestern city where he could spend one year learning about publishing from the other side of the business—from the booksellers themselves.

That city turned out to be Milwaukee, chosen in large part by a chance encounter that Goldin had with Schwartz’s then-manager, John Eklund, during a February 1986 visit. Eklund was putting out a new book by Andrew M. Greeley that day, and Goldin happened to be the author’s publicist. The two men struck up a conversation, which eventually led to a job offer. And in April of that year, Goldin moved. He never went back to publishing. His work as a bookseller turned into a job as David Schwartz’s assistant, and eventually he became the book buyer for the business, a position he would hold for more than two decades.

Like his store, Daniel Goldin is quirky and kinetic and whimsical. He is quick to laugh, and talks with the enthusiasm of someone who can’t wait to tell you about something new he’s discovered. For half an hour prior to our conversation, he led me through the store, pointing out changes he’s recently made and plans for those he hopes to accomplish during his second year of business. Goldin is both giddy and nervous about the future, ever aware of the tenuousness of his profession. Yet he is boundlessly hopeful, too.

But more than anything, Goldin is obsessed—a word he likes to use frequently—with books and book-selling. In particular, he is obsessed with the way in which the perfect book finds its way into the perfect person’s hands. Whether in the store or on his blog, this thought is never far from his mind. In that way, he is something of a matchmaker. And nothing makes him happier than making connections for his customers.

Prior to opening Boswell Book Company, you spent most of the twenty years of your bookselling career as a buyer. How is it different now running your own business?
In ’96 I ran our Mequon store, which is now Next Chapter. At one point David Schwartz had said to me, “You can’t really know the business until you run a store.” And it was really a great experience, though a very different experience from what I’m doing now because back then I was still sort of a faceless person. My customers didn’t really know who I was. I didn’t really meet people as much as I thought I would. But I liked doing it and I didn’t really want to go. But then they started talking about moving the downtown store here [to Downer Avenue], and John Eklund decided he wanted to be the person to open this store instead of buying. So they asked me to come back and buy full time.

What year was this?
The Downer store opened in 1997. But then John left to be a sales rep after three months, and I became disconnected from bookstores for a while. I mean, I was in the stores—I worked events, I worked Christmas, I worked sales, I pulled returns—but a lot of the time I was in an office. At one point we had six stores, and so it was just enough to get all the frontlists done. Sometimes I bought backlist, sometimes I returned. But it’s good because I did a little of everything.

Then, when David died, Mary McCarthy took over the stores and she ran them for a few years. David died in 2004; his mother died shortly afterward. He had already brought in Mary, but he didn’t know he was sick yet. I knew that I couldn’t run the stores. I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t have a broad enough skill set. I was very shaky with finance—I felt like I was very micro on the books. All I cared about was what books were coming out, how we sold them, and getting rid of the ones that didn’t work. That’s all I cared about.

I had thought about leaving Schwartz around 2000 to start a bookstore somewhere, but I thought, “I don’t know where I’m going to get financing from, and I don’t have the contacts, and I don’t have the media connections, and I don’t have the customer base.” How the hell do you build this? But by the time I knew Schwartz was closing for sure, I thought, “Maybe I’m ready to do this.”

At what point did you realize that Schwartz, as an entity, was under…
Under siege? Of course I didn’t believe it. I thought, “Maybe we can turn this around.” And the first year we cut our losses pretty substantially.

What do you mean by that?
I think we cut about a hundred thousand off our losses. We got rid of things like 401k matching, we got out of a partnership we’d gone into where we were managing the inventory for a hospital off-site gift shop, and we had to close the Bay View store. You know, we did various things to save money.

But when did this trouble begin? When did you start to see that you would have to start making serious changes?
I think we all knew when a Barnes & Noble closed for a year in Bayshore and we had a better year. Then, when they reopened, we were losing more money again.

Were they remodeling?
Yeah. The mall where the store was located went from a mall to a “style center.” They sunk maybe twenty million, thirty million—it could be two hundred million, three hundred million, for all I know—into the project. Whatever it was, it was a huge amount of money! It doesn’t even matter how many zeroes. It was so many zeroes that it was just unfathomable to me, a person who has to worry about, you know, a hundred dollars. I had to replace our accounting computer for a thousand dollars recently and I cried myself to sleep over it. [Laughter.]

So when they reopened and your sales fell once more, the writing was on the wall.
Right. We couldn’t compete with them. We used to discount books pretty aggressively, but we weren’t winning that war. And even though Barnes & Noble had cut most of their in-store discounting, between the Internet and the mass merchandisers we knew we had to get out of that side of the business. Because any customer who cared only about price would go somewhere else.

Speaking of costs, has the American Booksellers Association ever considered becoming a distributor for its members? If so, they’d be able to get the same discount structure as these big competitors. Or would the discount that you gain be lost in the administrative process?
Absolutely. It’s not big enough for it to be worth the while. And they’re not flush with cash; they have to decide what their mission is too. The number of stores has gone down in the last few years, and they have to see what gets the most bang for their buck.

And what is that right now? Where is the ABA focusing their efforts?
They seem to focus a good amount of attention on Winter Institute. It’s about three years old. They bring a minimal amount of people, they bring a minimal amount of authors, and there’s three days of workshops on topics like technology, profitable magazines, social networking, renegotiating a lease, buying strategies, etcetera.

Does it help your store?
The workshops really help us. And certainly the connections. I have a lot of booksellers that I’ve met at these events who I regularly email. In the last day I’ve talked to Marie at Vroman’s [in Pasadena, California]; I’ve talked to Kathy at Tattered Cover [in Denver, Colorado]; and I got an email from Miriam at Powell’s [in Portland, Oregon]. I also talked to Linda at Galaxy [in Hartwick, Vermont].

What do you discuss?
What books are working for us, mostly.

So there really is a lot of communication going on between booksellers.
Much more than there used to be. I don’t know if there’s more with Facebook than there was with e-mail, but—

But you definitely do make in-store decisions based on these conversations.
Absolutely. I always want to know what people are reading and what’s working. And that’s partly me. I just like being a connector. At Schwartz one of my favorite things to do was find out what everyone was reading and send that information to the publisher. Also, to tell people in one store what somebody else in another store was doing. We had become very, very successful at selling huge quantities of weird books.

For example, we helped make Elegance of the Hedgehog. There were four or five independent stores that just started selling the book like crazy, and pushing it. Newsletters and blogs and stuff like that. It’s really interesting how you can see some of these books move if you work really hard. If the book’s right, and it really delivers, and you’ve got enough people behind it, you can make this book jump to another market.

To me, that’s the whole idea behind a bookstore. I know that several of my friends at other independent bookstores don’t like this, but I feel like we’re a lab. We have to be ahead of the game; we have to move on to the next thing when everybody else is still selling it; we have to find the next thing. For the publisher to pay attention to us we have to be the specialty electronics store instead of Best Buy. We have to be the place where, you know, people say, “Wow! I have to go there because they’re going to tell me what to read. Because two years from now I’m going to hear from everybody about Water for Elephants, but I heard it from my independent bookstore first.”

What is the most exciting part of bookselling for you?
I have to say, focusing on a book you really love and think that other people will love is really cool. My favorite book of 2008 was Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee. I loved the book, but it was so hard to sell in hardcover. It’s still a slightly difficult book to sell in paperback, but I’m thrilled every time we do. I want to take the books I really love—that are offbeat—and make a difference with them. It’s a little harder now because I have too few booksellers on my staff to be reading broadly. But I love discovering a book that two or three people liked, especially when, say, this person reads this way [points to the left] and that person reads that way [points to the right].

Yet they both liked the same book.
Exactly. In the Woods by Tana French is a great example. We were one of its top sellers. It was on the best-seller list for about a year in paperback, but in hardcover there were only about five stores selling it. And the thing that was so cool was that mystery people liked it and fiction people liked it. I always look for things that are “high” and “middle.”

Do you think most people come into a bookstore knowing exactly what they want—or wanting something but not knowing what it is?
I think bookstores have really changed in that a much higher percentage of the customers who are left don’t know what they’re coming in for. The people who know exactly what they want are more likely to jump to the Internet. The Internet doesn’t browse that well compared with a bookstore. So my feeling in the store is that you have to find a lot of ways to sell people books that you like.

My other feeling is that customers need confirmation that this is a book they should buy. They don’t want to hear from just one person. They want to hear maybe two or three different ways that this is a book that’s important. This is one of the reasons that in the front of the store I have a book club section; I have the IndieBound best-sellers; I have my staff picks; I have Boswell’s Best, which is really like a buyer’s pick; and I have prizewinners and what’s in the media. My idea is that—especially with hardcover—I will put the same book in two or three different places if it belongs there. That way maybe someone will get confirmation from three different sources that this is the book that they want to buy.

Are there any recent books that were crossovers like this?
I love Chris Cleave’s novel Little Bee. I said, “I’m going to do anything to make this book work.” I got to read it really early, and I really liked the book. I think it’s the perfect book in that it allows you to read it to the level of your interest. You can be a middle reader and read it, or you can be a high-end reader and read it. And because the book leaves some things unsaid, you can interpret the ending in several different ways, which makes people obsess about it. Everything was perfect about it for me. I loved the jacket. Loved the jacket. I was so worried, you know, because the book has another name in England. It’s called The Other Hand. And I loved the cover of The Other Hand in hardcover, but I despised the cover of The Other Hand in paperback.

So you can judge a book by its cover? Or does this prove that you can’t?
A really good book with a really bad jacket is just 
really hard to sell. It gives the customer the wrong message.

Was there ever a book you’ve loved that you couldn’t sell because of the cover?
We were just talking about that. One of my booksellers just showed me one, and it had a very “merchy” cover.

What do you mean by that?
The British book business—the merchandise part of the business—is not driven by Walmart or Target. It’s driven by supermarkets. Tesco and Sainsbury’s do the big quantities. So when you sell lots and lots and lots of copies of a book in Great Britain, you sell them in the supermarket. They have bookstores, basically, within the supermarkets. The point being, I looked at that book jacket and I said, “That’s a very Tesco cover.” Then, when the author came for an event, he admitted that they’d just placed a really big order. [Laughter.]

So the cover is a bigger part of book buying than we’d like to admit.
Oh, I think publishers would say that it’s a big part of the decision-making process.

What about digital books, which don’t have covers?
I don’t know. Good luck! [Laughter.] But they have free downloads! Honestly, I have no idea. I hope to be getting some of the business. I hope so. I have customers who really want to do downloads through us. They want to come here and browse and then download the books from us. Just like they’re buying the books, in spite of the fact that they could buy them online. They like the space, they like the browsing, and because Schwartz just closed they get the idea that their purchases are connected to the store’s staying in business.

But I don’t take that goodwill for granted. And I feel that the way I can keep that goodwill is to continually try to make things better. I have to have very personal relationships with my customers, and I try to keep my personality very heavily in the store. I have a very distinct personality. I think I have a good sense of humor and I’m very quirky and I’m very respectful of differences and of people who like different things. I know what I like and I know what my customers like.

What about people who just moved to Milwaukee and have never heard of Schwartz? How will you bring them into the store?
It’s a tough thing. I feel like the store is interesting enough and there are fewer and fewer independent bookstores like this around, and so I feel I just have to keep it in the public eye. That’s why I do a lot of publicity. I throw out a lot of press releases. I do a lot of events. I try to do an offbeat spin on the events. For my first event last year I had the woman who owned the bookstore here [before Schwartz took over the space] introduce Jane Hamilton. She talked about what it was like being one of the first booksellers to discover Jane Hamilton, and how she’d once put together a bus tour to the apple orchard where The Book of Ruth took place.

There’s also a memoir about knitting coming out and I’m trying to get one of the knitting stores to come in and set up a table. We’ve talked about having some craft people come in too for something like that. For example, we had Scott Buer, who runs Bolzano Artisan Meats, the first dry-cured meat company in Wisconsin, come to the store and he did a sampling of his pancetta.

In addition to events and the eclectic selection of the books themselves, what do you offer customers that online booksellers, chain stores, and big-box retailers cannot? Is customer service what matters most?
People have pretty neutral feelings about the service at Amazon. It’s okay. Last year, in the customer surveys of chain stores, both Barnes & Noble and Borders came out in the top ten. Even if some of my customers think the service isn’t so good and complain that the booksellers there don’t know the books, it’s not terrible. Is my service spectacular? It could be better. I never overestimate my service abilities. Do I think I’m good at that sort of stuff, and do I think my booksellers are? Absolutely. Do I think I am effective 100 percent of the time? Nooo. I’m not.

This then brings me to the most important question. In this economic climate—
Yes.

Where a business with eighty-two years of history has already gone bankrupt—
Out of business. Schwartz didn’t go bankrupt. Don’t say we went bankrupt. [Laughter.]

And in the very same space that that iconic store has gone out of business, you thought it would be a good idea to open a bookstore. Care to explain?
I looked at the business and I said, “There is business here; it’s not like we’re not doing business. We just have a problematic cost structure.” And I thought a really nimble single-store business might work, because you don’t have that infrastructure level. Small chains are neither fish nor fowl. They’re not small enough to make decisions quickly, but not big enough to benefit from their size. When something’s not working here, I can just say, “Well, let’s not do that anymore.” But at Schwartz we had to go through committee meetings.

So it was hard to adapt quickly.
Right. And I thought, “If I don’t open right away, I’m going to lose that business because people are going to change their shopping habits. So I have to do this as quickly as possible.” And now we’ve gotten rid of the whole office infrastructure, which means that the costs to pay for another space, a dedicated marketing department, a lot of buyers, a working owner who got paid, and a percentage of rent—that all went away. I’m still me. I’m now doing the work that probably two or three people were doing before. Not as well! [Laughter.] And I took a pretty substantial pay cut to do it. But there are lots of little changes that I squeak through to try to cut costs, and I think we’re doing an okay job with that.

I also knew what my gross profit margin was at Schwartz, and I knew if I was really careful and watched everything and played with some of the things we were doing, that I could increase that a little. That was one of the problems with Schwartz—it wasn’t just the expenses, it was that our gross margin was on the low side.

Why was that?
I don’t really know. [Laughter.] But I know that I have friends with substantially higher gross profit margins. There’s all sorts of stuff I’m watching: damaged merchandise, throwing away things that can’t be used anymore, overly aggressive discounting—all that stuff. And so I worked on my business plan for three or four months, and I have to tell you, if I hadn’t gotten the numbers to work in a reasonable way…when I looked at my sales, I basically said, “I’m going to keep 75 percent of the Downer business, and then I will add to that 25 percent of the business in Shorewood [the neighborhood directly north].”

What has happened, in fact, is that more of the Downer business has gone away than I expected, because more of it was involved in the schools than I realized. They are in very bad shape, and they just changed the bidding process so we’re not getting quite as much Milwaukee public school business. On the other hand, we picked up more Shorewood business than I expected. So we’re close to where we want to be.

And you knew the numbers when you put together your business plan.
I knew the numbers and I also knew—

What you could do as an individual.
What I could do. Like I said, I feel like I have a very passionate personality; I can talk about books in a very nonthreatening way.

But it’s still a huge financial risk, especially considering the economy.
Yes. I had to bring my own money to the table. I had saved some money, but I am a bookseller—I didn’t save that much money! However, my family pulled together enough money so that with what I had saved, the bank would give me a loan. Actually, I still got rejected. I went to three banks: I was rejected by the first one, I got a provisional no from the second one, and then I got a yes from the third bank. The terms were very tough, but I got a yes. I took the yes and I went to the second bank and the second bank beat the other bank’s terms.

Did you ever say to yourself, “I had a good run, I enjoyed being a bookseller, but that phase of my life is over?”
What would I have done? What could I possibly do? [Laughter.]

So you haven’t second-guessed your decision.
I second-guess my decision every waking moment! I second-guess every decision.

Then perhaps I’ll close by asking this: What has made you happiest about this first year of owning your own bookstore?
Danny Meyer, who is a restaurateur, once said, “It’s not about service, it’s about hospitality. I don’t want to be the best restaurant, I want to be the favorite.” My favorite thing about Boswell is the emotional connection that people have with this store. Right before the holidays a pair of regular customers—loyal customers—came up to me and said, “When you first opened, the place was only so-so. At the time we said it was nice just to be polite, but now it really is great.” [Laughter.] I love that! I love that the place matters as much to them as it does to me. And I love that we’re headed in the right direction.

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INSIDE BOSWELL BOOK COMPANY

On average, how many books do you carry in your store?
Bookstores have been fibbing about this question since Gutenberg. I recently saw a new store that opened say they have fifty thousand titles. We have twenty thousand individual titles, though it looks like we have three times as many books. The quest for having the most books is over. Amazon won, with virtual numbers. In short, I’m not telling, though I sort of already did.

What are the best-selling sections in your store?
We’re a general bookstore, so, like just about every general bookstore, we mostly sell general fiction. We’ve been able to improve sales of mysteries and science fiction since taking over Schwartz as well. We sell about as many books from our humor section as we do from our philosophy section. That seems funny, but really, what is funny?

What were some of the best-selling books at Boswell in 2009?
It should not be a surprise to any indie bookseller that we sold huge amounts of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Probably our best-selling offbeat paperback fiction title was David Rhodes’s Driftless, which is a wonderful, prizewinning novel, as well as being quintessentially Wisconsin. In cloth, our most popular books were Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, and Sherman Alexie’s War Dances. The latter two were helped by very high-profile events.

Are there any books you’re particularly looking forward to this summer or fall?
I’m hoping that my two spring faves, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist and Frederick Reiken’s Day for Night, turn out to be books that we can sell well through the holidays. I’ve already got booksellers clamoring for Great House, the new novel from Nicole Krauss.

How do you think the rise of e-books and digital reading devices will affect your future
I’m not an ostrich—of course it will cut into my sales. I think they will affect airport and textbook stores first. I also am hoping our smaller size will make us more nimble. Some folks think e-books will kill the hardcover, but I think the mass market is more at risk—it’s a short jump from disposable to virtual. It’s not all worry—advances in technology have brought down the cost of short-run printing, making it cheaper for publishers to adjust prints as the numbers change. I also believe that the trend will not mirror music. Our audience is older, and because you don’t need to keep a device for traditional books, I think there will be more crossing over between e and non-e. I’m hoping that publishers will get the message and improve the quality of their traditional books. There’s no better advertisement for an e-book than a book whose pages are so thin that I can see through them.

What is the most unique or defining aspect of Boswell Book Company?
People who don’t know me sometimes refer to me as Daniel Boswell. That’s of course not the case, but in a sense it is. The store is close to a half-century of my book and idea obsessions, plus the brainstorms and hard work of my booksellers, together with the whims of my customers. It’s very much me, but I hope it will also live on after me. All you have to do is say to yourself, “This is the most important thing you will ever do,” and it should fall into place.

What do you think most people would be surprised to learn about bookselling?
It’s no surprise that many of the details are like any other job. Paying book invoices is like paying clothing invoices. Opening boxes of books is like opening boxes of groceries. Satisfying your regular book customers is not dissimilar to satisfying your customers as a lawyer. Wait, it is different. Most other businesses have figured out how to sell information, but we still give it away.

What has been the single biggest challenge in your first year of business?
It’s a variation of the eyes are bigger than the stomach. I couldn’t get done as much as I hoped. There’s always year two.

Where would you like to see Boswell in five years?
I’d like to be in business, culturally relevant, and anchoring a somewhat thriving, traditional urban neighborhood. Not too thriving, of course, or all the indie stores will be replaced by chains. And I’d like the store to have expanded somehow, but not with more branch stores. I did that for the first half of my career.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee

For the fourth installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside
Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Milwaukee to speak
with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company.

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Boswell Book Company opened in April 2009 in the Downer Avenue location of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, a beloved Milwaukee bookstore that had closed a month earlier after seventy-two years in business. Boswell’s owner, Daniel Goldin, was the long-time book buyer for Schwartz.

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The floor plan of the eight-thousand-square-foot store is almost completely open. You can survey the broad expanse of the store from nearly any spot.

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There are comfortable nooks along the periphery of the store’s open floor plan, and the children’s room has its own area.

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Visitors to Boswell Book Company soon find themselves winding past antique library card catalogues that display books about birds, and spindly legged side tables featuring literature about Africa.

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Every part of the store feels card for and hand selected; in every corner is an oddity or suprise you could easily miss. You come to a store like this to find what you didn’t realize you were looking for.

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“I do a lot of events,” Goldin says. “I try to do an offbeat spin on the events. For my first event last year I had the woman who owned the bookstore here [before Schwartz took over the space] introduce Jane Hamilton. She talked about what it was like being one of the first booksellers to discover Jane Hamilton, and how she’d once put together a bus tour to the apple orchard where The Book of Ruth took place.”

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Goldin’s interests as a bookseller range from urban planning to personal finance, fiction to photography, and he’s as comfortable talking about Cheever as children’s books.

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“In the front of the store I have a book club section; I have the IndieBound best-sellers; I have my staff picks; I have Boswell’s Best, which is really like a buyer’s pick; and I have prizewinners and what’s in the media,” says Goldin. “My idea is that—especially with hardcover—I will put the same book in two or three different places if it belongs there. That way maybe someone will get confirmation from three different sources that this is the book that they want to buy.”

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“People who don’t know me sometimes refer to me as Daniel Boswell,” Goldin says. “That’s of course not the case, but in a sense it is. The store is close to a half-century of my book and idea obsessions, plus the brainstorms and hard work of my booksellers, together with the whims of my customers. It’s very much me, but I hope it will also live on after me. All you have to do is say to yourself, ‘This is the most important thing you will ever do,’ and it should fall into place.”

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Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

3.1.10

Few independent bookstores are more iconic than Powell’s Books. Even readers who’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, know about the store from its ads in places like the New Yorker, or from its prominent online presence, or from its reputation as the largest new- and used-book store in the world. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there. (And if you can’t, try one of the seven branch stores in five other locations throughout Portland, specializing in everything from technical books to home and garden.)

I was early for my interview with owner Michael Powell, so I decided to get a coffee in the attached café. Like the bookstore itself, the guiding aesthetic is simplicity—no overstuffed chairs, no fireplace, no decorations on the salmon-colored walls other than some taped-up flyers for local bands and a Buddhist meditation group. Not that anyone seems to notice. While I was there, every single person I encountered was reading. At the table nearest me a high school girl in cat-eye glasses and a ski cap read Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (Epigraph Publishing, 2000), with a stack of David Sedaris waiting at her elbow. A well-dressed elderly woman flipped through the Oregonian not too far away. And on the other side, near the windows, a young woman with black hair and piercings through both her cheeks was making a list of recipes from The Garden of Vegan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Filling the rest of the tables were hipsters in zip-up sweatshirts and Chuck Taylor All Stars, a young father in a shirt and tie with his two children, construction workers wearing Carhartt overalls, and women with trendy bags and knee-high leather boots. All were reading. Here was a microcosm of the store: A diversity of people and interests, sure, but what’s most important in Powell’s is neither image nor decor but the books themselves.

This is not to say that the store doesn’t have a unique vibe. Like Michael Powell himself, there is a straightforwardness to Powell’s that puts a person at ease. When the owner and I met, he was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweater. And though he had to attend a black-tie community event later that night, he was generous with his time, walking me through both the history of the business and the store itself—how the portion of the building with terrazzo floors had originally been an American Motors dealership; how when they built the newer sections of the store, more than a decade ago, they’d intentionally left the concrete floors bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere; and how proud he is that their foreign-language section alone accommodates more than thirty thousand titles.

Michael Powell’s philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves.

This sense of equality permeates every aspect of the Powell’s business model, from the practice of shelving used and new books side by side in each section, to the store’s long-standing advocacy on free-speech issues, to the fact that its five hundred employees are unionized and have a matching 401(k) plan. Likewise, Powell may be the boss, but it’s clear that he also sees himself as a fellow employee. When we left the downtown location and he drove me across town to the former ball-bearing warehouse that is now the site of the online bookselling operations, no one had to “look busy” when the owner arrived. Instead, they chatted with him as we walked through the facility, offering updates on their various ongoing projects, including ideas for how best to recycle used packaging materials. The warehouse, which feels like an airplane hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air, processes up to three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders, a fact that amazes Powell, a logical man who never ceases to be surprised or impressed by his customers, even when they pay more than twenty dollars to have a four-
dollar book shipped overnight. It makes him wonder aloud how he can better meet their needs.

This, then, might be the trait that best characterizes Michael Powell: curiosity. He is endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business. It is a trait that has served him well during his last four decades of bookselling. And though he’ll officially hand over the reins of the business to his daughter, Emily, in July, when he turns seventy, one gets the sense that Powell will always be dreaming of how to connect books and people. Because it’s clear that he loves them both.  

How did you become a bookseller?
In the mid-sixties I ran a little student co-op [at the University of Chicago] where students could sell textbooks and other books on consignment. I also rode my bike around to various thrift shops in the general area and went to the Sunday morning flea market called Maxwell Street—which was very famous in its day in Chicago—to buy books and put them on consignment. Then I sold books by catalogue for a couple years to university libraries, mostly out-of-print social science and history, before I opened my first store in 1970, in Chicago.

Early on, I was thinking of opening a store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because my wife and I had traveled to Santa Fe and saw it for the first time and everybody falls in love with Santa Fe the first time. She was being offered a job as a Montessori teacher there and I was going to open a bookstore when I got a phone call from a mentor in Hyde Park, in Chicago. He wanted to move his store because he’d been attacked by a customer.

He’d found a new location that was closer to campus, and the reason it was currently vacant was that the Weathermen had firebombed its previous occupant out of existence and he didn’t want to go back into it, he was too nervous. And the university—well, not exactly the university, but whoever was in charge of organizing these things—had approached my friend. However, the space was too big for him; he wanted to take only half of it. So he said to me, “You take half and do mostly paperbacks, and I’ll do hardbacks.” And I said, “I could do that, but I don’t have the money.” My wife says I was always good for twenty bucks but never for a hundred. And he said, “There are some professors who would like to talk to you about that; they’re kind of the patron saints of bookstores.” There were three of them: Morris Janowitz, Edward Shils, and the third one was Saul Bellow. Morris Janowitz, who was the lead, came to me and said, “What would you need?” I had no idea. So I said—and this is, remember, 1970—I said, “Probably three thousand dollars.” And he said, “We can do that. We can loan you three thousand dollars.” Then I said, “But, you know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how quickly this will get up and running. And there’s all the rent.” So he said, “We can help with rent, too, for a little while.” Rent was, I think, a hundred dollars a month. So, okay, now they’re rehabbing the building and there’s some time before I can occupy it. So my wife and I take a thousand of the three thousand and we travel across the country to Oregon to visit my folks. [Laughter.]

When we were back in Chicago, I took the remaining two thousand dollars and bought some books. A friend and I built some shelves, and we opened. Like I was saying, it was a small, small store. But we did well. The students, of course, liked used paperbacks. They thought that was great. At some point my neighbor moved away and I took his space. Then there was another business in the back…and when they went away I took that space. So, ultimately, it was about four thousand square feet.

And then my dad [who had come to Chicago to work in the bookstore] went back to Portland in 1971. He opened his shop, moved once into a space of about ten thousand square feet, and had begun to introduce new books into the mix, shelving them side by side with used books. In 1979 he said, “You know, now wouldn’t be a bad time if you’re interested in coming back.” I always thought I would come back. I always thought of myself as an Oregonian, always kept my Oregon driver’s license. And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” There had been a huge snowstorm in Chicago that winter; we’d had an infant—she was born in November—and we had to get out of the neighborhood we were in. It wasn’t suitable for raising a family, and I’d had it with the weather. So coming back to Oregon sounded great to me.

Well, the night before we left Chicago, my dad called. He said, “I’ve got some news: We’ve lost our lease.” Our landlord, which was a brewery, had wanted to take the space back and had given us a year to find a new location. So we spent that year searching, and we found the space that is currently Powell’s Books. In the mid-eighties, we started opening branch stores. I was always curious about new ways to do things with books; I didn’t want just to replicate anything. And one of the questions was if we could do our new-used mix and do it in the suburbs, where everybody’s perception was that it would have to be Borders or Barnes & Noble or something.

By that you mean nice carpeting and polished wood, soft lighting—
The whole nine yards. We weren’t getting women to our downtown location in the proportions that most people have women as shoppers, perhaps because our area was a little bit edgy.

It was a developing neighborhood?
It was an undeveloped neighborhood—mostly warehouses, wholesalers, and auto repair shops. Kind of funky stuff, but not retail. Not restaurants and bars. Now it’s all high-end national and local boutiques, and dozens and dozens of restaurants and bars. It’s quite fashionable, I suppose.

In any case, I wanted to see if we could capture a different audience if we opened the store in a suburb, and that went well. And each year for about six years we opened a store. First, we did a travel bookstore downtown in about 1985. Then the Hawthorne District stores in about 1986. Then the cookbook store…somewhere in there we opened a store in the airport, and a technical bookstore. So I was both interested in segmenting books like technical and travel and cooking, and I was also interested in demographics, like urban centers, suburbs, and airports. It sounds like it was planned, but it wasn’t. It was just opportunity and impulse. The only one of those that we don’t have any longer is the travel store. The Internet took that business away enough to justify not keeping a whole store solely focused on the subject. And the cookbook store sort of morphed into a lifestyle store, with gardening and cooking and interior design. And now we have three stores at the airport.

What did you find with the suburban store that you built to look like Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Well, we were going to build a fairly fancy store in the suburbs—nice white shelving, a tile floor, banners over the aisles, and colors, and so forth and so on. But the aesthetics weren’t right. So the first chance we got to get rid of all that, we did.

You shut the whole store down?
We moved it. And when we moved it, we moved it into a larger space. And at that point we went back to wood shelves. Pine wood, cement floor, more of an industrial look. That has always worked for us well downtown. That was my misreading of the 
suburbs—that I had to sort of pretty it up, and I was wrong. We’ve more recently moved that store into a space double the size—thirty-two thousand square feet. And once again we have a cement floor. In fact, the ceiling has exposed insulation as a sort of architectural touch. It looks very industrial.

Why do you think that works?
People want a calm background for the books. I don’t think they need…I think Borders’s and Barnes & Noble’s message is “Buy the book and get the hell out of here” in some subliminal way. It’s too bright, the shelves are low so everybody’s watching everybody. You feel very exposed. Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.

You don’t have to worry about messing up someone’s living room.
No. And the used books look more comfortable in that environment, because they look a little shabbier when they’re too exposed. So, that’s where we are. In 1994 we went on the Internet with the only inventory we had in the database at that point, which was the technical bookstore. I’d only been up for about a month when I got a letter from England from someone saying, “I was looking for this technical book, and I was told in England it would take six weeks to deliver and would cost me the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just check out the Internet and see.’ You had the book for forty-five dollars and you could get it to me in three days.”

When I read this, I thought, “Holy hell! Here’s an opportunity.” So we got all our books into a database. We had what we called “the river” and “the lake”—there were all the new books coming every day that had to get entered, but we also had to back enter everything that was currently on the shelves. So it took a year.

Is that lake dried up now?
The lake is now part of the river. And we built up the Internet business to where it was about a fourth of our sales. So we were an early adopter for selling books online. Amazon came along, of course, and blew right past us. But we sell a lot of books via Amazon, and we sell books via eBay and Alibris and AbeBooks in addition to on our own site. We also carry inventories from England and Germany—our books are drop shipped to the customer. We do what we can.

I imagine that most people think of you as being in direct competition with Amazon. But, in fact, you’re actually doing a lot of partnership with Amazon?
Well, I don’t know. We are in competition at one level, certainly. I’m sure some of our business has turned over to Amazon. But I’m not foolish about it. If there’s an opportunity to sell books, I’m going to sell them. Amazon is my opportunity. And we sell some new books there, but mostly used.

So you ship to Amazon and then they repackage and ship them?
No, we package and ship. We can ship in our boxes with our materials inside. So we can brand that shipment. They’re good with that. And if somebody just orders a new book from us, we’ll usually have a wholesaler fill that order. Ingram or Baker & Taylor drop ship for us in our boxes, so it cuts out shipping to us. That works well. We do the same thing with Gardner Books in England and Lieber in Germany, both wholesalers. And it works. Some of it is hard. It’s not easy—a lot of infrastructure crossed with the Internet.

What are some of its particular challenges?
I think everybody, me included, thought the Internet was going to be this miracle way of making money, because for not very much money you could make all these books available around the whole world. Well, people didn’t count on all the software writers you need to keep your Web site hot and current, or the editorial work that has to go into maintaining a Web site both in terms of the tracking game and also making it sticky for people to visit and to find value there so that they’ll shop with us. Because we don’t discount the books, you know. It’s a small number—twenty, thirty books—otherwise it’s retail. You would think we’d have no business, that people are nuts for ordering books from us.

Because there are cheaper places?
There are cheaper places. And yet, the brand, the interest, whatever…we maintain a good new book sale. I won’t say it’s growing, but it’s steady. There’s a lot of price competition in both the used book world and in the new book world. So it’s been hard to build that business, but we think we can. We have a lot of people who visit the site but don’t stay, and we have to find a way to encourage them to stay. A small percentage of these customers mean a lot to our business. My daughter’s working with some consultants to redesign and redeploy our Web strengths. 

The site certainly has a wonderful array of resources—interviews with authors, blogs…
We Tweet; we do everything. We do everything we possibly can with the resources we have. I always say that the people I have working on our Web site are a rounding error for Amazon. Amazon would have thousands of employees dedicated to what I have twenty dedicated to. On the other hand, I have to say we go toe-to-toe with them. They have things we don’t have, but we have things they don’t have. Sometimes they have them pretty fast after we have them, but we think of ourselves as innovators.

One of these recent innovations is our online buyback. Anyone in the U.S. can go to our Web site, check via a book’s ISBN number to see whether or not we want to buy it, and then find out how much we want to pay for it. We’ll pay the freight; all you have to do is box it, print out our label and packing list, and ship it in. Once it’s received and we’ve checked the condition, we’ll pay you via PayPal, or you can get virtual credit, which you can spend as you will. That has given us a pretty hefty flow of books.

So even after paying shipping costs it’s still worthwhile for you to buy these books?

 

Yeah. In order to maintain our inventory, we can’t rely only on books bought in Portland. We’ve always relied on a certain number of books being bought elsewhere in the country, whether they’re from store inventories or private collections. Well, that’s an expensive way to buy books. You have to fly people there to look at them, then you have to fly people there to box them, and then you have to pay the shipping in. Also, you usually have to take everything, which means you’re handling a lot of books you don’t want. So the online buyback is great because theoretically we want all those books. And you don’t have to go anywhere to get them. And the customer boxes everything up. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t do that. There are some people who do, but they’re not major players. So that’s given us at least a temporary advantage in source of books.

 

I’d like to go back and talk a little bit about the operation of the main store. In addition to the industrial look and feel of the space, another way that Powell’s is different from most bookstores is that you mix new and used books on the shelves. Why did you decide to do this?
Well, we started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing. So when a local writer like Jean M. Auel published her first book, we had just two copies. Then we bought a bunch of tables from Dalton’s, and they asked, “What are you going to put on these tables?” And I said, “Stacks of…something.” So that’s when we got into the new arrival business.

But now we have about three hundred thousand volumes in the main store, as well as however many in the other stores. It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.

On average, bookstores make about 40 percent on each book they sell. Yet you’ve managed to nudge that up to nearly 44 percent. Considering that these percentages are before operational expenses, a small difference like this can mean the difference between staying open and going bankrupt. How did you achieve this?
You know, when you’re done, you’re always plus or minus. Your minus can be a lot, but your plus is hardly ever more than 2 percent after costs. And that’s before you make any capital reinvestment. Because we’re a larger business, we tend to order in volumes that allow us to get the maximum discount. And we do one other thing: We ship all our books to a central warehouse and then we distribute. I don’t know if it’s Borders or Barnes & Noble, but whatever the discount those stores got for shipping to a central warehouse, the publishers had to match that for us.

I’m sure that being your own distributor also makes things more efficient.
Yeah. We do all central receiving. Once the books are received, they’re labeled and then distributed out to each of the stores. So we have our own truck fleet that runs our books around.

With used books, on the other hand, you’ve said that your average is closer to 65 percent. Is that also something you’ve been able to nudge up in similar ways, or is that number static?
We have slowly, over time, pushed that up about five points, either by paying less or controlling inventory better, and by making fewer buying mistakes. In the used-book world the risk is that you’re going to buy something that you already have too many copies of, or that sales have evaporated for, or it’s a book you had once and never sold. Now computers can tell you all that, so while we don’t check every book we buy at the moment we buy it, if there’s any doubt about the book we can scan it and see its history, the current inventory level, sales history, and make a judgment based on that. So I think our rate of having to pull things from the shelves has dropped considerably.

What’s hurting us at the moment is this move away from people buying new hardbacks. You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but in this downturn many people are avoiding a twenty-five-dollar book and moving, in our case, to used books. This has meant that we can try to keep our dollar volume up by boosting the units we’re selling, because used books are cheaper, but of course the labor involved doesn’t go away.

Or the overhead or the cost of the building.
Right. But the overall dollars have dropped because you’re not selling that twenty-five-dollar book. Fewer dollars are coming in. So it’s been a challenge. And we’ve had to do several things in the course of the last year to accommodate that.

Such as?
Well, we had to reduce the number of people working in the company, which we did through not filling positions when people left.

But no one was let go?
No one was let go, no. At one moment we were within two weeks of seriously considering it, but then the numbers looked like they maybe didn’t require it, so we backed off. You don’t do that casually. You don’t turn people loose in this economic environment. I really didn’t want to do it, and fortunately we didn’t have to. We had twelve months of down business. But [last] September we had our first up month, so that was certainly good news.

What do you think accounted for that?
People are buying more books! I don’t know what to say.

Are you a bellwether for the economic recovery?
Well, I hope so. It’s not like spending money on cars or houses, but if they’re feeling comfortable enough to do that…I mean, listen, they have an alternative. First of all, they can choose not to read. They can go to the library, they can buy fewer books, whatever. But the fact that the customers are back feels great.

Some people have suggested that it’s not the fact that Amazon or big-box stores like Walmart and Target are selling books that accounts for many independent stores’ losing their footing, but rather it’s a lack of readers. Do you feel that’s the case?
No, I’m not a subscriber to that. I understand the theory. The theory is that there are only so many hours in the day, and so if you’re playing computer games or tweeting or searching the Internet or going to a movie or watching TV, you haven’t got time left over for reading. And, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense. Yet we are selling more books. [Last] September we sold more books than we did a year [earlier] by a fairly sensational number. They were cheaper books, but there were more of them.

Long run? I’m not a predictor of the future. I don’t know. Will the Kindle and the Sony Reader, or print on demand, or some other phenomenon we haven’t thought of yet, erode our business? It’s certainly possible. Nothing is forever. And there’s no way to say that somebody’s new vision of the future won’t force us to reshape our vision. But I think as long as we’re alert and pay attention and find ways to adapt, then we’ll be okay.

Let’s talk specifically about electronic books. Do they affect your business?
We sell them. Been doing that for the better part of ten years.

Really?
Yeah. There just weren’t very many books and they weren’t great and we didn’t sell a lot of them, though there have been people trying to do this for a long time. And, you know, it’s a small part of our business. But we’re positioned to make it a bigger part if that happens.

Now, I want to go back a minute. People always say, “Well, there’s this way of doing business and then there’s Powell’s way of doing business.” But I want to point out that I got on the Internet because there was one guy on my staff who came to me and said, “I can put the technical books on the Internet. I need ten thousand dollars to do that.” The money wasn’t for himself, but for the technology. And I said, “Seems good to me.” At the time, Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening stores all around me. My wagons were circled and they attacked from the suburbs, these giant stores. And I thought, “If there’s any way to leap over those stores and reach a broader audience, there’s nothing better than this thing called the Internet.” And I was very enthusiastic. And so for ten thousand dollars—which is a lot of money, I appreciate that—and his time, we got to play. But it’s not like somebody handed me ten million dollars and said, “Here, go invest this in the book business.” We have built every brick, every stone—every element of the system is a result of organic growth.

In addition to building this business from the ground up, your family has always played an important role in the process. Your father came to Chicago to work in the first store, and now your daughter Emily is involved.
Yes. Emily is going to take over in July.

How long has she been moving into this role?
Probably four years now. She was director of used books for a while, and she worked to get our minds back into the used book world. 

What do you mean?
Well, when the economy started to go bad, we told ourselves that we needed to get more used books on the shelves. That meant changing some of the ways of channeling books to the stores and also boosting the volume. For the last year she’s been in charge of the Internet marketing world, with the goal of taking a fairly flat Internet business and seeing it grow. She just finished an executive MBA, and one of the faculty members from her program, along with another fellow he knows, are acting as consultants. So she’s been working with them to redirect the energies of staff, reorganize staff, and redesign the Web site, and to do things that make it easier to use, more intuitive. We’ve always won awards for the content on our site, but I don’t think anybody would ever give us an award for the smoothness, or the use of the page. Now we’re trying to make it a more intuitive process to use, and that always involves a fair amount of rewrite on software, so you can’t do it overnight. But you can do it. So she’s been working on that and doing a great job.

Having grown up in a bookstore, she must have a familiarity with this world that few people possess. To say nothing of her commitment, since it’s a family business.
There’s a great story about Emily. When she was about eight or nine, she and I were doing Christmas cash register work. I would open the book and read the price, and then she would key it in the cash register and make change while I bagged the book. A lady came up who was trying to be nice to Emily and said, “When you grow up, are you going to be a cashier?” And Emily, counting out her change, says, “When I grow up, I’m going to own this place.” [Laughter.] And by God, she is.

That was never in my mind, as a given. In this day and age, the world beckons. I just told her, “You’d be a damn fool not to kick the tires that had been good to us. I don’t ask or expect you to go in this direction, but I think you’d be foolish not to give it a shot.” And out of the blue one day she called from San Francisco and said, “You know, I’m ready to take that shot if you’re ready.”

Was she in college at the time?
No, she was working in San Francisco. She had a boyfriend down there and she was in a variety of things—she was an apprentice to a maker of wedding cakes, then worked as an assistant to the head of a law firm for a couple years. And, you know, she enjoyed San Francisco very much, but I think that gave her the motivation to say, “Well, I think it’s time to try the book business.” She had worked here for a year earlier, right out of college, but she needed to really get out and try something else in the world for a while.

How hands on or off will you be once you retire?
Well, I’ll tell you a story. I had someone like you come to interview me and he said, “So when you retire, what will you do?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll probably go out to the warehouse and process books, get them out of boxes. I like doing that.” And he laughed. So I said, “What’s funny about that? You don’t think I can do that?” And he said “No, no. I was out on the floor interviewing one of your employees and I said, ‘What will Michael Powell do when his daughter takes over?’ And he said, ‘He’ll go over to the warehouse and process books.'” So I guess I’m known for my limited talents.

Somehow I’d like to stay involved. You know, you learn a lot, and business is complex, and you can’t know everything and you can’t be everywhere. Just walking around you see things and you say, “I wonder why they’re doing it that way? That doesn’t seem as efficient.” Or, “Do they know that people in the other store are doing it differently?” So I think it’ll be helpful to have someone with an educated eye watching the business from the inside, to see where those opportunities are. For example, there are several things we’re doing by hand that we ought to be doing in a more automated way. At the moment, those are opportunities. You’re always working for productivity efficiencies because your costs go up and you’ve got to keep your costs and revenues in balance. The casual approach we had to the business fifteen years ago just doesn’t work. Certainly with the high investment in technology we have and the high investment in inventory, we better be very grounded in what we’re doing, and alert.

You came into this neighborhood when it was mostly just car repair shops and warehouses, and now it’s become more of a boutique area. Do you think Powell’s had a hand in that transition? I imagine that most people must think of you as an anchor in this community.
Well, I think we’re an anchor for the city. That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world. You know, if you’ve got the biggest ball of string, people think you’re kooky. But if you have the biggest bookstore, it says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message. And we try to then earn the respect of the community by not just running a good business, but also being involved in the community. I spend a lot of my time on boards and commissions and planning efforts. I chair the streetcar board. We just created what will now be about eight miles of streetcar. We’re the first city in America to put new streetcars back in.

Like old-style trolleys?
No, they’re modern-looking streetcars, and they’re European built. They’re not San Francisco cute; they’re modern, sleek streetcars. And we move four million people each year. I’ve also been involved in dozens and dozens of committees and commissions, some in the arts and some in social services and some in politics. Not partisan politics, but political efforts to do things or to stop things from happening, all aimed at trying to fulfill the vision of a city that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day city, that works, that’s attractive and great to do business in, and great to live in. I think people respect the work that we do in that area. People will stop me and say, “I love your store,” but sometimes they’ll stop me and say, “I love what you do for the community,” and they’re referring to a broader level of involvement. People ask me if it ever gets tiring, being stopped by people. But I think no; when they stop, that’s problematic. That means we’re doing something that’s not working. I get involved in political things, but they’re almost always around censorship or involved with access to books. Oregon has a very strong constitutional defense of books, but we also have the same element of the population that would like to, for a variety of reasons, control that flow. You know: “Don’t put gay books in schools, don’t let anyone under the age of eighteen be exposed to bad books.” But we win those fights.

Still, they usually take a lot of energy and some money, and with the first anti-gay measure in Portland—Proposition 9—businesses were very closely involved. I have gay staff, of course, and friends who are gay, and they challenged me. There was an element of that legislation that involved not letting libraries, specifically school libraries, have gay-related materials. But we just turned the store into a poster board for that issue, and we won it, and we were very proud of that.

So you helped defeat it at the ballot.
Yep. There were two efforts and we won both of those. Not by overwhelming numbers, but we won. If we can define the issue as one of censorship, and they can define the issue as perversity, and you let that go in a challenge, they’ll win. But Oregonians don’t like censorship, and again I say not by overwhelming numbers, but we do win. And so we get involved in those issues and they seem to come along with certain regularity, every four or five years. Otherwise most of the stuff I get involved in is more planning. I don’t get involved in partisan politics as a company. In fact I keep the company very separate from that. Personally I do get involved, but I try to keep it as separate as I possibly can.

As a citizen, not an owner.
Yeah, yeah.

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What do you think people are most surprised to learn about independent bookselling?
I think they’re surprised to know how hard it is. I think everybody—or the uneducated person who doesn’t know much about the business—thinks that as a bookseller you sit in a store, read books, and when someone comes in you have a nice conversation and then recommend and sell some things to that person. That you have a stock of books you believe in and know intimately. That you wear patches on the elbows of your sport jacket, and there’s a cat somewhere in the window, and there’s a fire burning in a fireplace, and there’s the smell of coffee and all that. That it’s a very relaxed and low-key kind of thing. The reality is that it’s extremely intense, whether it’s a small store or a huge store. You’re always pushing the rock up the hill, and it’s relentless, and an awful lot of people get ground down by it. That’s why you see stores close with the frequency they have. People give five or ten years of their lives and realize it’s not going anywhere. And that’s hard. It’s hard to be in an industry that takes so many casualties and that much stress.

The good news is you still get to work with books. And you get to work with people who really love books, both as customers and as staff. I’m sure people who love hardware love their hardware, but, you know, I wouldn’t. There’s a high level of gratification. I was trying to calculate how many books I had sold during my life under the Powell’s name. I’d like to think it’s coming close to a hundred million. You know, in chaos theory there’s this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a storm in Africa. Well, what about a hundred million butterfly wings? What has it done? You don’t know. People hardly ever tell you, “I read a book and it changed my life.” Most books are probably sold for entertainment, some are sold for information, and some are sold for inspiration. Certainly some are sold for all three at the same time. But I say to myself, “Well, at least when you’re reading a book it’s hard to rob a bank.” I like to think that some of those books have had a positive impact on people’s lives.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE POWELL’S BOOKS
How many book sales are you processing a day as online orders?
About 2,500. Upward to 3,000. It spikes at Christmas, and it spikes when the school year starts, but otherwise it’s fairly steady.

How many books do you have in your warehouse for online sales?
About 380,000 in [the main] warehouse, and then there’s about 125,000 in another warehouse.

And how many books do you carry in your stores?
About a million in the flagship store, and probably another six hundred thousand scattered around the other stores. And then we support another two million in Europe. So online we support upward of 4.5 million titles.

How do you determine the price you pay for used books that you buy from online customers? Do you use an algorithm, or is there a person who works on each order?
No, it’s an algorithm. We have several million books in our database to match against, so we just take a percent of either the imprint price or the in-store resale price and pay that amount.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

For the second installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Portland, Oregon, to speak with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books.

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The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store in Portland, Oregon, is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. 

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The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. “From the moment you walk in,” writes Chamberlin, “it feels as if you could find anything there.”

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“People want a calm background for the books,” Michael Powell says. “Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little 
alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.”

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When the newer sections of the store were built more than a decade ago, the concrete floors were left bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere. 

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Among the 3,500 sections within the main store, one is devoted to literary journals and books published by small presses.

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“We started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing,” Michael Powell says. “It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.”

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Michael Powell is “endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business,” Chamberlin writes.

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The main warehouse, “which feels like an airplaine hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air,” Chamberlin writes, processes as many as three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders.

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“I think we’re an anchor for the city,” Michael Powell says. “That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world… It says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message.”

An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall

by

Lisa Albers

6.16.08

For more than twenty years, J. W. Marshall has been recommending poetry to his customers while writing it himself. He and his wife, poet Christine Deavel, own Seattle’s Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of only a couple bookstores in the United States devoted exclusively to poetry and a fixture in the city’s literary community.

In March, Oberlin College Press published Marshall’s first full-length collection of poetry, Meaning a Cloud, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize. The collection includes poems that previously appeared in the letterpress chapbooks Taken With (2005) and Blue Mouth (2001), both published by Wood Works, an independent press in Seattle, and named finalists for the Washington State Book Award.

The poems in Meaning a Cloud reflect Marshall’s ecumenical knowledge of poetry, a boon to his work as a purveyor of literature in verse. Informed by poetic tradition but shaped by delirious risk-taking, his writing is unabashedly autobiographical, yet stoically refrains from mere confession. Marshall’s poetic gaze into the interior is motivated not by a need to define his own self so much as by a desire to understand all selfhood.

Marshall’s cultivation of poetic presence extends beyond Open Books, as he and his wife cosponsor the Seattle Arts and Lectures poetry series, which brings top-notch poets—Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton, and Edward Hirsch, to name a few—to read in the city’s Intiman Theater, often to a packed house. The couple also participates in poetry festivals and conferences and host readings at their shop, which, they say, pays for itself.

Marshall spoke with Poets & Writers Magazine at Open Books, located in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. While Deavel readied the place to open at noon on an overcast Sunday earlier this month, Marshall described what it’s like to take part in both the creation and the dissemination of poetry.

Poets & Writers Magazine: After so many years of supporting the work of poets in a very direct way—by selling their books to readers—you now have a book of your own. How did you transition from bookseller to poet?

J. W. Marshall: Is it easy? No, it’s not. The one thing I’m very aware of is book sales, and so I get to look to see if Ingram is stocking my book, how many copies, and has anybody bought it. It’s a curse. You know, it isn’t a transition; in a way, it’s just two different worlds. They have this intersection. I’m glad to have the bookstore because it keeps my mind off my own book.

P&W: How so?

JWM: I come here, and I’m trying to sell books to people. I’m not trying to sell my book to people because that would get old pretty quickly, and you don’t want to bore folks with credit cards in their hands.

P&W: Did you learn things in the process of being a bookseller that you’re using now as an author yourself?

JWM: Oh, sure. There are connections I have through the bookstore that I very gently tug on to see if I can get readings or offer the book to people who’ve written reviews. I certainly do that. The thing that I’ve done that may be the most worthwhile, honestly [has to do with] Oberlin Press—God bless them; they’ve been very good to work with. David Young is a terrific guy, Linda in the office too. I like them a lot. But they offered their books at a 30 percent discount when the industry standard is 40 or better, and, through Ingram, they offered them at only a 10 percent discount. While I like my book, I was kind of heartbroken thinking that bookstores are not going to order it at 10 percent. So I politicked with them for months. Now [Oberlin has] changed. With next season, they will hit the standard 40.

P&W: It sounds like you reasoned with them on the basis of understanding the business.

JWM: It was the dreaded confluence of bookseller and author. Watch out, publishers! That’s an ugly one.

P&W: What has changed for you with the publication of Meaning a Cloud?

JWM: It’s changed my writing, I think, because now I know what it looks like in a book. The chapbooks were one thing, and those helped a lot, but to see it in a book that has some national distribution makes it seem more real somehow, less ethereal. It actually stopped me from writing for about two months. I try to write every day and was doing a pretty good job of that for years, and once the book came out, I don’t know; I guess there was this shadow cast over the typewriter. I couldn’t quite get there.

P&W: I’ve heard other people talk about that same phenomenon.

JWM: Yes, and you know, I have a counseling degree, and I can’t psychologize it. It’s post-partum something.

P&W: The first section, “Blue Mouth,” is about an accident you had that landed you in the hospital. I’m guessing that happened quite a while ago.

JWM: 1972.

P&W: The third section, “Taken With,” is about your mother’s death. More recent?

JWM: Right.

P&W: You and your mother inhabit parallel worlds during your time in the hospital and her time in a care facility, and the juxtaposition is remarkable, to have the poems bookended in that way. The two sections, beginning and end, had previous lives as chapbooks. What was your process for writing them in the first place for the chapbooks and then bringing them together for this collection?

JWM: In neither case were they written to be chapbooks. The hospital poems were published in 2001, and some of those were written in about 1984. It’s just a matter of writing a lot and then pawing back through and saying, “This goes with this.” I give credit to Paul Hunter, who was the publisher of both chapbooks, because he heard a reading and wanted to publish—there’s a prose poem in the hospital series, “The Nightshift Nurse Brought Her Shoes to Work in a Paper Bag”—he wanted to do that as a broadside. I said, “Of course.” He knew I had other hospital poems he’d heard at readings, and he said he wanted to see a manuscript, so I put one together for him. He gave me an idea about narrative arc; he gets good credit for that. The mom poems just came; she was in a nursing home, and I would visit once a week or more often, and it would spill over into the daily writing. After she died, at one point I just took two years’ worth of pieces of paper and pulled out everything that related to her, and tried to find another chapbook because I thought Paul would publish it.

P&W: The middle section, “Where Else,” is a cogent bridge between those two. The beginning and ending sections deal with inner battles, very personal battles, and then the one in the middle seems to contain echoes of the outside world at battle. In your poems, war filters in through the radio and news or manifests itself in a dream you’re having. Did you write “Where Else” later than the other two sections? How did the poems in that section come together?

JWM: Because I’m writing every day, some things just speak more loudly and ask to be followed up on. It’s probably true for some books that people actually sit down to write them with a set idea in mind. Unless it’s a verse novel or something, that’s not how I would write. But you’re right on it; those other two sections are internal, and I didn’t want to be just internal—I wanted to be part of the public. I wanted a voice that was with and among, not so interior.

P&W: When you’re writing daily, are you writing full poems, do you keep a journal, or do you just write whatever comes?

JWM: Whatever comes. More and more, the important part is, whatever’s in should come out. I don’t want to write the same poem. I could give all these other people’s descriptions, which is kind of cheating I guess. Mary Ruefle at Seattle Arts and Lectures said that she used to think writing was about speaking, and then she realized it is about listening. In a way, I’m up for that. I have language going in my head all the time, so I sit at the typewriter and press the keys.

P&W: It sounds like you weren’t necessarily seeking publication as much as publication sought you.

JWM: I sent to magazines for twenty years. The great thing about the Oberlin is, they publish FIELD magazine, and it’s a magazine I have liked a great deal since I started taking poetry seriously—that would be about 1980. I used to keep little index cards of submissions and rejections, and before I got into FIELD, I had been rejected by them for almost twenty years. Then they took one, they took three, they took another, so I thought, well, I should enter the contest. I’d been trying to get published before, just not rabidly. I was daintily trying to get published.

P&W: How did you get from chapbooks to Meaning a Cloud?

JWM: It was [Oberlin’s] competition, and it was Alice James, another good publisher. I’d put the two chapbooks together, with nothing in the middle, and sent that in for the FIELD prize four years ago. I got a nice e-mail back from David Young saying, “You’re a high finalist,” and that was very encouraging because it was the first time I’d entered a contest. I entered Alice James, and I was a finalist there. In each case, I felt a little guilty because they’d already been chapbooks. I had other work I liked, so I put it in the middle and tried Alice James again but didn’t get anything. Then I tried FIELD again and got it.

P&W: You said you have a degree in counseling—do you have formal training as a poet?

JWM: I have a BA and an MFA in poetry.

P&W: From the University of Washington?

JWM: The BA was here. The MFA is from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I came back and got a degree in rehab therapy at Seattle University, which was the best education of them all. They were tough. Creative writing programs are not.

P&W: They’re tough in a different way.

JWM: Yes. Right. Socially. [Laughs.] At the UW, the person who got me to really love poetry was Nelson Bentley. Two times a week, he’d encourage us to write a formal poem. He’d say, “Write a villanelle; write a sestina.” As an impressionable, somewhat young person, I tried that, and I liked it a lot. I still look for some kind of iambic progression. I want to bust it up, but I want to know it’s there.

P&W: How would you compare those formal experiences with the informal experiences you’ve had since you’ve been able to read a lot of poetry and support poetry over the years?

JWM: That’s the best education, the bookstore and the customers and the books. I went through school just like everybody else, attending the classes but also attending to my fellow students and my ego and all of that stuff. Reading is by far the best education. We have some great customers who come in and say wonderfully profound, off-the-cuff things that make me look at other writers who I’ve never looked at. I was just reading an interview with Nathaniel Tarn, and he was talking about Language poetry and how he saw Language poetry against the “workshop” poem and the lyric and talked about people who are doing both. As I’m sure you know, [poetry] is a fairly balkanized art, probably all arts are. What’s good about the bookstore is we can’t be balkanized or we wouldn’t be in business. We each read fairly widely and think widely and don’t get into one school or another. That I hope comes through in the writing.

P&W: It does. Even though you’re writing daily and you’re running the bookstore, you have time to read books of poetry as well?

JWM: You have to in order to sell them. Much less reading just for pleasure: People want to know, “Is this like his first book?” “How is she compared to so-and-so?” If I don’t know, then they might as well go to any of our major competitors. We’d rather they didn’t.

P&W: That gets me to the next question, too, because you’re not just running the shop; you’re also supporting poetry in other ways. You’ve been involved with the Seattle Arts and Lecture series and the local poetry festival. Yours sounds like a dream job to many people, but especially for a poet. Is it all silver lining, or are there any clouds?

JWM: It’s retail. There are clouds. This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I was just having a discussion with a wonderful customer, a great guy who was throwing flowers everywhere, telling us what great things we do for the poetry community, and I said, “You know, I’m a clerk. I could be at Les Schwab selling you tires.” There’s a hint of that that’s true. The Seattle Arts and Lectures work is great for us, but it’s economically great for us. While that’s supporting the community, it’s supporting the bookstore. Anything that supports the bookstore to some degree supports the community. At least it means that people can come here and find a relatively obscure book and find people willing to talk about aspects of poetry when it’s difficult to find people who will do that outside the academy, or even inside the academy in some cases.

P&W: Does that ever feel like a drag, the retail aspect: selling, staying profitable?

JWM: Once in a while. In a slow month. There needs to be income. There are clouds to the silver lining. But the silver lining: It’s lovely to be surrounded by poetry. And to have the customers who come in have an interest in poetry. That’s a godsend.

P&W: How do you choose the inventory?

JWM: That comes from two directions. If we have some knowledge about the writer. Some publishers we trust introduce people to us. We listen to our customers. I guess it’s just attentiveness. We’re open to failure. On the other hand, we’ve been in the bookselling business for more than twenty years, and there’s a learning curve. We’ve definitely learned some things.

P&W: Which poets have had the most influence on your own work?

JWM: Because of his love of poetry more than for his own poetry, Nelson Bentley. Bill Knott, and again, partially out of his poetry, which is just wild and liberating in its wildness, and he, too, was a teacher. He at one point asked me in a conference, “So what?” about a poem. That was devastating and was a great question. It’s a great question for all art. I’m afraid a lot of art doesn’t pass that question, not that there’s an answer you could know in advance. Bill was quite important. Then there are people I read, like Dickinson. Early James Tate. White guy American poets in the seventies and eighties.

P&W: What’s next for the poet J. W. Marshall?

JWM: I get to do readings in Michigan and Ohio in the fall. I’m still writing every day and liking some of the things I’m writing, and now, I fantasize about a second book. At the rate that I’m liking what I write, it will be a ways off.

Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle

by

Kevin Smokler

11.1.06

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. “I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel,” says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. “My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler’s.”

Eisler was part of a cadre of Bay Area authors who offered to give benefit readings and drive as much business as they could to the bookstore. Their efforts, combined with an alarmed customer base and a group of Silicon Valley investors, helped Kepler’s reopen to cheering crowds last October.

Kepler, whose father Roy founded the store in the spring of 1955, expressed both delight and gratitude for the community’s generosity, but warned that Kepler’s future was far from secure. “I think we were like frogs in hot water,” he says. “The old way of buying books, putting them on shelves, and waiting for someone to come in isn’t working anymore.”

What will? Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations (Denver’s Tattered Cover), downsizing (Cody’s in Berkeley, California, which was sold in September to Yohan Inc., a book distributor based in Tokyo), or closing altogether (San Francisco’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books). And while the American Booksellers Association (ABA) reports that its membership has held steady over the last few years, dramatic rescues like those of Kepler’s and Brazos Books in Houston, which owner Karl Kilian sold to a group of community investors in March, are becoming increasingly visible.

“When you run an independent bookstore, someone inevitably starts a conversation: ‘How do you compete? How do you stay in business?’ As if things weren’t bad enough with the chains, now you’ve got Amazon,” says Kilian from his new post as director of programs for the Menil Collection, a Houston art museum. Several years ago Kilian wrote a letter to friends and patrons of Brazos warning that the store might be in trouble. Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Susan Sontag, and other authors each wrote back with an offer to give benefit readings. While it turned out not to be necessary, Kilian says that Brazos’s reputation for first-rate author events was a significant part of what made the store’s potential closing “a loss the community would not tolerate.”

One of the less fortunate independent bookstores was Bristol Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, which hosted many readings by students attending the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Bristol Books closed last year after fifteen years in business. A rescue effort, says manager Nicki Leone, was neither possible nor practical.

“I think what happened to Kepler’s Books is great, but has it proved its case yet? Is it a working business model?” asks Leone. That question weighs heavily on the owners of bookstores who have been given a second chance. Jane Moser, who ran a successful children’s bookshop in Houston in the 1980s, was recently hired as the manager of Brazos Books. She says she plans on expanding the store’s hours, increasing its children’s book and cookbook sections, and improving its online presence, as well as deepening the store’s relationship with schools, universities, and area corporations. “Brazos was already an institution,” says Moser. “But times change. You can always do more.”

The seventy-nine-year-old Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the two remaining all-poetry bookstores in the United States. In April poet and Wellesley College professor Ifeanyi Menkiti bought the store when its previous owner fell ill. Knowing that his teaching job both enabled the purchase of the store and prevented him from working there full-time, Menkiti hired a manager and declared that Grolier could not remain economically viable based solely on its reputation.

“It’s a wonderful little place, filled with great conversation, tradition,” Menkiti says. “Our goal is to move that cultural vision forward but still pay our bills and keep books on the shelves. Then the enterprise will have been worthwhile.”

Before closure looms, booksellers say, writers can help. Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, recommends that authors include links to Booksense.com, the e-commerce arm of the ABA’s Book Sense program, on their Web sites. Kepler adds that authors can underscore the difference independent bookstores have played in their success when they give lectures and readings. Tracy Wynne, the owner of Cover to Cover Books in San Francisco, which was saved from closure by community activism and author donations in 2003, reports that many local children’s authors now use only Cover to Cover as their bookseller for events and school visits.

Just as authors can no longer publish and then wait for the sales to roll in, more and more booksellers have begun actively finding readers instead of waiting for readers to show up. “If the question is, ‘Can independent bookstores survive?’ part of the answer has to speak to finances,” says Dave Weich, director of marketing and development for the thirty-five-year-old Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. “We have to deliver more value than an ethical shopping experience and a community gathering place.… That might mean reaching out to local businesses or working closely with regional schools and authors.”

“You have to be really scrappy,” Weich says. “It is all about being proactive.”

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 2005). He lives in San Francisco.

Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations, downsizing, or closing altogether.

NJIT Grads Launch Bookswim: Think Netflix Without the Flix

5.25.07

George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui recently launched Bookswim, an online operation that allows readers to rent books much the same way Netflix allows people to rent movies. The two graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology posted a beta version of the Web site at www.bookswim.com.

Readers can choose from five rental plans that range in cost from twenty-four to thirty-six dollars per month. Once an account is set up, a customer can choose books from more than two dozen categories and place them in a queue. Bookswim then sends three to eleven books, depending on the chosen plan, to the reader, who can keep them indefinitely. When the customer is ready, books can be returned in a prepaid envelope and the next titles in the queue are mailed.

The new venture comes at a time when independent bookstores are struggling, Bertelsmann is cutting jobs at Bookspan, and voters in Oregon are choosing to shut down libraries. “Could the price of books possibly have gotten any more expensive?” Burke and Siddiqui ask on Bookswim’s Web site. “During any given week, the average bestseller lists for more than $20. Read three of these in a month and you’re spending over $60! What you’re paying for is the right to own the book…but is ownership what you really want?”

Bookswim members can review the books they rent and even rate them on a five-star scale. The “best rental” is currently The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult.

 

So Much Depends Upon a New Bookstore: Postcard From Paris

by

Ethan Gilsdorf

11.2.01

On the evening of October 29, more than seventy-five people crammed into The Red Wheelbarrow, a newly opened Anglophone bookshop, to inaugurate a reading series and celebrate two literary magazines: Upstairs at Duroc, published at the Anglo cultural center WICE, and Pharos, edited collectively by poet Alice Notleys workshop at the British Institute in Paris. The enthusiastic crowd spilled onto the cobblestone street, smoking cigarettes and craning their necks for a view of the proceedings.

The reading series, A Blue Monday, featured sturdy and in some cases spectacular readings by six writers-some Paris fixtures, others new to the scene, and all relatively unknown outside of the literary expat community. Highlights included Laure Millets The Crying Bowler, a side-splitting short story about suburban family disorder, and Amy Hollowels poems about September 11, which she prefaced by saying that a poets voice is more essential now than ever before. Srikanth Reddy, a fresh arrival in Paris thanks to Harvards Whiting Fellowship, read his poem Corruption (II), which features the following lines:

Lately I have found some comfort in words like here. Here was a chapel for instance. Here is a footprint filling with rain. Here might be enough.

An international crowd of English-language lovers, including students and professors from the Paris VII university across the street, had found its own here, a place to call home, at least for the evening. The Red Wheelbarrow is my act against globalism, my anti-matrix, said Penelope Fletcher Le Masson, the bookstores Canadian proprietor. Bookstores will become shrines. She expects her new venture to complement the existing competition. After two months in business, The Red Wheelbarrow has found its niche among Pariss half-dozen Anglo bookshops-not as high-brow as The Village Voice, and less bohemian than Shakespeare and Company.

Later, at a nearby wine bar, a post-reading gathering brought together six writers, one teacher, a dancer, two artists, and four magazine editors. A zealous activist named Mark Feurst peddled his new anti-war rag The First Amendment. A sighting of the just-released Frank magazine was rumored, and two representatives from Kilometer Zero-after huddling at a private table to plan their Paris-based art and literary center-promised a new issue by the end of November. Their KMZ Venue, a series of six Sunday night variety shows in a bistro basement, kicks off November 4.

The whole [Blue Monday] event was a confirmation that a bookstore makes itself, Le Masson said the next day. People are thirsty to hear what people have written. I especially welcome unknown writers to read, even if they dont have books to sell. Upcoming readings at The Red Wheelbarrow include British novelist Rupert Morgan, American poet Kathleen Spivak and, Le Masson hopes, Canadian-Parisian Nancy Huston.

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

1.1.10

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?

Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?

The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.

Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?

My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—
his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—
but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?

You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.

Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?

No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.

Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.

Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.

Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review
?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?

It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?

No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?

I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?

The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?

No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?

In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.

Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?

I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker
article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

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So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?

I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?

I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.

Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss
?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.

Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?

No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?

John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?

Lark and
Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing
by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?

I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves
by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

For the first installment of our new series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Oxford, Mississippi, to interview Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books. For the past thirty years, the independent bookstore has been a cornerstone of Oxford’s literary community. 

Square Books 1

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Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.

 

Square Books 2

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The first thing customers notice when they enter Square Books is the signed author photographs. There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling.

Square Books 3

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The names of sections, grouped by topic, are painted on the stairs leading to the second floor of the stoor.

Square Books 4

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Most of the photos are black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and others. Collectively, they comprise an archaeological record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

 

Square Books 5

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Jeremiah Chamberlin sat with Richard Howorth upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. “I chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections,” Chamberlin writes. “Howorth commandeered the espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing us our drinks himself.”

Square Books 7

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A bronze statue of Oxford native William Faulkner in front of the city hall, which is located near Square Books.

Square Books 8

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In addition to Square Books, Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, have opened two other shops: Off Square Books, which specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program, in 1993; and, in 2003, Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore.

Square Books 9

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“To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe, irreplaceable,” Howorth says.

 

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

1.1.10

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?

Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?

The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.

Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?

My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—
his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—
but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?

You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.

Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?

No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.

Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.

Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.

Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review
?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?

It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?

No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?

I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?

The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?

No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?

In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.

Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?

I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker
article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

page_5: 

So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?

I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?

I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.

Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss
?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.

Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?

No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?

John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?

Lark and
Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing
by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?

I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves
by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

5.1.10

When I walked into Women & Children
First, the
feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann
Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding
feeling I
experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a
late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books
stacked
on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the
handwritten
recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves,
everything
feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of
the store, a
painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top
hangs from
the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar
sign,
this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ
section.
Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women
&
Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.
The
literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of
photography
collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines
as
diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though
conceived as a
feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its
current
location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a
large
population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has
since
evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse
range of
locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe
house,
and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become
as
much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has
become
popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as
likely
to be made up of men as women.

Still, books
related to women
and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality,
literature,
criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus.
Such
lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie
Leibovitz,
and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers
such as
Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane
Hamilton
got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children
First has
a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known
writers
themselves. So on any given night you’ll be as likely to be sitting next
to
authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara
Paretsky,
Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak
from
the podium.

Like co-owner
Bubon, Women
& Children First doesn’t take itself or its mission too seriously,
despite
its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front
windows
facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front
counter; and
tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater
performances
and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black,
scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red,
orange, and
cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for
their
comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit,
Bubon
took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour.
Women &
Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one
large
open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as
well as
journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds
to its
coziness.

But nothing
captures the
laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden
kitchen
table that sits in the back, near the children’s section. Around it are
four
unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it
seems
a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.
Several
times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her
and I
was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself
politely to
help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn’t reach. But never did
these
interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the
course of our
conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb
and flow
of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made
me feel
more welcome.

When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both
getting a
master’s degree in literature, and we became very good friends.

Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our
class and
the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine
Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were
finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a
business
together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one
local
chain at the time, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and there were probably
sixty or
seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of
Chicago.

That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores.
It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all
thought of
ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough
readers
to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after
five
years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store,
two
blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.

Did you decide from the beginning
that you
wanted to specialize in books for women and children?

Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and
in our
politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of
feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the
Newberry
Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked
us to
join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The
Reproduction
of
Mothering
had just
come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!”
because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group
of
academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen.
These
were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch’s
&
Brentano’s or Barbara’s Bookstore, I wasn’t finding. Similarly, as an
academic,
I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for
Virginia Woolf
and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs.
Dalloway.
Or A Writer’s Diary. But we envisioned a store
where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And
everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would
be
there.

It’s interesting to hear you
describe these
authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up
they were
people I was reading from the beginning.

Oh, back then you had to go lookin’,
lookin’,
lookin’, lookin’ to
find these writers. And they certainly weren’t being taught. Alice
Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian
had come out. But all the
stuff that you think of as classic women’s literature—Margaret Atwood,
Toni
Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling
writers.
It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian
literature.
None. I mean, it just didn’t exist. We put a little sign on the shelf
that
said, “If you’re looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
May Sarton, Willa
Cather….” You know, writers who historians had discovered had had
relations
with women. [Laughter.]
Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back
then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight
inches
apart.
]
Now, thirty years later, it’s incredible to look back and see the
diversity of
women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and
lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that’s being published.

I
still think
women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in
getting
critical attention. So there’s still a need for Women & Children
First and
stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that
time,
we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of
this
one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a
challenge to
find enough serious women’s literature to stock the shelves. Because we
didn’t
want to do romances. And it’s not that we didn’t have a vision of a
bookstore
that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and
eventually
a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there
would be
this renaissance in women’s writing. That it really would happen. That
women
would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I
would
finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and
American or
British. I mean, the internationalizing of women’s literature has been
very
exciting, I think.

What precipitated the move to 
this
neighborhood and this bigger store, then?

In those first ten years we had
double-digit
growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don’t
think
we even made returns until we’d been in business three years. We were
just
selling. I had no ordering budget. “Oh, new stuff by women?” I’d say.
“Great!
We need it.” Business was growing.

Was that because nobody else was
selling this
type of literature?

Yes, and because women’s studies was
developing as
a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great
programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but
interesting stuff.

So like the first store, you outgrew
the second
one.

We outgrew it. Our landlord had also
sold the
building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed
any
more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that
we’d
been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to
Chicago.
You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side,
off the
highways…yet we couldn’t really afford to stay there, and we couldn’t
find a
new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here
by the
Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of
Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to
Ravenswood. They
literally came to us and said, “The people in our community would love
to have
a bookstore in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of spaces that are being
renovated, and we wonder if you’re thinking of opening a second store,
or if we
could encourage you to.”

This happened by coincidence, while
you were
already considering a new location?

Yes! And we said, “Well, you know, we
need more
space. We’ll come up and look.” At the same time, there were two women
who were
opening a women’s arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, “It
doesn’t matter where you’re located as long as you’re next to or on the
same
block with Women & Children First.” So we came up to Edgewater to
look, and
they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was
being
renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, “We
want the
corner and we want this much space.” The arts-and-crafts store opened
next
door. They
stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997,
we
took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20
percent
the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year
people
came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, “Thank you for coming
to our
neighborhood.” It was just great.

But
the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring
operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy
volunteers.
Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people
moved every
book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day.
We
organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, “Okay, you
have the
Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them
‘Bio,’
pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to
the new
space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up.” We had other
women
who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the
volunteers.
We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the
afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really
officially
closed for one day. And women still tell me, “I remember helping you
move.”
They’ll come in and they’ll say, “That’s my section; I put this section
back together.”

Have readings and events been a part
of this
store from the beginning?

They’ve been a huge part of the store.
Getting to meet
all these wonderful writers whom I’ve read—in person—is also something
that’s
kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of
discovering a
new writer is always great.

We have a lot
of local
politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support
Barack
Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here.
She asked if she could use
our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support
behind him
in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, “If we can just get
people to
not call him Osama.” I mean, that’s where we were at that time. Nobody
knew who
he was.

So the store has been important for
the
community in many ways.

A political gathering place, and a
literary
gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read
sometimes. We’ve developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy
discussion
group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you’d see twenty to
thirty
preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it.
I just
love it. It’s absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background
in
theater and oral interpretation, so it’s just so much fun for me.

Has that grown over the years as the
neighborhood has developed?

Grown, grown, grown. For many years I
would have
nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five
years
ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty
to
thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That’s
why
everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I
sit
here. For regular readings, it’s the opposite—authors read from the
stage and
we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a
hundred
and fifty people in here.

A year and a
half ago, we
started Sappho’s Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an
evening
of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it’s open mike; sometimes it’s
acoustic
music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her
girlfriend,
Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up
little
tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We’ve even had
strippers. [Laughter.]
But right from the beginning we conceived of having a
weekly program night. Author
readings weren’t happening much, so we decided we’d have
discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of
teachers
from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the
process
of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a
presentation
on an idea.

Then we
conceived of having
a topic for each month. For example, “Women in the Trades.” So every
Tuesday
night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would
come and
talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering,
or what
kind of discrimination she’s experiencing on the job and what her
recourses
were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was
on the
subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or
ninety
women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn’t have chairs and
stuff
like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints
discuss the
issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time,
and
people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or
not.
Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one
pamphlet
available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because
you would put a
handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what
your
sexual proclivity was.

It’s amazing how subtle the coding
had to be.
It was so discreet.

I remember the first time I saw two
women walk out
of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later
because
somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I
cried. Because it was so
rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each
other’s
hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they’d come out of
this
atmosphere in which it was okay.

At
our thirtieth
anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women’s History
Conference
recorded people’s memories of Women & Children First. They had a
side room
at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go
in and
talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when
they
saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that
when
their daughter told them she was gay and they didn’t know what to do
about it
they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And
that’s
going to be part of our archive too.

This celebration was
also a
benefit for the Women’s Voices Fund, which you started five years ago.
Can you
talk about its mission?

Several years ago, Ann
and I were
looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn’t enough money coming in
for the
expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our
twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some
extra
money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us
said,
“People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep
your
programming going.” So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print
and
mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the
programs, and
then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty
thousand
dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, “If
there’s a
way to remove that expense from the budget and use people’s donations to
fund
that, that would be a smart thing.” So that’s what we did. Now anytime
we have
an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing
refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women’s Voices
Fund.

So the store’s not a
nonprofit,
but it has a nonprofit arm.

It’s not a 501c3 on its
own. We are
a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can
send
Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for
the
Women’s Voices Fund.

Few people realize
how expensive
readings and events can be.

Occasionally there are
readings that
are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice
turnout of
twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books.
Maybe five
or six. But it’s not paying for the program. And from the beginning we
didn’t
want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to
make
money: “If we have this author
we gotta
sell ten books or we’re not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the
freight.” No. Having the fund
means we
pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty
dollars. But
sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty
thousand
dollars at this benefit.

But
obviously something
changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn’t have had to hold
this
fundraising event. You
said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had
double-digit growth. What happened?

Well, the rest of that story is that a
year and a
half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next
year, they
fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a
store
that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in
the
suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this
hit us,
Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the
south of
us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in
Evanston.
Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is
just a
mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles.
More recently,
B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced
over
two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.

They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to
downsize,
Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in
Uptown.
And, you know, we’d almost gotten past the point where the chain stores
were
affecting us, because they’ve had to stop widespread discounting. But
the month
this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over
the
year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5
percent. But, you know, it’s been an underperforming store. They put it
in
between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more
economically
depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.

Do you think five years from now
they’ll be
gone?

I do. I do.

Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe,
Barnes &
Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put
stores in
locations where there’s actually a need, and to close stores down when
needed
and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very
carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times
since
1990. I just don’t see how they are going to survive. When I go in there
now
all I see is…sidelines. Candy.

I think what’s been
particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have
developed a
reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and
bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to
fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a
real base
in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, “Oh,
but the
Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that’s a better
location.”

Why does that happen?
They
don’t always realize
that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind
of
clientele. And I’ve seen situations where we’ll have a local author—one
who we
have a close relationship with, and who’s done every launch with
us—whose
publisher will now say to her, “You know, two thirds of your books are
sold in
the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store.”
But
those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra
business.

The author tour itself seems to be
waning. I
don’t blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the
road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an
author’s
travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event.
But
people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.

Right. Because I’ve read the book, and
so has one
of my coworkers, and we’ll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We’re
going to
keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we
look at
our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost
always
written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here,
they’ve done
an off-site event that we’ve been in charge of. Those books turn out to
be our
number one sellers for the year.

So what does the future look like for
you?

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist
bookseller.
Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m
not
sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer
viable?” And
I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a
general
bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist
reading
series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my
life
is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about
their
lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and
women’s
lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we
take
the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes
we’re
discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these
things.
Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not
stopped. We don’t
have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we
did.

The goal of my
life has been
to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to
evolve
and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to
have a
full share of the world.

page_5: 

INSIDE WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST WITH ANN CHRISTOPHERSEN
What were some of your best-selling
books in
2009?

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout; Her
Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger; Yes Means Yes!
Visions of Female Sexual Power and
a World Without Rape
,
edited
by Jaclyn
Friedman and Jessica Valenti; Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa
Lahiri; The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The
Sisters
Grimm
Book
1: Fairy-Tale Detectives
by Michael Buckley; In
Defense of Food
by Michael Pollan; Fun
Home
by
Alison Bechdel; Hardball by Sara Paretsky; The Mysterious
Benedict Society
by Trenton Lee Stewart; Everywhere
Babies
by
Susan Meyers; Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Mama Voted For
Obama!
by Jeremy Zilber; The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz; and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg
Larsson.

What is the best-selling section in
your
store?

Paperback fiction.

What do you look for in terms of an
author
event?

First we consider whether the book fits
with our
specialty—books by and about women—or ones that offer a feminist
perspective
on any subject. It is also important to us that we can provide an
audience for
the author. Finally, though we always want to host women writers with a
national reputation, we are strongly invested in supporting local
writers and
those launching their careers with debut novels, poetry, or nonfiction.

In what ways have your events
changed over the
years?

In the store’s early days, many of our
events
were feminist issue–based, sometimes with an author or book involved but
not necessarily. We were a hub of feminist and lesbian politics and
culture,
and produced feminist plays and women’s music concerts, sponsored
women’s
sports teams, and provided support for almost every women’s/lesbian
project in
our city. Over the past number of years, however, we have focused our
energies
and events on books and other written material, knowing that that was
our
unique role in the women’s movement.

What challenges do
women still
face that you hope your store can help address?

Women writers are still
vastly
under-represented in review vehicles, which means their books are less
visible.
This can be verified by keeping a gender tally of writers reviewed in
the NYTBR or the New
Yorker
, for example, during any
given month. Though women
artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still
struggle for opportunity and recognition. Women in general have also,
obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a
long way
to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being
challenged;
we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few
good
options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of
us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and
children;
women are seriously unrepresented in political decision-making. I could
go on,
but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and
bookstores—that focus on women.

How does feminism in
the
twenty-first century differ from when you opened this store?

The main difference is
that the
second wave of the feminist movement in the seventies was just hitting
the
streets and was brilliantly, feverishly, and obviously active. New
organizations were being created every day to deal with issues like
incest,
domestic abuse, healthcare, job opportunities, equal pay, the absence of
political power, and many others. The work that began then has become
institutionalized over the years since. It continues to advance, but
people
don’t always notice it now since it’s become deeper, more complex, and,
some
might say, mainstream. Another significant difference is that many of
the
growing pains have been outgrown: Feminism has been able to overcome
many of
the challenges posed by race, class, and national boundaries, becoming
truly
global. 

What role does technology play in
your store?

It has played an important role since
we bought a
computer and began using POS/IM bookstore software in 1985. We had a Web
site
for marketing purposes and then took advantage of the American
Booksellers
Association’s Web solution so we could sell books online; we switched
from
print to e-newsletters several years ago; we use social media, first
MySpace
and now Facebook and Twitter. And we have the technology—and desire—to
sell
e-books.

How do you think the rise of digital
reading
devices will affect your future?

The extent to which e-books affect our
future
depends on how large that segment of the market grows and whether there
are any
real opportunities for stores our size to get a share of online sales.
There’s
little to no local advantage online, and when your competitors are large
enough
to dictate market prices, it is somewhere between extremely difficult
and
utterly impossible to get even market share to scale.

Where would you like to see Women
&
Children First in ten years?

I would like to see us still finding
ways to serve
our community and fulfill our mission of giving voice to women.

How about feminism?
Continuing to make steady
progress toward
a world in which women are free to live an unobstructed, rich, creative
life.

What do you most love
about
bookselling?
Going through my days surrounded
by books
and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and
talking
about them. 

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of
the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Ann Christophersen photo by Kat Fitzgerald.

Women & Children First in Chicago

For the third installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Chicago to speak with Linda Bubon, who, along with Ann Christophersen, owns Women & Children First.

Women & Children First 1

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Founded more than thirty years ago in Chicago, Women & Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one large open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as well as journals, cards, and gifts.

Women & Children First 2

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Twinkle lights hang in the front windows facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front counter; and tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater performances and burlesque shows.

Women & Children First 3

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“In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.”

 

Women & Children First 4

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The literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of photography collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines as diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings.

Women & Children First 5

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“Nothing captures the laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden kitchen table that sits in the back, near the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Around it are four unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it seems a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.”

Women & Children First 6

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“The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives,” says co-owner Linda Bubon. “We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.”

Women & Children First 7

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Co-owner Ann Christophersen says what she loves most about bookselling is being “surrounded by books and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and talking about them.”

Women & Children First 8

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“I still think women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in getting critical attention,” says Bubon. “So there’s still a need for Women & Children First and stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers.”

Women & Children First 9

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“Though women artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still struggle for opportunity and recognition,” Christophersen says. “Women in general have also, obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a long way to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being challenged; we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few good options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and children….I could go on, but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and bookstores—that focus on women.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: McNally Jackson Books in New York City

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

11.1.10

In a recent New York magazine article about the renaissance of indie
bookstores in the city, Joe Keohane wrote, “New York’s independent bookshops
were supposed to be long gone by now. After a decade of slow financial
strangulation at the hands of the big-box stores, the web, the Kindle, and,
finally, the recession, the fact that there are still Strands and McNally
Jacksons standing seems positively miraculous.” Yet what is interesting about
this article is not just the fact that new stores are opening and thriving in
the city, but that McNally Jackson Books is likened to an institution like the
Strand, which has been in business since 1927. Although Sarah McNally’s
bookstore at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan certainly feels as though it’s
always been a part of the New York City literary scene, the truth is that it
was founded only six years ago, in December 2004.

Perhaps part of the
store’s sense of legacy has to do with the fact that McNally herself comes from
a bookselling family. Her parents own several McNally Robinson bookstores in
Canada—the flagship store in Winnipeg, and another in Saskatoon. In fact,
though always owned and operated by Sarah, the store in New York City
originally opened as a McNally Robinson. It became McNally Jackson in August
2008, both to end confusion about the store being independent from those run by
her parents and to commemorate the birth of her child with her then husband,
Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau.

It’s also clear
that this store is an integral part of the fabric of this neighborhood. It’s
located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita
(North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of
Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy
restaurants. On the Thursday morning that I showed up, there were already
several people waiting for the place to open. One person sat casually on a
bench outside the bookstore’s café, others chatted together on the sidewalk,
and a few peered in the front windows at the beautiful display of arranged
books.

“Beautiful” is
perhaps the best way to describe Sarah McNally’s bookshop. The store is light
and open and modern, yet still warm. Similarly, the worn hardwood floors and
the gray slate tile in the café are a wonderful contrast to the glass and
brushed aluminum staircase that leads to the lower level, as well as the
sculptural “chandelier”—for lack of a better word—that hangs over the
staircase, a piece resembling an enormous bunch of grapes the size of beach
balls that has been constructed from bright, distorted, partially mirrored
globes. From the lighting choices to the side tables, everything feels
deliberate, unhurried.

It also feels
personal. Every display in the store has a bit of cloth and flowers, a touch
that McNally learned from her mother growing up. Similarly, the wallpaper that
decorates the café is made up entirely from pages of McNally’s own collection
of books. However, she jokes that it’s not quite as personal as she’d hoped it
would be. When she brought her books to the wallpaper company, she’d selected
specific pages that she’d written on, with the intention that after they’d been
scanned and printed her marginalia would be visible alongside the text—a
record of the conversation that she, like so many readers, has had with her
books. But company personnel, thinking they were doing her a favor, laboriously
erased every underline and scribble before they were finished printing. And
because the remodeled café was scheduled to reopen the following day, she
decided to hang the wallpaper anyway. Still, there is something comforting
about sitting in her café, surrounded by all those pages of books.

McNally herself is
a wonderful presence. When we met, she welcomed me into the store as if it were
her home. She introduced me to staff, made sure I had something to drink when
we settled at a long wooden table in the café, and asked me about my own
writing projects before we began. Her vitality and openness not only draws a
person to her, but also permeates the entire store. She is energetic yet
grounded, with a genuine excitement for new ideas. And throughout our
conversation she was quick to joke, never taking herself too seriously. Yet her
commitment to bookselling and literature itself is deeply serious. She has high
standards—for publishing, for her store, and for herself.

You grew up in a bookselling family
in Canada. Did you know you wanted to be a bookseller from a young age?

No. I moved to New York to work in
publishing, which always seemed so glamorous growing up in a Winnipeg
bookselling family. And I did that for a few years, but it didn’t ultimately
work well with my temperament. Perhaps I would be happier in an office now than
I was then, but at the time it was torture, which I think is maybe what a lot
of young people feel who work in offices. [Laughter.]

So while I was at
Basic Books and Counterpoint, I did a few African American books. I used to go
to the Harlem Book Fair every year and work at the publisher’s booth. Have you
ever been to the Harlem Book Fair? You would not believe the throngs of
people—you cannot move to get through the crowds. But people were coming up to
my booth and discussing books of mine that they’d read. And just that
electrifying moment of talking to a reader about a book that I’d edited made me
realize how far I’d traveled away from that experience.

When you’re in
publishing, your reader is so abstract. Your only readers are reviewers. Or
your sales team. In-house, as an editor, you’re often the only person to read
the book. I mean, when you get to be higher up you do books that people spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on and other people read, but I was not at
that level. [Laughter.] So I
missed actually talking to readers about books, and I thought, “This is where I
want to be.” And I’ve never ever regretted that decision. The primary reason I
love my job is because of talking to readers.

So was it the solitary process of
editing that was difficult for that twenty-something version of yourself, or
was it the ethos of publishing that you found didn’t fit your temperament?

I always liked the editing. No, I found
the office environment very trying. Growing up I’d been working in bookstores
since I was twelve, so the thought of being stuck at a desk in an environment
where the only people you interact with are the other people who work with you
in the same office every day for years…I couldn’t imagine it! So that aspect of
it was very difficult. Also, the formality of meetings and the strict, strict
hierarchy is something I made sure that my store has never had. I never try to
make anybody feel that, just because I’m the boss, my opinion on something
stands. I always try to keep it a dialogue where everyone is putting out their
best ideas—from how a display looks, to how we’re going to take off in a whole
new direction for our Web site, or whatever it might be. I always try to have a
conversation. But in publishing, it’s a much more hierarchical environment. I
had bosses that were so high up that I’d never even met them. They’d never even
set foot in the office in all the years that I was stuck there with these
people, and yet one word from them would completely change what I had to do.
Similarly, my opinions—if I was even asked for them—would be filtered up
through three, four, or five people.

Do you think it might have actually
been harder for you to work in publishing because of your bookselling
background, considering how closely you’d been connected to readers before?

I do think so. I also came to see how
abstract the idea of a book can become around a conference table. Because that
can never happen in a bookstore—you’re constantly having readers come back to
you and say, “God, that book sucked.” Or, “God, this book was great.” And
before a person buys a book, many have to engage with it. They have to open it
up, read it. The first page has to be there.

Do you feel that publishers think
about getting books into the hands of customers differently than booksellers
do?

Hmm. They try different things with
different books, so there’s not really a single answer to that question. The
way that Algonquin gets its books into people’s hands, as with A Reliable
Wife
or Water for Elephants, is very different from the way that Random House
tried to get Yann Martel into people’s hands. It’s a completely different
route. It’s also hard for me to answer because I’m in New York, so I interact
with editors in a way that I think the rest of the country might not. I mean, I
will have editors come to the store and put a book in my hands and say, “Please
read this.”

Not just a sales rep.
Right. And so there is that
difference. But the good editors are sending notes to booksellers around the
country, saying, “This is something special.”

Putting books in the hands of
readers is also more individualized in a bookstore. As a bookseller, you learn
your regular customers so well that you know their tastes. At the store I used
to run, for example, we’d often set aside new titles for particular
individuals.

I don’t know if I know my customers
that well. In some ways I do. The way I do is that I believe every person
contains multitudes, and so I draw on the multitudes within me even more than I
do the knowledge of the customers themselves. And I feel like that is what does
not happen in publishing enough—people do not draw on the multitudes within
themselves. Paying three, four, five, or six million dollars for a second book
by a writer that’s not a good book means you’re drawing only on numbers, and
that’s not what sells books unless it’s one by James Patterson. That’s why it
was so hard for me to stay in publishing. Obviously I’m doing a very particular
kind of bookselling, but I do feel that publishers should ask the book to speak
first to their own heart. I think that’s what readers are asking, and that’s
what buyers are asking. I’m sure you hear this from every bookseller you speak
to—that they’re selling the books that speak deeply to them.

Absolutely.
Also, something that people don’t think
enough about is that the future of reading depends on the present of reading.
The future of our industry depends on a healthy present. I’ve heard it time and
again from customers—and I’ve found it in my own life—that when you read a
book that’s not very good, you don’t rush out to read another book. But when
you read a book you love, you rush back to continue the trend. So every
mediocre book that’s pushed with great blurbs—

is one more leak in the boat.
It is one more leak in the boat. [Laughter.] Great blurbs from the author’s friends when the
book is not that great is discrediting the entire experience, which is bad for
all of our futures. And there are so many ways in which I feel that publishers
are not really fostering that future. Do you know Richard Nash? Richard was the
editorial director at Soft Skull Press and he’s a consultant now. He was here
recently talking about how the paper in books gets worse and worse and worse
every year, and he called it “the endless shitification of the book.” [Laughter.] It’s so true, right? I mean, they’re publishing
on newsprint. Newsprint! Not the small presses, incidentally. Very few small
presses are doing that, despite the fact that they’re the ones that don’t have
any money. So I’m suspicious of these arguments by the mainstream that they
have to.

So it’s short-term versus long-term
thinking.

Which there is a lot of.

A few minutes ago we were talking
about multitudes. Do you consider this a general bookstore?

Yes. I mean, we are. I’m considering not being a general store anymore. I remember Karl
Pohrt [of Shaman Drum, in Ann Arbor, Michigan] saying to me once, “We sell
books. We only sell books.” And I sell all sorts of stuff—I sell wedding
planners, and I sell pet books, and I sell SAT guides. I sell self-help,
health, humor, business, sports. I sell all of this stuff. When I created my
business model, I articulated that we could be a destination bookstore in the
same way that Barnes & Noble is a destination bookstore. We would have
everything they did, but we’d simply be more selective—as a favor to the consumer, not a disservice.

And so I spent
years pushing that on the public and trying to get this idea across. But
increasingly, even in just the last five years, online retail has become
normalized. Everyone buys from eBay. And I’m sure there are regular customers
of ours who buy from Amazon.com. So I don’t even know if anyone wants that in a
bookstore anymore, if anybody wants a reliable general store.

I mean, think of
ten years ago—nobody bought online. Ten years ago my techie geek friends
bought online, and nobody else did. And twenty years ago, even fifteen years
ago, if you wanted a book you needed a bookstore. It was that simple. If you
want the book, you need the bookstore. And that seems sometimes prehistoric now
in terms of how far we’ve come.

In a city of bookstores like New
York, in an era where you don’t need a bookstore to buy a book, what was the
mission behind opening this store?

It was very much to be an event-driven
independent. I mean…my own vision is starting to seem so hackneyed and dusty at
this point. I really think I need to reimagine this store, and I’m in the
process of doing that. Imagine a community center for books that’s very event
driven. And we do still have four, five, six, seven events a week, as well as
story times and book clubs.

So it’s very much a neighborhood
bookstore.

Well, and more than that. I mean, a
place that is actually comfortable—there are chairs, it’s very spacious. That
might not seem like an important thing, but in New York it’s a big deal. We had
the radical idea of giving people chairs. [Laughter.] The chains took out all their chairs because
people were falling asleep in them, and literally dying in them. So we wanted to have a place, you know,
where you could sit and relax and look at books. It was almost like taking the
bookselling strategy that everyone else around the country had already figured
out and bringing it to New York.

Which seems so ironic.
Right, right. In retrospect I felt so
inspired, but when I look at my five-year-old or six-year-old vision, it was
really not revolutionary. [Laughter.]

And the café has been busy all
morning. Is it a part of the success of the store?

Not financially, but spiritually.

It brings people in and it adds to
the atmosphere.

And it brings so much energy. Just the
movement and the talking and the people bring real vitality to the
store—people don’t want to walk into an empty bookstore.

Why are you rethinking your mission
or your model? Is it an issue of overhead?

No, it’s an issue of staying ahead of
whatever is happening in the book industry, because right now we’re having our
best year ever. We’re doing really well. But my fear is that remaining a general
store, what people may actually want is an extraordinary literature section. So
maybe we should get rid of photography and art—because you see other places
selling it—and just have an enormous literature section. Maybe we get rid of
music and film and have an enormous poetry section. Maybe we really dedicate
ourselves to becoming the most extraordinary literary bookstore in the country.

Though remaining a more general
bookstore appeals to your mission as a neighborhood store.

Yes, exactly.

Whereas the idea of being the best
literature store in the country would perhaps be a large draw

—to tourists, to the whole city.

There would be tradeoffs either
way.

Yes! I know. I’m feeling very torn.
One of my friends is the VP of marketing at Harper, and when we went out to
lunch last week I talked to her about this idea. She said, “What does that
mean, the ‘best’ literature section in the city? What does that mean?” She
said, “You’re never going to have more books than Amazon, so are they still a
better bookstore?” So I’m feeling conflicted.

But you’re talking about hand
selecting rather than carrying everything.

Yeah, that’s the idea. That was always
the concept in this store. But if you read Ken Auletta’s recent essay about
e-books in the New Yorker [“Publish
or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle and Save the Book Business?”] he
quotes [Carolyn Reidy of] Simon & Schuster as saying that in a three-month
period, online retailers sell copies of 2,500 of their titles that aren’t
stocked in bookstores anymore. So I haven’t seen the chains as my competition
since I opened. I don’t see Barnes & Noble as my competition.

Your competition is online.
Entirely. That’s partly because there
isn’t a chain near my location, of course.

So do you feel more pressure from
online bookselling or the digital book?

Online, online.

But what about e-books? Is that something that you have any interest
pursuing?

Yes? [Pause.] Yes. In typical
Sarah McNally fashion, though, I feel like I can’t do it until I figure out a
whole new exciting revolutionary way to do it [laughter], which I
probably never will. So I’ll just end up doing it off the ABA [American
Booksellers Association] Web site. We’re setting up on the ABA site now. Though
we don’t love any of the templates, so we have to do it ourselves from scratch,
which is a big hullabaloo.

But, yes, I
definitely want to do it. It’s just very hard. I mean, talk about comparing
competition based on price! When you start getting into e-books and you’re
selling online, people are a click away from platforms like Amazon that are
already established. I’ve never felt that as a bookstore you should rely too
much on the concept of loyalty, but maybe I’m wrong. I’ve always said, “Shop
from me because I’m better, don’t shop from me because you feel sorry for me.”
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time and ultimately I’m
going to come back pleading for their loyalty. [Laughter.]

But if there are already
established online retailers like Amazon and Powell’s, do you think that
spending all these resources to develop a Web presence is the best use of the ABA’s
time and resources, or might Shop Local First campaigns and educational
programs like Winter Institute benefit booksellers more?

It’s an excellent question, and I don’t
know. Sometimes I look around the store and I think, “This is a good
bookstore.” We opened without knowing what the hell we were doing, but
somewhere along the line we’ve become a good bookstore. And I feel confident
that we’re a good bookstore. But who cares in 2010? Does anyone care whether
you’re a good bookstore? Is that enough? I don’t know. And if that’s enough,
then Winter Institute is more important. If that’s enough, then Shop Local is
more important. If it’s not
enough—and I don’t know whether or not it’s enough—then I think it’s
important that we at least try online bookselling.

And if loyalty is
based on some kind of chivalrous notion of sympathy with the culture, then
selling e-books is maybe irrelevant to that. I mean, you’ve seen my store. We
have seven thousand square feet in New York City. I’m obviously paying a lot of
rent. Clearly I’m not a completely incompetent businessperson, and yet every
day people come in and ask if we take credit cards. As if I’m just sitting here
stroking my cat, with my abacus. [Laughter.] So partly the idea of selling e-books is a symbol of something.

And one thing that
the ABA platform is great about is the ability to upload your whole inventory
onto its Web site every day, so you can have what I think is necessary: a
terminal in the store the customers can use to look up books themselves.

Like a kiosk.
Yeah, and from that kiosk you can buy
e-books. You can place your order or you can see whether the book is in the
store. Because I believe that for every customer who asks, there are a hundred
who get confused and leave. I mean, our literature section is broken up by
region—French literature is its own thing, as is Mediterranean, European,
African. If you can’t find the African literature section and you want The
Power of One
, nine out of ten
people will leave. But if they have a kiosk, it will give them the confidence
to go to a staff person if they can’t find something. Or they’d be able to
download it on the spot.

And I am
someone who reads books on my iPhone. I started doing this because I only had
one hand when I was breastfeeding. [Laughter.] But I only read what’s in the public domain.
This is another thing that worries me—I won’t spend a penny on e-books. So I
end up reading old British stuff. I’m reading The Woman in White right now on my phone, but I’m finally buying the
book today because I can’t stand it anymore. While it’s great to be able to
read in the dark, there’s something really depressing about going to bed with
your phone and reading a book on it. [Laughter.] Although you do have moments of immersion where
the medium is lost.

That suspension of disbelief.
You do. You come in and out of it. But
it’s still depressing. Especially because I’ve realized how deep my
relationship is with books. When things get tense in a book, I think you start
doing things like stroking the edge of the pages. When you do that on your
iPhone, the next thing you know you’ve frozen the thing. [Laughter.]

But it has made me believe in multiple platforms. I
remember publishers once suggesting that if you buy the book you also get the
e-book and maybe the audio, too. I remember thinking, “That’s stupid.” But now
I don’t think so, because I’d love The Woman in White in audio for when I’m cooking, I’d love it on my
phone for little moments when I’m waiting in line or when I’m nursing—which
is, admittedly, a very specific situation—and then to also have the book for
when I’m sitting in my reading chair or in my bed. Have you read Lee
Siegal’s book Against the Machine?

No, I haven’t.
He makes an excellent point in it that
whether you’re buying sex toys or lawn mowers or books or clothes for your kid,
the retail experience is completely the same online. Whether it’s sordid or
boring, it’s the same. And that is what is so wonderful about retail—when you
buy something from a place, the aura of that place becomes a part of the
object. I’m sure if you went through your bookshelf you could remember where
you bought every single book, and somehow it affects how you feel about that
book forever.

Absolutely.
And I would love to be able to create
an online bookstore that actually felt like a unique experience. So I do have a dream of selling e-books and having
an online store that actually has ambiance. But we’ve been so focused these
past few years on renovating the physical space that I really haven’t had the
time. For the first couple of years it was such a tremendous act of creation.
Coming from a bookselling family, I had enormous confidence that I knew how to
run a bookstore. That confidence was almost entirely misplaced. I realized how
shallowly I had inhabited my parents’ business.

You didn’t know what they were
doing, or you didn’t realize the extent of what they had to do?

The latter. And the former. [Laughter.] Because I felt like I was doing so much, but I was
merely moving snow around the tip of the iceberg. When you work for other
people, you don’t realize how much you’re passing by.

How much thought goes into every
decision.

Yeah. Every square inch of a business.

So in what ways did you either
model yourself after or consciously decide to do different from your parents’
bookstores?

What I modeled after them was their
philosophy to be event-driven. That’s the engine of their marketing and
publicity. We also use our café—like they do their restaurants—as the event
space, whether that’s a good idea or not.

But what’s funny
is that my favorite bookstores that I’ve loved shopping in are crazy junky old
used stores with books piled everywhere, with the owners smoking, and all the
books smell like cigarette smoke. I love stores like that. Yet if my staff
leaves anything lying around, I’ll say, “Get rid of this mess! We have to keep
everything clean!” It’s so funny. You can sit in the quiet of your mind and
say, “I will be this sort of spouse, I will be this sort of friend, I will be
this sort of daughter.” Then you go into daily life and you are exactly the
spouse, friend, and daughter that you have no choice but to be. The dominant
personality is indomitable, and I believe that bookselling is the exact same
way. You can say, “I will have this kind
of bookstore,” but you can no more control that than what kind of person you
are.

So is what we see here the best
or the worst of you? [Laughter
.]
It’s beyond my control. This is the
only bookstore I could have, I think. It can be no other way. It’s like when
you have to wear someone else’s shirt. Even though you think it’s a perfectly
nice shirt, somehow it’s humiliating. You wouldn’t think, “God, that person
shouldn’t leave the house in that shirt.” But your leaving the house in that shirt becomes totally
unbearable. It’s exactly like that with your bookstore. You can’t wear someone
else’s clothes and you have the only bookstore you can have.

Another thing I’d like to talk
to you about is China. In January of 2008
you
traveled to Beijing with several other American booksellers: Karl Pohrt of
Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Paul Yamazaki of City Lights in San Francisco, Rick
Simonson of Elliot Bay in Seattle, and Allison Hill of Vroman’s in Pasadena.
How did this come about?

Well, I’ll tell you. Mitch Kaplan
[of Books & Books in Miami] put together a bookselling panel at the 2007
Miami Book Fair and he brought us down. Allison
wasn’t a part of that, but the rest of us were. And afterward Karl said, “We
need to take this on the road!” Meanwhile, Lance Fensterman—who works for Reed
Exhibitions and who used to be the Director of BEA [BookExpo America]—was
talking to the Chinese equivalent
of BEA, which is enormous. He was asked for a list of booksellers to give an educational
panel to Chinese booksellers, and so he thought of us. He also asked Allison to
join the group because she’s an extremely impressive woman. She’s a very, very
smart businessperson. There were also several British booksellers.

So we went to
Beijing, and it was wonderful. The Chinese were so gracious and so hospitable.
We stayed for over a week, and for most of that time they had arranged every
single meal of every day, as well as tours. It was amazing. We met so many
people and we were fed so well.

In addition to the trade show,
did you also visit individual bookstores?

Yes. We met the CEO of the second
largest bookstore in the world, which is enormous—it was like ten Barnes &
Nobles. Their mandate is to stock every single book published in Chinese.
Period. I cannot give you a sense of the magnitude of this store. People had
shopping carts. You couldn’t even move in this store it was so crowded. And when
we went to the conference room to talk with the head of the store, the
conference table was so enormous that the far end of it was on the horizon
somewhere. [Laughter.] The place must
have been a hundred thousand square feet. It was enormous.

But that’s atypical.
Well, that was a state-owned store.
When you walk in, all the communist texts were right there in front—Marx and
Mao and Engles. But then we also visited the City Lights of China, which is now
state-owned but was not originally. They published all the Beats. We went to an
academic bookstore that was beautiful, run by a professor who’d been locked up
after Tiananmen Square and who now had this amazing bookstore.

Are all the bookstores
state-owned?

No, this is what is so interesting
about Chinese cultural control. Some of the publishing houses are state-owned,
some of the bookstores are state-owned, but not all of them. Still, it’s enough
that the government nudges the direction of the culture without having complete
control. We talked to the wonderful man who runs the academic bookstore, and we
said, “Why don’t you have more events? Because all of our stores use events to
get the word out about our stores.” And he said, “I have some, but I’m already
under surveillance. If I have too many then they’ll crack down.”

Other than the influence of the
state, how does Chinese bookselling compare to bookselling here in the States?

It was really like bookselling
twenty-five years ago. Remember what middle class retail used to be like? Go
back to our early teenage years. It wasn’t nice before the Banana Republicization of retail. I remember even when I
opened this store people kept coming up to me, saying, “It doesn’t feel like a
book store. It feels like a restaurant or a clothing store.” And I thought,
“Why can’t bookstores be nice?” It’s ridiculous. [Laughter.] So retail is changing in China. There are more and
more Western chains, and there’s a lot of money suddenly. So there are more and
more high-end stores that are beautiful. Retail feels very 1982 there.

So if you went back to China ten
years from now, do you think their stores will have evolved in the same way
that ours have?

I hope so. That’s what I gave my
speech about. Online retail is just now starting to impact their businesses. It really is
like a snap shot of our own history. So they are going to have to figure out
how to make their stores feel necessary. They’re about to come up against the
same challenge that we’ve been fighting. And the only way I know how to do that
is to create an attractive physical space. My customers tend to also say it’s the
staff.

What’s been the greatest challenge
in the first six years of business?

I don’t know. Everyone always asks me
that. Because it’s all gone so well, really.

For me I guess it
might be competition over author events. It’s really hard to get the A-list
authors in New York. Barnes & Noble always gets them. I also find management really a
challenge. It’s not, you know, native to my personality to tell people what to
do. I remember reading The Gospel of St. Thomas when I was quite young. There is a line in it that
says, “Jesus said, ‘Be passersby.’” And I thought, “What a wonderful idea, just
to be a passerby.” I mean, we’re all so meddlesome, you know? And I think being
raised by my mother, who was a retailer—once you’re a retailer you’re always
going into other people’s stores thinking, “Why would they choose that carpet?
Why would they have their staff do it that way?” Or constantly looking at ways
that things can be done better because that’s the only way to survive as a
store is to be always on the
lookout for any little thing
that you can do better. It’s a constant act of regeneration. If you stop,
you’re dead.

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What would be the highest compliment
you could receive from a customer?

I think it’s always the same, which is
they found and loved books that they would never have otherwise found.
Ultimately, that is my service. That can be the only service that independent
bookstores provide, because we no longer are the exclusive purveyors of these
things. That’s the only reason why we should exist.

To put good books in the hands of
people.

Yeah. Matchmaking, you know? That’s
the bookseller’s role. If we do it well, we’ll stay relevant. If we don’t do it
well, we won’t.

And what do you most want to have
achieved in the next six years of business?

I want this store to really have a
feeling of being so deeply curated. Because I don’t want to exist just for the
sake of existing, but to really feel essential to the culture.

INSIDE MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
On average, how many books do you
stock?

Forty thousand.

What are the best-selling sections
in your store?

Literature, art, and design.

What books did you most enjoy
selling in 2010?

Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer has brought many customers
and booksellers to vegetarianism; Just Kids by Patti Smith, as she is our neighbor and was
wonderful about signing stock, and New Yorkers loved this book; Faithful
Place
by Tana French is one of the
best mysteries we’ve read in a long time; and Nox by Anne Carson, whose writing I love deeply and
madly.

What is the most unique or defining aspect of McNally Jackson as a
bookstore for you?

Our focus on international literature,
which is part of a larger effort to create a bookstore that is as diverse as
New York City.

Is there anything special you look for in terms of an author event?
We try to avoid single-author readings
unless there is a pressing reason. We try panels, interviews, conversations,
political discussions—anything that avoids recitation and allows the spark of
creation to enter the store.

What would most people be surprised to learn about independent
bookstores?

That we don’t sit around all day
reading.

Where would you like to see McNally Jackson six years from now?
I aspire only to continue offering a
place where New Yorkers can celebrate the written word.

What do you love most about bookselling?
The customers.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online
journal Fiction Writers Review.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City

For the sixth and final installment of our series of interviews, Inside
Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books.

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McNally Jackson Books, located in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, stocks about 40,000 books at any given time and sprawls over 7,000 square feet. Though founded by Sarah McNally in December 2004, it feels as though it’s always been a part of the city’s literary scene.

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The store has a sense of legacy, perhaps because McNally herself comes from a family of booksellers, and it’s clearly an integral part of the fabric of the neighborhood. It also feels personal. Every display has a bit of cloth and flowers. The wallpaper that decorates the café is made up entirely from pages of McNally’s own collection of books.

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“I want this store to really have a feeling of being so deeply curated,” McNally says. “Because I don’t want to exist just for the sake of existing, but to really feel essential to the culture.”

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The store is light and open and modern, yet still warm. From the lighting choices to the side tables, everything feels deliberate, unhurried. McNally Jackson Books is a neighborhood spot. There are plenty of places to sit, and lingering is encouraged.

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“When you buy something from a place, the aura of that place becomes a part of the object,” McNally says. “I’m sure if you went through your bookshelf you could remember where you bought every single book, and somehow it affects how you feel about that book forever.”

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“When I created my business model,” says McNally, “I articulated that we could be a destination bookstore in the same way that Barnes & Noble is a destination bookstore. We would have everything they did, but we’d simply be more selective—as a favor to the consumer, not a disservice.”

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The café is always busy, and while McNally admits it’s not a money maker, she says it contributes “spiritually” to the store. “It brings so much energy. Just the movement and the talking and the people bring real vitality to the store—people don’t want to walk into an empty bookstore.”

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“The future of our industry depends on the present of reading,” McNally says. “I’ve heard it time and again from customers—and I’ve found it in my own life—that when you read a book that’s not very good, you don’t rush out to read another book. But when you read a book you love, you rush back to continue the trend.”

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For McNally, the highest compliment is when a customer says they found and loved books that they would never have otherwise found. “Ultimately, that is my service,” she says. “That can be the only service that independent bookstores provide, because we no longer are the exclusive purveyors of these things. That’s the only real reason why we should exist…. Matchmaking, you know? That’s the bookseller’s role. If we do it well, we’ll stay relevant.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

9.1.10

On the morning I visited Denver’s
Tattered Cover Book Store, the place was bustling with activity. Customers
wandered up and down the central staircase, carrying books tucked under their
arms. They stopped to browse the spacious aisles, scanning titles on the
shelves. They lingered in the downstairs café, eating as they flipped through
magazines from the enormous periodical section.

The reason for the
crowds had partly to do with the influx of writers who had traveled to Denver
this weekend for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference,
and partly with the fact that it was opening day of the Major League Baseball
season—the sidewalks were filled with fans headed to nearby Coors Field, home
of the Colorado Rockies, and before the game, many of them stopped at Tattered
Cover. The store’s location, in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of Denver, is a
success story of urban revitalization. This neighborhood is the oldest section
of Denver, and like the boom-and-bust economy of this western city, it has had
its fair share of downturns. In 1988, however, the city council created the
Lower Downtown Historic District with the mission to preserve the architectural
and historical assets of the area and to spur economic investment and growth.

Because of her
belief in this project and the need for community-oriented business districts,
Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover, purchased the warehouse building at 16th
and Wynkoop with a business partner in 1990, and subsequently moved her
administrative offices and the shipping-and-receiving operations for her Cherry
Creek store, which opened in 1974, to this location. A few years later, she
opened a second Tattered Cover store here, as well as a coffee shop and
newsstand. By 1996 the LoDo store had substantially expanded and today occupies
two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and
a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

The store has since
become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers.
From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There
are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious
tables in the café area. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old
(worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams)
and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local
options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

The same could be
said of Meskis. Though soft spoken, she possesses an engaging and charming
personality that immediately put me at ease. She radiates a type of calm that
seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is
the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her
thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but
also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social
and literary communities of Denver. In fact, Tattered Cover hosts more than
five hundred readings a year among its three locations. So it was fitting that
we sat down for our talk beside a fireplace at the back of Tattered Cover’s
expansive event space, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of many of the
authors who’ve read at the store during its nearly four decades of existence.

How did you come to bookselling?
I came to bookselling accidentally. I
was intent on teaching at the university level.

Here in Denver?
No, I didn’t have a place in mind. I
grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and I was very driven in terms of my
direction in life. I was determined I was going to get the zillionth degree,
and I wanted to have a life that was full of the usual things—marriage,
children. I could see myself at an excellent university teaching brilliant
students all day long, walking home with a briefcase in hand, kicking the fall
leaves as I approached my nice but not ostentatious house, hearing strains of
Chopin being played by my children through the open French doors. [Laughter.] It didn’t quite work out that way.

What year was this?
I graduated high school in 1959. Then
I went to college.

Did you go to school in Chicago?
No, I went to Purdue [in Indiana]. I
was a math major, believe it or not. It was always a toss-up, and I eventually
shifted to English. My parents didn’t have much money, but they were able to
pay for my first year. So I always had part-time jobs in the summers. But then
I married young, while we were in school, and I needed to get more work during
the school year. And soon I found myself working in bookstores to help pay the
tuition.

This was at Purdue?
Yes. But then my husband finished his
graduate degree and we moved to Colorado. All the while I was still working in
bookstores and libraries to help pay the tuition bills. And after some time—I
was in graduate school then—I woke up one morning literally staring at the
ceiling and said, “You idiot, don’t you know that you’ve been doing what you love
all these years? Why don’t you just get on with it?” So I dropped out of
graduate school and I got more serious about the book business. Around this
time the marriage ended, and I had two small children.

When was this?
1973. We were still pretty young, so
we didn’t have much savings. But I took my half and began pursuing the book
business. Fast forward a year or so and a little store in the Cherry Creek area
of Denver came up for sale. It was called the Tattered Cover, and it was three
years old. It was a small storefront—only 950 square feet—and carried only
new books, despite its name. So, I did a little business plan on an envelope
with a pencil and figured I could pull it off. The bad news was that the owner
wanted what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. But the good news
was that he was willing to carry the note, to be the banker. And the other
piece of good news was that he didn’t want much money down. So I figured out
what I could do and I made an offer, which was promptly rejected.

Some time went by
and I decided, through the urging of a friend, to go see what was going on,
because there was no ownership transition of the store that was apparent. It
turned out that someone else had made a better offer earlier, but the deal had
fallen through. I don’t know why the owner didn’t come back to me afterward.
Who knows? But, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I made another offer. I
borrowed some money from my uncle in California and that offer was accepted in
September 1974, and ownership transferred to me.

Over the next several years you
expanded, however.

Yes, in increments.

Was this the plan from the
beginning, or did opportunities arise that allowed you to grow?

I can’t speak for every bookseller
in the world, obviously. But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller
sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you
would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers
appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in
different areas without betting the ranch?

Of course.
So I don’t think I had a goal to
have a huge bookstore by any means. But I certainly wanted to grow it to a size
that would accommodate a fine representation of the wonderful books that are published.
So every time one of our neighbors in the building would move out, we would
take the space if it were available and if it were the right timing for us. We
were fortunate in that way. There was growth in the commercial area, there was
growth in what was possible in the book business in Denver, and we took the
opportunities.

But looking back, I think our biggest decision in
terms of growth in that first store was when we decided to move upstairs in the
original building. Quite a bit of space had become available on the second
floor and it was offered to us at a good price because second floor space—for
retail—is less desirable. So I pondered and pondered and pondered it. Because
the question was: How do you get the customers upstairs? And any time our
customers or colleagues found out that we were considering this, they thought
the sky was falling! They were very concerned and they gave me all kinds of
advice: “Don’t do it, don’t do it; your customers won’t follow you. It will be
the end of the Tattered Cover. It will be dreadful.”

Were you going to move the whole
store upstairs?

Oh, no. We were going to have both
floors. We were going to put in a staircase. And it’s not like there weren’t
stores that had tried this before. Obviously department stores were
multi-level. But it wasn’t quite the same thing. Our colleagues and sales reps
and customers were just beside themselves in their advice to me about not doing
this. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I’m sure they’ve got good reasons
for this, and I can see both sides to the story…” but we needed the space, we
were growing, the rent was very compelling, and I simply didn’t want to lose
that opportunity. And I thought, “We could make the staircase wider; we could
put books on the landings to draw people up the stairs; we could put
destination sections up there…” I said, “We can do this so it doesn’t feel like
an interminable journey up these stairs.”

Fast forward—we
did it. Our landlord had a charitable streak from time to time, and he loaned
me the money to put the staircase in. And the customers came upstairs. But our
colleagues were right in that it is much
harder to get people upstairs. Still, it worked. And it worked again. We took
again more space upstairs when it became available. So we grew from about 950
square feet to 6,000 square feet in that location. Then we were out of space.

Then, perhaps 1980
or so, I started looking around for space within the immediate area to move to.
And so I was looking, looking, looking, looking, nothing, nothing, nothing,
nothing. Moving a store is a serious decision, you know?

And no small undertaking.
And no small undertaking, even
though we’d become pretty used to barreling out walls and moving bookcases. In
fact, in my earliest years, after my husband and I were divorced, I lived in a
small place with the kids. I would go to the lumberyard and have my boards
pre-cut and then bring them back in the car. I had space in the alleyway, which
was next to the store, and I’d be banging away, making new bookcases. [Laughter.] I’d forgotten about that.

So, you know, we
were stuck. It didn’t seem like anything was going to work. And then I had a
visit from a developer in town who had his eye on a vacant piece of property
next to a parking garage next to a department store that was across the street
from a shopping center. It was an open field at that point, and he was planning
on putting in ground-floor retail and then a little bit of an expansion of the
parking garage next door above on the roof—a few extra stories of parking. And
so he said, “I’ll cut you a good deal. Would you like to move over here?” It
was only half a block away and it was brand new space—two floors, totaling
about 11,000 square feet. This was double what we currently had. And he was
willing to do a lot for us to get us over there, and I thought, “Okay. Let’s go
for it.”

So we got serious
about that and we were planning to sublet the old store location of 6,000
square feet. But then the bookstore grapevine came through town and we learned
that Pickwick Books was considering bringing a store to Denver. You probably
don’t remember Pickwick Books.

No, I don’t.
Pickwick Books was a new
development arm of the Dayton Hudson Corporation, which owned B. Dalton back
then. And Crown Books—do you remember Crown Books?

I do.
Well, Crown Books was very
successful opening up in the Washington D.C. area. They were one of the first major
discounters and they, were really doing a number on the independent stores, as
well as on the B. Dalton and Walden stores. So my assumption back
then—”assumption,” keep that in mind—was that when the powers that be got
together and saw what was happening with Crown in their locations, they got
nervous and started to think of ways they could counteract this trend. So B. Dalton—at
that time owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation—decided to do an experiment.
They had purchased a small, regional chain in southern California called
Pickwick. Then they converted those stores to B. Dalton stores and they retired
the Pickwick name. But they still owned it. It’s my understanding that by still
owning that name they decided to use it for their trial run of a new bookstore
model: heavy discounting, using Crown as the model. They were going to place it
in three or four cities around the country to test market it, and one of those
cities was Denver. [Laughter.]

This was now in the 80s?
This would be the early-to-mid 80s,
because we were supposed to move in ’82 but there was construction delay. So we
moved in January ’83 into the new space. And then we learned that Crown was
doing this roll-out across the country and that one of the cities was also
going to be Denver.

Cue ominous music.
Right! [Laughter.] So I took my calculator home and tried to figure
out what they knew about bookselling that I didn’t know. And I couldn’t see how
we could maintain our position. So I thought, “Well, we can’t discount. But we
can give the bargain-conscious customer something else. We can go heavily into
bargain books—remainders.” But we needed more space to do that. So we decided
to keep the old store space and put it primarily into bargain books. That’s
also about the same time that we decided to go more heavily into periodicals and
sidelines. Anyway, it turned out that business thrived.

Tattered Cover is often cited as one of the first independent stores
to develop an author reading series. Were readings a part of Tattered Cover
from the beginning?

It happened early, but it happened in
an unusual sort of way. As I said before, I had worked in bookstores when I was
in school. And when I bought Tattered Cover we were not really seeking author
events because I had seen too often a lovely gathering where nobody came, and I
didn’t want to put the author in that kind of position. Well, one day I got a
call from our sales rep for Little, Brown and she said, “Joyce, I’ve got an
offer to make to you. Ansel [Adams] is going to be on his way to see Georgia
[O’Keeffe] in New Mexico and he’s going to stop in Denver. Would you like to
have him for a signing?” I held my breath and said, “Absolutely. We would be
delighted to have a signing.” Though I was completely terrified. I had heard
that he was very particular about the plates on the books and that he would go
to the printers about it, and so I thought he must be a difficult and demanding
personality. But when he came he couldn’t have been sweeter. Just wonderful.
And, of course, the line was out the door. I was sold at that point. The magic
of that moment—of seeing the author and his people—was just fabulous.

I remember when
Tom Wolfe came for The Right Stuff. We had a wonderful group of folks waiting for him, and events just
became a part of our community experience. Every signing—every one—is
different. To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all
the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common
to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular
writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has
ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of
reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.

Are there any other authors or
events that you found particularly special?

Once we had acquired the second
floor in the original building, we did all the signings up there. And at one
point we had the opportunity to host Buckminster Fuller—a forward-looking
architect and writer of note. As it turned out, he was on his last tour. He was
quite elderly at the time. And when he walked in the door and I saw how frail
he was, I thought, “He’s never going to make those stairs.” So I said, “We’ll bring the signing table
downstairs.” But he said, “No, no, no, no, no.” He was going to go up those
stairs and sit at that table and greet his admirers. And he did so. It was a
daytime event, and his admirers almost genuflected when they came up to the
signing table. It was that type of experience. And as the line was coming to a
close, his adult grandson, who was traveling with him, said to me, “Do you have
a large pan that you could put some warm water in for granddad to soak his
hand?” It turns out that he’d broken a finger or two but he insisted on coming
to sign. That was really remarkable.

Do you also do nonliterary events here that are community oriented?
When we’re not doing signings here [in
the events space] or when there is a gap for some reason, we will rent this
space out to the community; we also have a minimal rental rate for nonprofits.
And sometimes we’ll just let some organizations use it, such as the Lighthouse
Writers Group. They meet here once in a while. So, yes, it’s a community
meeting space.

Another thing I’d like to talk with
you about—because it has to do both with the local community here in Denver
and the broader literary community—is the First Amendment case that you were
involved in. Can you talk a bit about how this came about?

In 2000 we were approached by a DEA
agent who served us with a subpoena to turn over some records. But the
subpoena—upon sending it to our attorney—turned out not to be an official
subpoena. After my attorney looked at it, he indicated to me that this type of
subpoena was not actionable. So he called the agent, informing him that in
order to obtain access to the records a proper subpoena would need to be
presented.

But the agent
indicated that he didn’t want to take that course of action. So we thought that
was the end of that. But three weeks later, my attorney, Dan Recht, called and
said, “Joyce, I got a call from an individual in the Adams County DA’s office,
saying that a search warrant is in the works on Tattered Cover, in the hopes of
getting the sales records for a particular customer.” And I said, “A search
warrant? That is immediately
actionable.” I knew that much about the law. But he said, “Don’t get excited
yet; I asked for some extra time. We have until the end of the business day
tomorrow to come up with a response. So I want you to think about this
overnight, and I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.

The decision was whether to allow
it?

The decision was about how we were
going to respond. Because there’s no decision to be made about “allowing” a
search warrant—once issued, the authorities can act on it. So the next day I
was in the office and I got a visit from one of our floor managers. She said,
“Joyce, there are police officers here with a search warrant and they want to
see you.” I said, “That’s impossible.” And she said, “No, it isn’t; they’re
here.”

So you began shredding all your records, right?
No. [Laughter.] I said, “Okay, send them upstairs and we’ll
deal with this.” There were four or five individuals, all dressed in civvies.
They weren’t jack-booted police officers or anything like that. In fact, they
were dressed like booksellers—one had a ponytail; they wore tennis shoes. They
were all completely gentlemanly. But they had a search warrant. So I said, “May
I call my attorney?” They said, “Yes.” And when I called Dan he absolutely hit
the ceiling: “They can’t do that! They gave us until the end of the business
day today! Fax me a copy of the search warrant.”

So while the
warrant was faxing over, I was sitting with the officers and talking about the
First Amendment and the Kramerbooks case [in which independent counsel Kenneth
Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky’s purchase records from an
independent bookstore in Washington, D.C.]. They had a mission and the mission
was going to be accomplished. They said, “This isn’t about you.” I said, “I know it’s not about me.” They said, “You’re perfectly
legal.” I said, “I know we’re
perfectly legal.” They said, “You can sell anything that’s constitutionally
protected.” I said, “I know we
can sell anything that’s constitutionally protected—that’s what we sell.” This
went on: “But we need this information.” “Well, I see that as a First Amendment
issue.” “It’s not a First Amendment issue.” “Yes, it’s a First Amendment
issue.”

Meanwhile, Dan got
the copy of the search warrant and he asked to talk with the lead officer. So I
put him on the phone and they went at it. While Dan was talking to him, I kept
talking to the other officers. Finally, at the very end, I said, “What are the
books that you’re after, anyway? How do you even know we stock them?” And one
officer looked me right in the eye and he said, “You’ll special-order anything,
won’t you?” [Laughter.] Got
me.

Throughout this
meeting they kept saying, “We just want this one record, we just want this one
record from this one customer.” And I asked, “What if you don’t find what
you’re looking for?” And he said, “We’ll take the next step then.” Which I
translated as: The search warrant goes into effect and they look at more
records and more records.

Somehow, some way,
Dan was able to persuade them to hold off for ten days. So they left the store,
Dan and I conversed, and within a heartbeat Dan filed for a temporary
restraining order in the court, and we got it. This enabled us to file suit
against them—to get a judicial opinion on whether the search warrant could
move forward or not.

Whether it truly was an infringement of First Amendment rights?
Right. That’s what was up for debate.

Was it the individual’s right to privacy being defended, or was it
your right?

It was the individual’s right. I asked
the officer, “Why don’t you just go to the individual and get us out of the
loop?” But the officer replied, “He’s not going to tell us anything.” You see,
we didn’t know anything about the case. We assumed it had something to do with
drugs because the DEA had been involved earlier, but that was all we knew.

So they suspected that this
individual had purchased a particular title, but they needed to verify that
fact with you.

That’s right. They wanted confirmation.
When we learned more, as our case moved through the judicial process, we found
out that it had to do with a meth lab. There’d been suspicion of a meth lab in
a trailer home in a trailer park in Adams County, and so the officers had been
able to get a search warrant for the premises on probable cause that illegal
activity was happening there. As they suspected, they found a small meth lab in
the bedroom of the trailer home. They also found in the trash what they called
a “mailing envelope” from Tattered Cover. The mailing envelope had a mailing
label on it, and there was an invoice number on the label. There was also the
name of the person to whom the contents of the envelope were addressed, who
lived at the trailer home. But there was no indication what had been in the envelope.

Because there was no invoice?
Correct. Inside the trailer home, near
the meth lab, were two books on how to make meth. And so the officers said,
“Aha!” They wanted to put the two pieces of evidence together to tie it to that
specific person. They wanted to know who occupied that bedroom, because there
were four or five people who lived in that trailer.

So Tattered Cover was within its legal rights to sell that book; the
officers simply wanted to identify which individual had bought it so that that
purchase could be used as circumstantial evidence to prove who
had been making the meth.
Right. So they went to get a search
warrant for us after we were unwilling to turn the information over with the
unofficial subpoena. But because Tattered Cover is a legitimate business, the
DA’s office in Adams County may have felt there wasn’t any danger of us
destroying evidence—which is normally one of the reasons why a search would be
necessary. Instead, they wanted the officers to do more due diligence
first—dust the books for fingerprints, interview people in the trailer park to
see who lived in that trailer, and so on.

So they went and
did the fingerprinting, which yielded no results. In fact, one of the books
still had its brown wrapper around it. Hadn’t been opened, hadn’t been cracked.
And the other one looked like it hadn’t been cracked—the spine was clean.

But the officers
wanted to take the shortcut. And since they were on hold with the Adams County
DA’s office, they went to Denver for the search warrant. They could do that
because we’re located in the city and county of Denver. So now we’re in the
Denver district court and we find out that this is going to go on for a while.
Dan’s is a small office. He doesn’t have a big corporate office to absorb
costs, and he was charging us little. Meanwhile, we were getting five-dollar
donations from customers to help pay legal fees. And Chris Finan from the
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression stepped in. And our pal
Neal Sofman in San Francisco held a fund-raiser at A Clean Well-Lighted Place
for Books with Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, along with some
other authors to raise money for us.

So this was becoming a national issue.
It became a national phenomenon. We
were getting calls from national press. I never saw anything like it.
Meanwhile, all we’re trying to do is sell books. [Laughter.]

Yet 90 percent of your time was spent on this issue.
And our customers—every time we’d
been involved in cases like this before there was press, and each time I
thought, “This time the customers are not going to understand and we’re going to
go out of business.” I thought for sure that would be the case with this one. I
mean, a meth lab? We don’t like meth labs. But that was not the point of the
case.

So that judge in
the district court gave half a loaf to each side. In his decision, he ruled
that authorities could not have the thirty days’ worth of material/background
on this customer that they were seeking. But the Tattered Cover would have to
turn over the record of what was mailed to that customer on that one invoice.
So then we had a decision as to whether to appeal our case to the Colorado
Supreme Court or not. And we did.

To skip to the end
of that story, we got a 6-0 decision in our favor. One judge abstained; I
have no reason why.

How long did the entire process last?
Two years. It was decided in 2002. And
once it was over, the authorities finally went out and got the guy. They put
him in prison for a number of years.

Without even needing this evidence.
Right. By the time we were into the
case we had several pro bono attorneys. And many of them were criminal
[defense] attorneys. They looked at the facts and they said, “They don’t need
this. We’ve had less evidence for some of our clients who got put away.” At
about the same time—midway through the case—a couple of local young filmmakers
asked us if they could do a documentary. So they followed us around for the
second year of the case. But when the case was over and they’d finished their
piece and were trying to sell it to PBS, they found out that they needed to get
eight or nine more minutes of film. So they came to us and said, “We would like
to have an aftermath panel with all the parties. It would be you, Dan, the lead
officer, their attorney, and someone from the University of Denver law school
who would moderate the panel. We’ll do it at the Press Club. Would you be
willing to do that?” So we were all set to go when Dan got a phone call from
the public defender who had represented the guy who was accused and convicted
of making the meth. He asked Dan to confirm what was in the package.

Because of course you had to have known what the book was this whole
time.

But the guy who’d been put in prison
hadn’t known anything about this case while it was going on. He had no idea.
They’d arrested him after the case was over. But evidently he’d told his public
defender what had been in the package, and when the police had finally
interviewed him he’d also told them. But they didn’t believe him, evidently.

So the public
defender said to Dan, “Would you confirm the title?” And Dan said, “Well, we
could if we had permission from the individual. But it’s not something we
really want to do. We feel that this is private. He can say what the book was
if he wants to, but in any case we would certainly need written permission.” So
the next thing you know a letter is delivered from the guy in prison, with his
permission to reveal the contents of the package.

After the phone
call, Dan said to me, “Maybe we should do that.” And I said, “No! We spent two
years of our lives on this thing. We’re not going to make more hay out of
this.” Meanwhile, the filmmakers have set up the panel. You can actually see
this film if you ever care to. They play it nearly every September during
Banned Book Week.

So there we are on
the panel. A whole bunch of people are in attendance. It’s a small room at the
Denver Press Club, but it’s filled up. And when we get to the
question-and-answer period, who should be in the audience but the public
defender…. [Raises eyebrows.]
He stands up, identifies himself as the attorney for the convicted individual,
and he says—I’m paraphrasing here—”Mr. Recht, you have received a letter from
my client giving you permission to identify what was in the package, haven’t
you?” Dan says, “Yes.” “And would you do so?” And Dan says, “We would never
identify what was in the package unless we had explicit permission from whoever
owned the package, whoever bought the book.” And the public defender says, “But
you have that permission, don’t you?” And Dan says, “Yes, but again I want you
to know that we would certainly never put this information out there unless we
had permission.” “Well?” the public defender asks. “Okay, then,” Dan finally
says. “The book was on Japanese calligraphy.”

That’s amazing.
It’s true. The guy was a tattoo
artist. [Smiles.]

Let’s talk a bit about the future next. You can’t open a
bookselling-related periodical and not see at least one story about e-readers
and Kindles and digital bookselling. Do you have any intention of selling
digital books?

I think it’s very apropos of the
times. We do sell digital downloads on our Web site. We can sell them for most
of the e-readers except the Kindle, which is proprietary to Amazon. There are
many issues with regard to books being produced in this way, but as far as
independent stores’ being competitive with Amazon it’s a pricing issue. Though
we can sell these digital downloads, we can’t really be competitive because
Amazon is selling below cost. We just don’t have the financial wherewithal to
sustain that.

I’ve always been a
firm believer that information will move in the most user-friendly manner
possible. And when mass-market paperbacks became a big deal in the United
States after World War II, there were a number of people who said that this was
going to be the end of good publishing. That didn’t happen. Times will change,
and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our
care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the
writers and the readers. And I think that ink on paper between boards, well
done, will always be, at least in the foreseeable future, part of our social
construct. Reading a book, as you well know, is more than a cerebral
experience—it’s a physical experience. And while an e-reader has its place in
many people’s lives, there’s nothing like holding a book and seeing the pages
turn in a way that is not electronic. [Laughter.]

When I think of a
book, there are many forms that it takes. When we talk about fine literature
and poetry and use that as an example, the soul of that book is its content and
the message of the author. So that’s first. What holds that message—whether it
is a computer, ink on paper, or an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony
Reader—has more significance in some circumstances than others. I would prefer
to read my fiction and a great deal of my nonfiction in ink on paper. If I’m on
an airplane and going on vacation, I might choose something else. But if it’s a
cookbook, I need pictures. I want to be able to get a little of what I’m
cooking on the page. [Laughter.]
So, while it may be mixing metaphors a bit, you’re not going to stand in the
way of the freight train of change. However, I think it’s really important to
be up front laying the track as best you can in the right direction for the
benefit of the readers who we serve.

Finally, what is your favorite
thing about the day-to-day of bookselling?

When I’m walking through the sales
floor and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh,
wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making
that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time
and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.

Just this morning we received a letter
from a young girl—a ten-year-old fifth grader—who wrote a poem about books,
and loving to be in this store, and the cushy chairs, and her favorite step
that she likes to sit on. “Books, books, books, books,” she wrote. “Read, read,
read, read.” That’s what she said. [Smiles.] It is a remarkable profession, trade, and way of life.

page_5: 

INSIDE TATTERED COVER BOOK STORE
What are the best-selling sections
in your stores?

Backlist and genre fiction, new
fiction, new nonfiction, and children’s books. The next tier would include
history, religion, and travel.

What for you is the most unique or
defining aspect of Tattered Cover as a bookstore?

The dedication of its booksellers to
providing a special comfortable “place,” physical and mental, where customers
can browse a vast selection of ideas in print. 

Is there anything special you look
for in terms of an author event?

The Tattered Cover offers a wide
variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each
year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical,
educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few. All of this
said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated
to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can
provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author
who is the draw.

What role does technology play in
your store?

If one considers the modern printing
press a technological wonder, not to mention the various elements of
production, these are the very basis of our existence as a business. However,
technology, as we tend to think of it today, plays a significant role in
database information and searches, communication, business record keeping,
marketing, and, increasingly, the presentation and download of “the book”
itself into handheld and/or computer devices.

What has been the biggest challenge
for Tattered Cover in the last decade?

Maintaining a strong customer base that
will continue to support the booksellers; offering customers a substantial inventory
in a faltering economy and a highly competitive atmosphere.

What is the most important service
that bookstores provide their communities?

The free flow of ideas in print through
a sense of place within the community, offering an opportunity for people and
ideas to come together.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers
Review
.

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

For the fifth installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover.

Tattered Cover Book Store 1

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Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store, located in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of the city, occupies two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

Tattered Cover Book Store 2

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From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious tables in the café area.

Tattered Cover Book Store 3

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The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

Tattered Cover Book Store 4

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Owner Joyce Meskis radiates a type of calm that seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social and literary communities of Denver.

Tattered Cover Book Store 5

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“I can’t speak for every bookseller in the world, obviously,” Meskis says. “But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in different areas without betting the ranch?”

Tattered Cover Book Store 6

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“When I’m walking through the sales floor,” says Meskis, “and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh, wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.”

 

Tattered Cover Book Store 7

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“Every signing—every one—is different,” says Meskis. “To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.”

Tattered Cover Book Store 8

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“The Tattered Cover offers a wide variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical, educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few,” Meskis says. “All of this said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author who is the draw.”

 

Tattered Cover Book Store 9

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“Times will change,” says Meskis, “and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the writes and the readers.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

3.1.10

Few independent bookstores are more iconic than Powell’s Books. Even readers who’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, know about the store from its ads in places like the New Yorker, or from its prominent online presence, or from its reputation as the largest new- and used-book store in the world. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there. (And if you can’t, try one of the seven branch stores in five other locations throughout Portland, specializing in everything from technical books to home and garden.)

I was early for my interview with owner Michael Powell, so I decided to get a coffee in the attached café. Like the bookstore itself, the guiding aesthetic is simplicity—no overstuffed chairs, no fireplace, no decorations on the salmon-colored walls other than some taped-up flyers for local bands and a Buddhist meditation group. Not that anyone seems to notice. While I was there, every single person I encountered was reading. At the table nearest me a high school girl in cat-eye glasses and a ski cap read Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (Epigraph Publishing, 2000), with a stack of David Sedaris waiting at her elbow. A well-dressed elderly woman flipped through the Oregonian not too far away. And on the other side, near the windows, a young woman with black hair and piercings through both her cheeks was making a list of recipes from The Garden of Vegan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Filling the rest of the tables were hipsters in zip-up sweatshirts and Chuck Taylor All Stars, a young father in a shirt and tie with his two children, construction workers wearing Carhartt overalls, and women with trendy bags and knee-high leather boots. All were reading. Here was a microcosm of the store: A diversity of people and interests, sure, but what’s most important in Powell’s is neither image nor decor but the books themselves.

This is not to say that the store doesn’t have a unique vibe. Like Michael Powell himself, there is a straightforwardness to Powell’s that puts a person at ease. When the owner and I met, he was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweater. And though he had to attend a black-tie community event later that night, he was generous with his time, walking me through both the history of the business and the store itself—how the portion of the building with terrazzo floors had originally been an American Motors dealership; how when they built the newer sections of the store, more than a decade ago, they’d intentionally left the concrete floors bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere; and how proud he is that their foreign-language section alone accommodates more than thirty thousand titles.

Michael Powell’s philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves.

This sense of equality permeates every aspect of the Powell’s business model, from the practice of shelving used and new books side by side in each section, to the store’s long-standing advocacy on free-speech issues, to the fact that its five hundred employees are unionized and have a matching 401(k) plan. Likewise, Powell may be the boss, but it’s clear that he also sees himself as a fellow employee. When we left the downtown location and he drove me across town to the former ball-bearing warehouse that is now the site of the online bookselling operations, no one had to “look busy” when the owner arrived. Instead, they chatted with him as we walked through the facility, offering updates on their various ongoing projects, including ideas for how best to recycle used packaging materials. The warehouse, which feels like an airplane hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air, processes up to three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders, a fact that amazes Powell, a logical man who never ceases to be surprised or impressed by his customers, even when they pay more than twenty dollars to have a four-
dollar book shipped overnight. It makes him wonder aloud how he can better meet their needs.

This, then, might be the trait that best characterizes Michael Powell: curiosity. He is endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business. It is a trait that has served him well during his last four decades of bookselling. And though he’ll officially hand over the reins of the business to his daughter, Emily, in July, when he turns seventy, one gets the sense that Powell will always be dreaming of how to connect books and people. Because it’s clear that he loves them both.  

How did you become a bookseller?
In the mid-sixties I ran a little student co-op [at the University of Chicago] where students could sell textbooks and other books on consignment. I also rode my bike around to various thrift shops in the general area and went to the Sunday morning flea market called Maxwell Street—which was very famous in its day in Chicago—to buy books and put them on consignment. Then I sold books by catalogue for a couple years to university libraries, mostly out-of-print social science and history, before I opened my first store in 1970, in Chicago.

Early on, I was thinking of opening a store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because my wife and I had traveled to Santa Fe and saw it for the first time and everybody falls in love with Santa Fe the first time. She was being offered a job as a Montessori teacher there and I was going to open a bookstore when I got a phone call from a mentor in Hyde Park, in Chicago. He wanted to move his store because he’d been attacked by a customer.

He’d found a new location that was closer to campus, and the reason it was currently vacant was that the Weathermen had firebombed its previous occupant out of existence and he didn’t want to go back into it, he was too nervous. And the university—well, not exactly the university, but whoever was in charge of organizing these things—had approached my friend. However, the space was too big for him; he wanted to take only half of it. So he said to me, “You take half and do mostly paperbacks, and I’ll do hardbacks.” And I said, “I could do that, but I don’t have the money.” My wife says I was always good for twenty bucks but never for a hundred. And he said, “There are some professors who would like to talk to you about that; they’re kind of the patron saints of bookstores.” There were three of them: Morris Janowitz, Edward Shils, and the third one was Saul Bellow. Morris Janowitz, who was the lead, came to me and said, “What would you need?” I had no idea. So I said—and this is, remember, 1970—I said, “Probably three thousand dollars.” And he said, “We can do that. We can loan you three thousand dollars.” Then I said, “But, you know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how quickly this will get up and running. And there’s all the rent.” So he said, “We can help with rent, too, for a little while.” Rent was, I think, a hundred dollars a month. So, okay, now they’re rehabbing the building and there’s some time before I can occupy it. So my wife and I take a thousand of the three thousand and we travel across the country to Oregon to visit my folks. [Laughter.]

When we were back in Chicago, I took the remaining two thousand dollars and bought some books. A friend and I built some shelves, and we opened. Like I was saying, it was a small, small store. But we did well. The students, of course, liked used paperbacks. They thought that was great. At some point my neighbor moved away and I took his space. Then there was another business in the back…and when they went away I took that space. So, ultimately, it was about four thousand square feet.

And then my dad [who had come to Chicago to work in the bookstore] went back to Portland in 1971. He opened his shop, moved once into a space of about ten thousand square feet, and had begun to introduce new books into the mix, shelving them side by side with used books. In 1979 he said, “You know, now wouldn’t be a bad time if you’re interested in coming back.” I always thought I would come back. I always thought of myself as an Oregonian, always kept my Oregon driver’s license. And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” There had been a huge snowstorm in Chicago that winter; we’d had an infant—she was born in November—and we had to get out of the neighborhood we were in. It wasn’t suitable for raising a family, and I’d had it with the weather. So coming back to Oregon sounded great to me.

Well, the night before we left Chicago, my dad called. He said, “I’ve got some news: We’ve lost our lease.” Our landlord, which was a brewery, had wanted to take the space back and had given us a year to find a new location. So we spent that year searching, and we found the space that is currently Powell’s Books. In the mid-eighties, we started opening branch stores. I was always curious about new ways to do things with books; I didn’t want just to replicate anything. And one of the questions was if we could do our new-used mix and do it in the suburbs, where everybody’s perception was that it would have to be Borders or Barnes & Noble or something.

By that you mean nice carpeting and polished wood, soft lighting—
The whole nine yards. We weren’t getting women to our downtown location in the proportions that most people have women as shoppers, perhaps because our area was a little bit edgy.

It was a developing neighborhood?
It was an undeveloped neighborhood—mostly warehouses, wholesalers, and auto repair shops. Kind of funky stuff, but not retail. Not restaurants and bars. Now it’s all high-end national and local boutiques, and dozens and dozens of restaurants and bars. It’s quite fashionable, I suppose.

In any case, I wanted to see if we could capture a different audience if we opened the store in a suburb, and that went well. And each year for about six years we opened a store. First, we did a travel bookstore downtown in about 1985. Then the Hawthorne District stores in about 1986. Then the cookbook store…somewhere in there we opened a store in the airport, and a technical bookstore. So I was both interested in segmenting books like technical and travel and cooking, and I was also interested in demographics, like urban centers, suburbs, and airports. It sounds like it was planned, but it wasn’t. It was just opportunity and impulse. The only one of those that we don’t have any longer is the travel store. The Internet took that business away enough to justify not keeping a whole store solely focused on the subject. And the cookbook store sort of morphed into a lifestyle store, with gardening and cooking and interior design. And now we have three stores at the airport.

What did you find with the suburban store that you built to look like Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Well, we were going to build a fairly fancy store in the suburbs—nice white shelving, a tile floor, banners over the aisles, and colors, and so forth and so on. But the aesthetics weren’t right. So the first chance we got to get rid of all that, we did.

You shut the whole store down?
We moved it. And when we moved it, we moved it into a larger space. And at that point we went back to wood shelves. Pine wood, cement floor, more of an industrial look. That has always worked for us well downtown. That was my misreading of the 
suburbs—that I had to sort of pretty it up, and I was wrong. We’ve more recently moved that store into a space double the size—thirty-two thousand square feet. And once again we have a cement floor. In fact, the ceiling has exposed insulation as a sort of architectural touch. It looks very industrial.

Why do you think that works?
People want a calm background for the books. I don’t think they need…I think Borders’s and Barnes & Noble’s message is “Buy the book and get the hell out of here” in some subliminal way. It’s too bright, the shelves are low so everybody’s watching everybody. You feel very exposed. Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.

You don’t have to worry about messing up someone’s living room.
No. And the used books look more comfortable in that environment, because they look a little shabbier when they’re too exposed. So, that’s where we are. In 1994 we went on the Internet with the only inventory we had in the database at that point, which was the technical bookstore. I’d only been up for about a month when I got a letter from England from someone saying, “I was looking for this technical book, and I was told in England it would take six weeks to deliver and would cost me the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just check out the Internet and see.’ You had the book for forty-five dollars and you could get it to me in three days.”

When I read this, I thought, “Holy hell! Here’s an opportunity.” So we got all our books into a database. We had what we called “the river” and “the lake”—there were all the new books coming every day that had to get entered, but we also had to back enter everything that was currently on the shelves. So it took a year.

Is that lake dried up now?
The lake is now part of the river. And we built up the Internet business to where it was about a fourth of our sales. So we were an early adopter for selling books online. Amazon came along, of course, and blew right past us. But we sell a lot of books via Amazon, and we sell books via eBay and Alibris and AbeBooks in addition to on our own site. We also carry inventories from England and Germany—our books are drop shipped to the customer. We do what we can.

I imagine that most people think of you as being in direct competition with Amazon. But, in fact, you’re actually doing a lot of partnership with Amazon?
Well, I don’t know. We are in competition at one level, certainly. I’m sure some of our business has turned over to Amazon. But I’m not foolish about it. If there’s an opportunity to sell books, I’m going to sell them. Amazon is my opportunity. And we sell some new books there, but mostly used.

So you ship to Amazon and then they repackage and ship them?
No, we package and ship. We can ship in our boxes with our materials inside. So we can brand that shipment. They’re good with that. And if somebody just orders a new book from us, we’ll usually have a wholesaler fill that order. Ingram or Baker & Taylor drop ship for us in our boxes, so it cuts out shipping to us. That works well. We do the same thing with Gardner Books in England and Lieber in Germany, both wholesalers. And it works. Some of it is hard. It’s not easy—a lot of infrastructure crossed with the Internet.

What are some of its particular challenges?
I think everybody, me included, thought the Internet was going to be this miracle way of making money, because for not very much money you could make all these books available around the whole world. Well, people didn’t count on all the software writers you need to keep your Web site hot and current, or the editorial work that has to go into maintaining a Web site both in terms of the tracking game and also making it sticky for people to visit and to find value there so that they’ll shop with us. Because we don’t discount the books, you know. It’s a small number—twenty, thirty books—otherwise it’s retail. You would think we’d have no business, that people are nuts for ordering books from us.

Because there are cheaper places?
There are cheaper places. And yet, the brand, the interest, whatever…we maintain a good new book sale. I won’t say it’s growing, but it’s steady. There’s a lot of price competition in both the used book world and in the new book world. So it’s been hard to build that business, but we think we can. We have a lot of people who visit the site but don’t stay, and we have to find a way to encourage them to stay. A small percentage of these customers mean a lot to our business. My daughter’s working with some consultants to redesign and redeploy our Web strengths. 

The site certainly has a wonderful array of resources—interviews with authors, blogs…
We Tweet; we do everything. We do everything we possibly can with the resources we have. I always say that the people I have working on our Web site are a rounding error for Amazon. Amazon would have thousands of employees dedicated to what I have twenty dedicated to. On the other hand, I have to say we go toe-to-toe with them. They have things we don’t have, but we have things they don’t have. Sometimes they have them pretty fast after we have them, but we think of ourselves as innovators.

One of these recent innovations is our online buyback. Anyone in the U.S. can go to our Web site, check via a book’s ISBN number to see whether or not we want to buy it, and then find out how much we want to pay for it. We’ll pay the freight; all you have to do is box it, print out our label and packing list, and ship it in. Once it’s received and we’ve checked the condition, we’ll pay you via PayPal, or you can get virtual credit, which you can spend as you will. That has given us a pretty hefty flow of books.

So even after paying shipping costs it’s still worthwhile for you to buy these books?

 

Yeah. In order to maintain our inventory, we can’t rely only on books bought in Portland. We’ve always relied on a certain number of books being bought elsewhere in the country, whether they’re from store inventories or private collections. Well, that’s an expensive way to buy books. You have to fly people there to look at them, then you have to fly people there to box them, and then you have to pay the shipping in. Also, you usually have to take everything, which means you’re handling a lot of books you don’t want. So the online buyback is great because theoretically we want all those books. And you don’t have to go anywhere to get them. And the customer boxes everything up. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t do that. There are some people who do, but they’re not major players. So that’s given us at least a temporary advantage in source of books.

 

I’d like to go back and talk a little bit about the operation of the main store. In addition to the industrial look and feel of the space, another way that Powell’s is different from most bookstores is that you mix new and used books on the shelves. Why did you decide to do this?
Well, we started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing. So when a local writer like Jean M. Auel published her first book, we had just two copies. Then we bought a bunch of tables from Dalton’s, and they asked, “What are you going to put on these tables?” And I said, “Stacks of…something.” So that’s when we got into the new arrival business.

But now we have about three hundred thousand volumes in the main store, as well as however many in the other stores. It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.

On average, bookstores make about 40 percent on each book they sell. Yet you’ve managed to nudge that up to nearly 44 percent. Considering that these percentages are before operational expenses, a small difference like this can mean the difference between staying open and going bankrupt. How did you achieve this?
You know, when you’re done, you’re always plus or minus. Your minus can be a lot, but your plus is hardly ever more than 2 percent after costs. And that’s before you make any capital reinvestment. Because we’re a larger business, we tend to order in volumes that allow us to get the maximum discount. And we do one other thing: We ship all our books to a central warehouse and then we distribute. I don’t know if it’s Borders or Barnes & Noble, but whatever the discount those stores got for shipping to a central warehouse, the publishers had to match that for us.

I’m sure that being your own distributor also makes things more efficient.
Yeah. We do all central receiving. Once the books are received, they’re labeled and then distributed out to each of the stores. So we have our own truck fleet that runs our books around.

With used books, on the other hand, you’ve said that your average is closer to 65 percent. Is that also something you’ve been able to nudge up in similar ways, or is that number static?
We have slowly, over time, pushed that up about five points, either by paying less or controlling inventory better, and by making fewer buying mistakes. In the used-book world the risk is that you’re going to buy something that you already have too many copies of, or that sales have evaporated for, or it’s a book you had once and never sold. Now computers can tell you all that, so while we don’t check every book we buy at the moment we buy it, if there’s any doubt about the book we can scan it and see its history, the current inventory level, sales history, and make a judgment based on that. So I think our rate of having to pull things from the shelves has dropped considerably.

What’s hurting us at the moment is this move away from people buying new hardbacks. You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but in this downturn many people are avoiding a twenty-five-dollar book and moving, in our case, to used books. This has meant that we can try to keep our dollar volume up by boosting the units we’re selling, because used books are cheaper, but of course the labor involved doesn’t go away.

Or the overhead or the cost of the building.
Right. But the overall dollars have dropped because you’re not selling that twenty-five-dollar book. Fewer dollars are coming in. So it’s been a challenge. And we’ve had to do several things in the course of the last year to accommodate that.

Such as?
Well, we had to reduce the number of people working in the company, which we did through not filling positions when people left.

But no one was let go?
No one was let go, no. At one moment we were within two weeks of seriously considering it, but then the numbers looked like they maybe didn’t require it, so we backed off. You don’t do that casually. You don’t turn people loose in this economic environment. I really didn’t want to do it, and fortunately we didn’t have to. We had twelve months of down business. But [last] September we had our first up month, so that was certainly good news.

What do you think accounted for that?
People are buying more books! I don’t know what to say.

Are you a bellwether for the economic recovery?
Well, I hope so. It’s not like spending money on cars or houses, but if they’re feeling comfortable enough to do that…I mean, listen, they have an alternative. First of all, they can choose not to read. They can go to the library, they can buy fewer books, whatever. But the fact that the customers are back feels great.

Some people have suggested that it’s not the fact that Amazon or big-box stores like Walmart and Target are selling books that accounts for many independent stores’ losing their footing, but rather it’s a lack of readers. Do you feel that’s the case?
No, I’m not a subscriber to that. I understand the theory. The theory is that there are only so many hours in the day, and so if you’re playing computer games or tweeting or searching the Internet or going to a movie or watching TV, you haven’t got time left over for reading. And, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense. Yet we are selling more books. [Last] September we sold more books than we did a year [earlier] by a fairly sensational number. They were cheaper books, but there were more of them.

Long run? I’m not a predictor of the future. I don’t know. Will the Kindle and the Sony Reader, or print on demand, or some other phenomenon we haven’t thought of yet, erode our business? It’s certainly possible. Nothing is forever. And there’s no way to say that somebody’s new vision of the future won’t force us to reshape our vision. But I think as long as we’re alert and pay attention and find ways to adapt, then we’ll be okay.

Let’s talk specifically about electronic books. Do they affect your business?
We sell them. Been doing that for the better part of ten years.

Really?
Yeah. There just weren’t very many books and they weren’t great and we didn’t sell a lot of them, though there have been people trying to do this for a long time. And, you know, it’s a small part of our business. But we’re positioned to make it a bigger part if that happens.

Now, I want to go back a minute. People always say, “Well, there’s this way of doing business and then there’s Powell’s way of doing business.” But I want to point out that I got on the Internet because there was one guy on my staff who came to me and said, “I can put the technical books on the Internet. I need ten thousand dollars to do that.” The money wasn’t for himself, but for the technology. And I said, “Seems good to me.” At the time, Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening stores all around me. My wagons were circled and they attacked from the suburbs, these giant stores. And I thought, “If there’s any way to leap over those stores and reach a broader audience, there’s nothing better than this thing called the Internet.” And I was very enthusiastic. And so for ten thousand dollars—which is a lot of money, I appreciate that—and his time, we got to play. But it’s not like somebody handed me ten million dollars and said, “Here, go invest this in the book business.” We have built every brick, every stone—every element of the system is a result of organic growth.

In addition to building this business from the ground up, your family has always played an important role in the process. Your father came to Chicago to work in the first store, and now your daughter Emily is involved.
Yes. Emily is going to take over in July.

How long has she been moving into this role?
Probably four years now. She was director of used books for a while, and she worked to get our minds back into the used book world. 

What do you mean?
Well, when the economy started to go bad, we told ourselves that we needed to get more used books on the shelves. That meant changing some of the ways of channeling books to the stores and also boosting the volume. For the last year she’s been in charge of the Internet marketing world, with the goal of taking a fairly flat Internet business and seeing it grow. She just finished an executive MBA, and one of the faculty members from her program, along with another fellow he knows, are acting as consultants. So she’s been working with them to redirect the energies of staff, reorganize staff, and redesign the Web site, and to do things that make it easier to use, more intuitive. We’ve always won awards for the content on our site, but I don’t think anybody would ever give us an award for the smoothness, or the use of the page. Now we’re trying to make it a more intuitive process to use, and that always involves a fair amount of rewrite on software, so you can’t do it overnight. But you can do it. So she’s been working on that and doing a great job.

Having grown up in a bookstore, she must have a familiarity with this world that few people possess. To say nothing of her commitment, since it’s a family business.
There’s a great story about Emily. When she was about eight or nine, she and I were doing Christmas cash register work. I would open the book and read the price, and then she would key it in the cash register and make change while I bagged the book. A lady came up who was trying to be nice to Emily and said, “When you grow up, are you going to be a cashier?” And Emily, counting out her change, says, “When I grow up, I’m going to own this place.” [Laughter.] And by God, she is.

That was never in my mind, as a given. In this day and age, the world beckons. I just told her, “You’d be a damn fool not to kick the tires that had been good to us. I don’t ask or expect you to go in this direction, but I think you’d be foolish not to give it a shot.” And out of the blue one day she called from San Francisco and said, “You know, I’m ready to take that shot if you’re ready.”

Was she in college at the time?
No, she was working in San Francisco. She had a boyfriend down there and she was in a variety of things—she was an apprentice to a maker of wedding cakes, then worked as an assistant to the head of a law firm for a couple years. And, you know, she enjoyed San Francisco very much, but I think that gave her the motivation to say, “Well, I think it’s time to try the book business.” She had worked here for a year earlier, right out of college, but she needed to really get out and try something else in the world for a while.

How hands on or off will you be once you retire?
Well, I’ll tell you a story. I had someone like you come to interview me and he said, “So when you retire, what will you do?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll probably go out to the warehouse and process books, get them out of boxes. I like doing that.” And he laughed. So I said, “What’s funny about that? You don’t think I can do that?” And he said “No, no. I was out on the floor interviewing one of your employees and I said, ‘What will Michael Powell do when his daughter takes over?’ And he said, ‘He’ll go over to the warehouse and process books.'” So I guess I’m known for my limited talents.

Somehow I’d like to stay involved. You know, you learn a lot, and business is complex, and you can’t know everything and you can’t be everywhere. Just walking around you see things and you say, “I wonder why they’re doing it that way? That doesn’t seem as efficient.” Or, “Do they know that people in the other store are doing it differently?” So I think it’ll be helpful to have someone with an educated eye watching the business from the inside, to see where those opportunities are. For example, there are several things we’re doing by hand that we ought to be doing in a more automated way. At the moment, those are opportunities. You’re always working for productivity efficiencies because your costs go up and you’ve got to keep your costs and revenues in balance. The casual approach we had to the business fifteen years ago just doesn’t work. Certainly with the high investment in technology we have and the high investment in inventory, we better be very grounded in what we’re doing, and alert.

You came into this neighborhood when it was mostly just car repair shops and warehouses, and now it’s become more of a boutique area. Do you think Powell’s had a hand in that transition? I imagine that most people must think of you as an anchor in this community.
Well, I think we’re an anchor for the city. That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world. You know, if you’ve got the biggest ball of string, people think you’re kooky. But if you have the biggest bookstore, it says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message. And we try to then earn the respect of the community by not just running a good business, but also being involved in the community. I spend a lot of my time on boards and commissions and planning efforts. I chair the streetcar board. We just created what will now be about eight miles of streetcar. We’re the first city in America to put new streetcars back in.

Like old-style trolleys?
No, they’re modern-looking streetcars, and they’re European built. They’re not San Francisco cute; they’re modern, sleek streetcars. And we move four million people each year. I’ve also been involved in dozens and dozens of committees and commissions, some in the arts and some in social services and some in politics. Not partisan politics, but political efforts to do things or to stop things from happening, all aimed at trying to fulfill the vision of a city that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day city, that works, that’s attractive and great to do business in, and great to live in. I think people respect the work that we do in that area. People will stop me and say, “I love your store,” but sometimes they’ll stop me and say, “I love what you do for the community,” and they’re referring to a broader level of involvement. People ask me if it ever gets tiring, being stopped by people. But I think no; when they stop, that’s problematic. That means we’re doing something that’s not working. I get involved in political things, but they’re almost always around censorship or involved with access to books. Oregon has a very strong constitutional defense of books, but we also have the same element of the population that would like to, for a variety of reasons, control that flow. You know: “Don’t put gay books in schools, don’t let anyone under the age of eighteen be exposed to bad books.” But we win those fights.

Still, they usually take a lot of energy and some money, and with the first anti-gay measure in Portland—Proposition 9—businesses were very closely involved. I have gay staff, of course, and friends who are gay, and they challenged me. There was an element of that legislation that involved not letting libraries, specifically school libraries, have gay-related materials. But we just turned the store into a poster board for that issue, and we won it, and we were very proud of that.

So you helped defeat it at the ballot.
Yep. There were two efforts and we won both of those. Not by overwhelming numbers, but we won. If we can define the issue as one of censorship, and they can define the issue as perversity, and you let that go in a challenge, they’ll win. But Oregonians don’t like censorship, and again I say not by overwhelming numbers, but we do win. And so we get involved in those issues and they seem to come along with certain regularity, every four or five years. Otherwise most of the stuff I get involved in is more planning. I don’t get involved in partisan politics as a company. In fact I keep the company very separate from that. Personally I do get involved, but I try to keep it as separate as I possibly can.

As a citizen, not an owner.
Yeah, yeah.

page_5: 

What do you think people are most surprised to learn about independent bookselling?
I think they’re surprised to know how hard it is. I think everybody—or the uneducated person who doesn’t know much about the business—thinks that as a bookseller you sit in a store, read books, and when someone comes in you have a nice conversation and then recommend and sell some things to that person. That you have a stock of books you believe in and know intimately. That you wear patches on the elbows of your sport jacket, and there’s a cat somewhere in the window, and there’s a fire burning in a fireplace, and there’s the smell of coffee and all that. That it’s a very relaxed and low-key kind of thing. The reality is that it’s extremely intense, whether it’s a small store or a huge store. You’re always pushing the rock up the hill, and it’s relentless, and an awful lot of people get ground down by it. That’s why you see stores close with the frequency they have. People give five or ten years of their lives and realize it’s not going anywhere. And that’s hard. It’s hard to be in an industry that takes so many casualties and that much stress.

The good news is you still get to work with books. And you get to work with people who really love books, both as customers and as staff. I’m sure people who love hardware love their hardware, but, you know, I wouldn’t. There’s a high level of gratification. I was trying to calculate how many books I had sold during my life under the Powell’s name. I’d like to think it’s coming close to a hundred million. You know, in chaos theory there’s this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a storm in Africa. Well, what about a hundred million butterfly wings? What has it done? You don’t know. People hardly ever tell you, “I read a book and it changed my life.” Most books are probably sold for entertainment, some are sold for information, and some are sold for inspiration. Certainly some are sold for all three at the same time. But I say to myself, “Well, at least when you’re reading a book it’s hard to rob a bank.” I like to think that some of those books have had a positive impact on people’s lives.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE POWELL’S BOOKS
How many book sales are you processing a day as online orders?
About 2,500. Upward to 3,000. It spikes at Christmas, and it spikes when the school year starts, but otherwise it’s fairly steady.

How many books do you have in your warehouse for online sales?
About 380,000 in [the main] warehouse, and then there’s about 125,000 in another warehouse.

And how many books do you carry in your stores?
About a million in the flagship store, and probably another six hundred thousand scattered around the other stores. And then we support another two million in Europe. So online we support upward of 4.5 million titles.

How do you determine the price you pay for used books that you buy from online customers? Do you use an algorithm, or is there a person who works on each order?
No, it’s an algorithm. We have several million books in our database to match against, so we just take a percent of either the imprint price or the in-store resale price and pay that amount.

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

1.1.10

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?

Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?

The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.

Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?

My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—
his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—
but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?

You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.

Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?

No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.

Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.

Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.

Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review
?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?

It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?

No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?

I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?

The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?

No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?

In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.

Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?

I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker
article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

page_5: 

So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?

I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?

I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.

Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss
?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.

Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?

No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?

John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?

Lark and
Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing
by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?

I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves
by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

9.1.10

On the morning I visited Denver’s
Tattered Cover Book Store, the place was bustling with activity. Customers
wandered up and down the central staircase, carrying books tucked under their
arms. They stopped to browse the spacious aisles, scanning titles on the
shelves. They lingered in the downstairs café, eating as they flipped through
magazines from the enormous periodical section.

The reason for the
crowds had partly to do with the influx of writers who had traveled to Denver
this weekend for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference,
and partly with the fact that it was opening day of the Major League Baseball
season—the sidewalks were filled with fans headed to nearby Coors Field, home
of the Colorado Rockies, and before the game, many of them stopped at Tattered
Cover. The store’s location, in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of Denver, is a
success story of urban revitalization. This neighborhood is the oldest section
of Denver, and like the boom-and-bust economy of this western city, it has had
its fair share of downturns. In 1988, however, the city council created the
Lower Downtown Historic District with the mission to preserve the architectural
and historical assets of the area and to spur economic investment and growth.

Because of her
belief in this project and the need for community-oriented business districts,
Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover, purchased the warehouse building at 16th
and Wynkoop with a business partner in 1990, and subsequently moved her
administrative offices and the shipping-and-receiving operations for her Cherry
Creek store, which opened in 1974, to this location. A few years later, she
opened a second Tattered Cover store here, as well as a coffee shop and
newsstand. By 1996 the LoDo store had substantially expanded and today occupies
two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and
a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

The store has since
become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers.
From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There
are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious
tables in the café area. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old
(worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams)
and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local
options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

The same could be
said of Meskis. Though soft spoken, she possesses an engaging and charming
personality that immediately put me at ease. She radiates a type of calm that
seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is
the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her
thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but
also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social
and literary communities of Denver. In fact, Tattered Cover hosts more than
five hundred readings a year among its three locations. So it was fitting that
we sat down for our talk beside a fireplace at the back of Tattered Cover’s
expansive event space, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of many of the
authors who’ve read at the store during its nearly four decades of existence.

How did you come to bookselling?
I came to bookselling accidentally. I
was intent on teaching at the university level.

Here in Denver?
No, I didn’t have a place in mind. I
grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and I was very driven in terms of my
direction in life. I was determined I was going to get the zillionth degree,
and I wanted to have a life that was full of the usual things—marriage,
children. I could see myself at an excellent university teaching brilliant
students all day long, walking home with a briefcase in hand, kicking the fall
leaves as I approached my nice but not ostentatious house, hearing strains of
Chopin being played by my children through the open French doors. [Laughter.] It didn’t quite work out that way.

What year was this?
I graduated high school in 1959. Then
I went to college.

Did you go to school in Chicago?
No, I went to Purdue [in Indiana]. I
was a math major, believe it or not. It was always a toss-up, and I eventually
shifted to English. My parents didn’t have much money, but they were able to
pay for my first year. So I always had part-time jobs in the summers. But then
I married young, while we were in school, and I needed to get more work during
the school year. And soon I found myself working in bookstores to help pay the
tuition.

This was at Purdue?
Yes. But then my husband finished his
graduate degree and we moved to Colorado. All the while I was still working in
bookstores and libraries to help pay the tuition bills. And after some time—I
was in graduate school then—I woke up one morning literally staring at the
ceiling and said, “You idiot, don’t you know that you’ve been doing what you love
all these years? Why don’t you just get on with it?” So I dropped out of
graduate school and I got more serious about the book business. Around this
time the marriage ended, and I had two small children.

When was this?
1973. We were still pretty young, so
we didn’t have much savings. But I took my half and began pursuing the book
business. Fast forward a year or so and a little store in the Cherry Creek area
of Denver came up for sale. It was called the Tattered Cover, and it was three
years old. It was a small storefront—only 950 square feet—and carried only
new books, despite its name. So, I did a little business plan on an envelope
with a pencil and figured I could pull it off. The bad news was that the owner
wanted what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. But the good news
was that he was willing to carry the note, to be the banker. And the other
piece of good news was that he didn’t want much money down. So I figured out
what I could do and I made an offer, which was promptly rejected.

Some time went by
and I decided, through the urging of a friend, to go see what was going on,
because there was no ownership transition of the store that was apparent. It
turned out that someone else had made a better offer earlier, but the deal had
fallen through. I don’t know why the owner didn’t come back to me afterward.
Who knows? But, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I made another offer. I
borrowed some money from my uncle in California and that offer was accepted in
September 1974, and ownership transferred to me.

Over the next several years you
expanded, however.

Yes, in increments.

Was this the plan from the
beginning, or did opportunities arise that allowed you to grow?

I can’t speak for every bookseller
in the world, obviously. But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller
sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you
would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers
appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in
different areas without betting the ranch?

Of course.
So I don’t think I had a goal to
have a huge bookstore by any means. But I certainly wanted to grow it to a size
that would accommodate a fine representation of the wonderful books that are published.
So every time one of our neighbors in the building would move out, we would
take the space if it were available and if it were the right timing for us. We
were fortunate in that way. There was growth in the commercial area, there was
growth in what was possible in the book business in Denver, and we took the
opportunities.

But looking back, I think our biggest decision in
terms of growth in that first store was when we decided to move upstairs in the
original building. Quite a bit of space had become available on the second
floor and it was offered to us at a good price because second floor space—for
retail—is less desirable. So I pondered and pondered and pondered it. Because
the question was: How do you get the customers upstairs? And any time our
customers or colleagues found out that we were considering this, they thought
the sky was falling! They were very concerned and they gave me all kinds of
advice: “Don’t do it, don’t do it; your customers won’t follow you. It will be
the end of the Tattered Cover. It will be dreadful.”

Were you going to move the whole
store upstairs?

Oh, no. We were going to have both
floors. We were going to put in a staircase. And it’s not like there weren’t
stores that had tried this before. Obviously department stores were
multi-level. But it wasn’t quite the same thing. Our colleagues and sales reps
and customers were just beside themselves in their advice to me about not doing
this. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I’m sure they’ve got good reasons
for this, and I can see both sides to the story…” but we needed the space, we
were growing, the rent was very compelling, and I simply didn’t want to lose
that opportunity. And I thought, “We could make the staircase wider; we could
put books on the landings to draw people up the stairs; we could put
destination sections up there…” I said, “We can do this so it doesn’t feel like
an interminable journey up these stairs.”

Fast forward—we
did it. Our landlord had a charitable streak from time to time, and he loaned
me the money to put the staircase in. And the customers came upstairs. But our
colleagues were right in that it is much
harder to get people upstairs. Still, it worked. And it worked again. We took
again more space upstairs when it became available. So we grew from about 950
square feet to 6,000 square feet in that location. Then we were out of space.

Then, perhaps 1980
or so, I started looking around for space within the immediate area to move to.
And so I was looking, looking, looking, looking, nothing, nothing, nothing,
nothing. Moving a store is a serious decision, you know?

And no small undertaking.
And no small undertaking, even
though we’d become pretty used to barreling out walls and moving bookcases. In
fact, in my earliest years, after my husband and I were divorced, I lived in a
small place with the kids. I would go to the lumberyard and have my boards
pre-cut and then bring them back in the car. I had space in the alleyway, which
was next to the store, and I’d be banging away, making new bookcases. [Laughter.] I’d forgotten about that.

So, you know, we
were stuck. It didn’t seem like anything was going to work. And then I had a
visit from a developer in town who had his eye on a vacant piece of property
next to a parking garage next to a department store that was across the street
from a shopping center. It was an open field at that point, and he was planning
on putting in ground-floor retail and then a little bit of an expansion of the
parking garage next door above on the roof—a few extra stories of parking. And
so he said, “I’ll cut you a good deal. Would you like to move over here?” It
was only half a block away and it was brand new space—two floors, totaling
about 11,000 square feet. This was double what we currently had. And he was
willing to do a lot for us to get us over there, and I thought, “Okay. Let’s go
for it.”

So we got serious
about that and we were planning to sublet the old store location of 6,000
square feet. But then the bookstore grapevine came through town and we learned
that Pickwick Books was considering bringing a store to Denver. You probably
don’t remember Pickwick Books.

No, I don’t.
Pickwick Books was a new
development arm of the Dayton Hudson Corporation, which owned B. Dalton back
then. And Crown Books—do you remember Crown Books?

I do.
Well, Crown Books was very
successful opening up in the Washington D.C. area. They were one of the first major
discounters and they, were really doing a number on the independent stores, as
well as on the B. Dalton and Walden stores. So my assumption back
then—”assumption,” keep that in mind—was that when the powers that be got
together and saw what was happening with Crown in their locations, they got
nervous and started to think of ways they could counteract this trend. So B. Dalton—at
that time owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation—decided to do an experiment.
They had purchased a small, regional chain in southern California called
Pickwick. Then they converted those stores to B. Dalton stores and they retired
the Pickwick name. But they still owned it. It’s my understanding that by still
owning that name they decided to use it for their trial run of a new bookstore
model: heavy discounting, using Crown as the model. They were going to place it
in three or four cities around the country to test market it, and one of those
cities was Denver. [Laughter.]

This was now in the 80s?
This would be the early-to-mid 80s,
because we were supposed to move in ’82 but there was construction delay. So we
moved in January ’83 into the new space. And then we learned that Crown was
doing this roll-out across the country and that one of the cities was also
going to be Denver.

Cue ominous music.
Right! [Laughter.] So I took my calculator home and tried to figure
out what they knew about bookselling that I didn’t know. And I couldn’t see how
we could maintain our position. So I thought, “Well, we can’t discount. But we
can give the bargain-conscious customer something else. We can go heavily into
bargain books—remainders.” But we needed more space to do that. So we decided
to keep the old store space and put it primarily into bargain books. That’s
also about the same time that we decided to go more heavily into periodicals and
sidelines. Anyway, it turned out that business thrived.

Tattered Cover is often cited as one of the first independent stores
to develop an author reading series. Were readings a part of Tattered Cover
from the beginning?

It happened early, but it happened in
an unusual sort of way. As I said before, I had worked in bookstores when I was
in school. And when I bought Tattered Cover we were not really seeking author
events because I had seen too often a lovely gathering where nobody came, and I
didn’t want to put the author in that kind of position. Well, one day I got a
call from our sales rep for Little, Brown and she said, “Joyce, I’ve got an
offer to make to you. Ansel [Adams] is going to be on his way to see Georgia
[O’Keeffe] in New Mexico and he’s going to stop in Denver. Would you like to
have him for a signing?” I held my breath and said, “Absolutely. We would be
delighted to have a signing.” Though I was completely terrified. I had heard
that he was very particular about the plates on the books and that he would go
to the printers about it, and so I thought he must be a difficult and demanding
personality. But when he came he couldn’t have been sweeter. Just wonderful.
And, of course, the line was out the door. I was sold at that point. The magic
of that moment—of seeing the author and his people—was just fabulous.

I remember when
Tom Wolfe came for The Right Stuff. We had a wonderful group of folks waiting for him, and events just
became a part of our community experience. Every signing—every one—is
different. To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all
the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common
to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular
writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has
ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of
reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.

Are there any other authors or
events that you found particularly special?

Once we had acquired the second
floor in the original building, we did all the signings up there. And at one
point we had the opportunity to host Buckminster Fuller—a forward-looking
architect and writer of note. As it turned out, he was on his last tour. He was
quite elderly at the time. And when he walked in the door and I saw how frail
he was, I thought, “He’s never going to make those stairs.” So I said, “We’ll bring the signing table
downstairs.” But he said, “No, no, no, no, no.” He was going to go up those
stairs and sit at that table and greet his admirers. And he did so. It was a
daytime event, and his admirers almost genuflected when they came up to the
signing table. It was that type of experience. And as the line was coming to a
close, his adult grandson, who was traveling with him, said to me, “Do you have
a large pan that you could put some warm water in for granddad to soak his
hand?” It turns out that he’d broken a finger or two but he insisted on coming
to sign. That was really remarkable.

Do you also do nonliterary events here that are community oriented?
When we’re not doing signings here [in
the events space] or when there is a gap for some reason, we will rent this
space out to the community; we also have a minimal rental rate for nonprofits.
And sometimes we’ll just let some organizations use it, such as the Lighthouse
Writers Group. They meet here once in a while. So, yes, it’s a community
meeting space.

Another thing I’d like to talk with
you about—because it has to do both with the local community here in Denver
and the broader literary community—is the First Amendment case that you were
involved in. Can you talk a bit about how this came about?

In 2000 we were approached by a DEA
agent who served us with a subpoena to turn over some records. But the
subpoena—upon sending it to our attorney—turned out not to be an official
subpoena. After my attorney looked at it, he indicated to me that this type of
subpoena was not actionable. So he called the agent, informing him that in
order to obtain access to the records a proper subpoena would need to be
presented.

But the agent
indicated that he didn’t want to take that course of action. So we thought that
was the end of that. But three weeks later, my attorney, Dan Recht, called and
said, “Joyce, I got a call from an individual in the Adams County DA’s office,
saying that a search warrant is in the works on Tattered Cover, in the hopes of
getting the sales records for a particular customer.” And I said, “A search
warrant? That is immediately
actionable.” I knew that much about the law. But he said, “Don’t get excited
yet; I asked for some extra time. We have until the end of the business day
tomorrow to come up with a response. So I want you to think about this
overnight, and I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.

The decision was whether to allow
it?

The decision was about how we were
going to respond. Because there’s no decision to be made about “allowing” a
search warrant—once issued, the authorities can act on it. So the next day I
was in the office and I got a visit from one of our floor managers. She said,
“Joyce, there are police officers here with a search warrant and they want to
see you.” I said, “That’s impossible.” And she said, “No, it isn’t; they’re
here.”

So you began shredding all your records, right?
No. [Laughter.] I said, “Okay, send them upstairs and we’ll
deal with this.” There were four or five individuals, all dressed in civvies.
They weren’t jack-booted police officers or anything like that. In fact, they
were dressed like booksellers—one had a ponytail; they wore tennis shoes. They
were all completely gentlemanly. But they had a search warrant. So I said, “May
I call my attorney?” They said, “Yes.” And when I called Dan he absolutely hit
the ceiling: “They can’t do that! They gave us until the end of the business
day today! Fax me a copy of the search warrant.”

So while the
warrant was faxing over, I was sitting with the officers and talking about the
First Amendment and the Kramerbooks case [in which independent counsel Kenneth
Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky’s purchase records from an
independent bookstore in Washington, D.C.]. They had a mission and the mission
was going to be accomplished. They said, “This isn’t about you.” I said, “I know it’s not about me.” They said, “You’re perfectly
legal.” I said, “I know we’re
perfectly legal.” They said, “You can sell anything that’s constitutionally
protected.” I said, “I know we
can sell anything that’s constitutionally protected—that’s what we sell.” This
went on: “But we need this information.” “Well, I see that as a First Amendment
issue.” “It’s not a First Amendment issue.” “Yes, it’s a First Amendment
issue.”

Meanwhile, Dan got
the copy of the search warrant and he asked to talk with the lead officer. So I
put him on the phone and they went at it. While Dan was talking to him, I kept
talking to the other officers. Finally, at the very end, I said, “What are the
books that you’re after, anyway? How do you even know we stock them?” And one
officer looked me right in the eye and he said, “You’ll special-order anything,
won’t you?” [Laughter.] Got
me.

Throughout this
meeting they kept saying, “We just want this one record, we just want this one
record from this one customer.” And I asked, “What if you don’t find what
you’re looking for?” And he said, “We’ll take the next step then.” Which I
translated as: The search warrant goes into effect and they look at more
records and more records.

Somehow, some way,
Dan was able to persuade them to hold off for ten days. So they left the store,
Dan and I conversed, and within a heartbeat Dan filed for a temporary
restraining order in the court, and we got it. This enabled us to file suit
against them—to get a judicial opinion on whether the search warrant could
move forward or not.

Whether it truly was an infringement of First Amendment rights?
Right. That’s what was up for debate.

Was it the individual’s right to privacy being defended, or was it
your right?

It was the individual’s right. I asked
the officer, “Why don’t you just go to the individual and get us out of the
loop?” But the officer replied, “He’s not going to tell us anything.” You see,
we didn’t know anything about the case. We assumed it had something to do with
drugs because the DEA had been involved earlier, but that was all we knew.

So they suspected that this
individual had purchased a particular title, but they needed to verify that
fact with you.

That’s right. They wanted confirmation.
When we learned more, as our case moved through the judicial process, we found
out that it had to do with a meth lab. There’d been suspicion of a meth lab in
a trailer home in a trailer park in Adams County, and so the officers had been
able to get a search warrant for the premises on probable cause that illegal
activity was happening there. As they suspected, they found a small meth lab in
the bedroom of the trailer home. They also found in the trash what they called
a “mailing envelope” from Tattered Cover. The mailing envelope had a mailing
label on it, and there was an invoice number on the label. There was also the
name of the person to whom the contents of the envelope were addressed, who
lived at the trailer home. But there was no indication what had been in the envelope.

Because there was no invoice?
Correct. Inside the trailer home, near
the meth lab, were two books on how to make meth. And so the officers said,
“Aha!” They wanted to put the two pieces of evidence together to tie it to that
specific person. They wanted to know who occupied that bedroom, because there
were four or five people who lived in that trailer.

So Tattered Cover was within its legal rights to sell that book; the
officers simply wanted to identify which individual had bought it so that that
purchase could be used as circumstantial evidence to prove who
had been making the meth.
Right. So they went to get a search
warrant for us after we were unwilling to turn the information over with the
unofficial subpoena. But because Tattered Cover is a legitimate business, the
DA’s office in Adams County may have felt there wasn’t any danger of us
destroying evidence—which is normally one of the reasons why a search would be
necessary. Instead, they wanted the officers to do more due diligence
first—dust the books for fingerprints, interview people in the trailer park to
see who lived in that trailer, and so on.

So they went and
did the fingerprinting, which yielded no results. In fact, one of the books
still had its brown wrapper around it. Hadn’t been opened, hadn’t been cracked.
And the other one looked like it hadn’t been cracked—the spine was clean.

But the officers
wanted to take the shortcut. And since they were on hold with the Adams County
DA’s office, they went to Denver for the search warrant. They could do that
because we’re located in the city and county of Denver. So now we’re in the
Denver district court and we find out that this is going to go on for a while.
Dan’s is a small office. He doesn’t have a big corporate office to absorb
costs, and he was charging us little. Meanwhile, we were getting five-dollar
donations from customers to help pay legal fees. And Chris Finan from the
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression stepped in. And our pal
Neal Sofman in San Francisco held a fund-raiser at A Clean Well-Lighted Place
for Books with Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, along with some
other authors to raise money for us.

So this was becoming a national issue.
It became a national phenomenon. We
were getting calls from national press. I never saw anything like it.
Meanwhile, all we’re trying to do is sell books. [Laughter.]

Yet 90 percent of your time was spent on this issue.
And our customers—every time we’d
been involved in cases like this before there was press, and each time I
thought, “This time the customers are not going to understand and we’re going to
go out of business.” I thought for sure that would be the case with this one. I
mean, a meth lab? We don’t like meth labs. But that was not the point of the
case.

So that judge in
the district court gave half a loaf to each side. In his decision, he ruled
that authorities could not have the thirty days’ worth of material/background
on this customer that they were seeking. But the Tattered Cover would have to
turn over the record of what was mailed to that customer on that one invoice.
So then we had a decision as to whether to appeal our case to the Colorado
Supreme Court or not. And we did.

To skip to the end
of that story, we got a 6-0 decision in our favor. One judge abstained; I
have no reason why.

How long did the entire process last?
Two years. It was decided in 2002. And
once it was over, the authorities finally went out and got the guy. They put
him in prison for a number of years.

Without even needing this evidence.
Right. By the time we were into the
case we had several pro bono attorneys. And many of them were criminal
[defense] attorneys. They looked at the facts and they said, “They don’t need
this. We’ve had less evidence for some of our clients who got put away.” At
about the same time—midway through the case—a couple of local young filmmakers
asked us if they could do a documentary. So they followed us around for the
second year of the case. But when the case was over and they’d finished their
piece and were trying to sell it to PBS, they found out that they needed to get
eight or nine more minutes of film. So they came to us and said, “We would like
to have an aftermath panel with all the parties. It would be you, Dan, the lead
officer, their attorney, and someone from the University of Denver law school
who would moderate the panel. We’ll do it at the Press Club. Would you be
willing to do that?” So we were all set to go when Dan got a phone call from
the public defender who had represented the guy who was accused and convicted
of making the meth. He asked Dan to confirm what was in the package.

Because of course you had to have known what the book was this whole
time.

But the guy who’d been put in prison
hadn’t known anything about this case while it was going on. He had no idea.
They’d arrested him after the case was over. But evidently he’d told his public
defender what had been in the package, and when the police had finally
interviewed him he’d also told them. But they didn’t believe him, evidently.

So the public
defender said to Dan, “Would you confirm the title?” And Dan said, “Well, we
could if we had permission from the individual. But it’s not something we
really want to do. We feel that this is private. He can say what the book was
if he wants to, but in any case we would certainly need written permission.” So
the next thing you know a letter is delivered from the guy in prison, with his
permission to reveal the contents of the package.

After the phone
call, Dan said to me, “Maybe we should do that.” And I said, “No! We spent two
years of our lives on this thing. We’re not going to make more hay out of
this.” Meanwhile, the filmmakers have set up the panel. You can actually see
this film if you ever care to. They play it nearly every September during
Banned Book Week.

So there we are on
the panel. A whole bunch of people are in attendance. It’s a small room at the
Denver Press Club, but it’s filled up. And when we get to the
question-and-answer period, who should be in the audience but the public
defender…. [Raises eyebrows.]
He stands up, identifies himself as the attorney for the convicted individual,
and he says—I’m paraphrasing here—”Mr. Recht, you have received a letter from
my client giving you permission to identify what was in the package, haven’t
you?” Dan says, “Yes.” “And would you do so?” And Dan says, “We would never
identify what was in the package unless we had explicit permission from whoever
owned the package, whoever bought the book.” And the public defender says, “But
you have that permission, don’t you?” And Dan says, “Yes, but again I want you
to know that we would certainly never put this information out there unless we
had permission.” “Well?” the public defender asks. “Okay, then,” Dan finally
says. “The book was on Japanese calligraphy.”

That’s amazing.
It’s true. The guy was a tattoo
artist. [Smiles.]

Let’s talk a bit about the future next. You can’t open a
bookselling-related periodical and not see at least one story about e-readers
and Kindles and digital bookselling. Do you have any intention of selling
digital books?

I think it’s very apropos of the
times. We do sell digital downloads on our Web site. We can sell them for most
of the e-readers except the Kindle, which is proprietary to Amazon. There are
many issues with regard to books being produced in this way, but as far as
independent stores’ being competitive with Amazon it’s a pricing issue. Though
we can sell these digital downloads, we can’t really be competitive because
Amazon is selling below cost. We just don’t have the financial wherewithal to
sustain that.

I’ve always been a
firm believer that information will move in the most user-friendly manner
possible. And when mass-market paperbacks became a big deal in the United
States after World War II, there were a number of people who said that this was
going to be the end of good publishing. That didn’t happen. Times will change,
and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our
care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the
writers and the readers. And I think that ink on paper between boards, well
done, will always be, at least in the foreseeable future, part of our social
construct. Reading a book, as you well know, is more than a cerebral
experience—it’s a physical experience. And while an e-reader has its place in
many people’s lives, there’s nothing like holding a book and seeing the pages
turn in a way that is not electronic. [Laughter.]

When I think of a
book, there are many forms that it takes. When we talk about fine literature
and poetry and use that as an example, the soul of that book is its content and
the message of the author. So that’s first. What holds that message—whether it
is a computer, ink on paper, or an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony
Reader—has more significance in some circumstances than others. I would prefer
to read my fiction and a great deal of my nonfiction in ink on paper. If I’m on
an airplane and going on vacation, I might choose something else. But if it’s a
cookbook, I need pictures. I want to be able to get a little of what I’m
cooking on the page. [Laughter.]
So, while it may be mixing metaphors a bit, you’re not going to stand in the
way of the freight train of change. However, I think it’s really important to
be up front laying the track as best you can in the right direction for the
benefit of the readers who we serve.

Finally, what is your favorite
thing about the day-to-day of bookselling?

When I’m walking through the sales
floor and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh,
wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making
that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time
and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.

Just this morning we received a letter
from a young girl—a ten-year-old fifth grader—who wrote a poem about books,
and loving to be in this store, and the cushy chairs, and her favorite step
that she likes to sit on. “Books, books, books, books,” she wrote. “Read, read,
read, read.” That’s what she said. [Smiles.] It is a remarkable profession, trade, and way of life.

page_5: 

INSIDE TATTERED COVER BOOK STORE
What are the best-selling sections
in your stores?

Backlist and genre fiction, new
fiction, new nonfiction, and children’s books. The next tier would include
history, religion, and travel.

What for you is the most unique or
defining aspect of Tattered Cover as a bookstore?

The dedication of its booksellers to
providing a special comfortable “place,” physical and mental, where customers
can browse a vast selection of ideas in print. 

Is there anything special you look
for in terms of an author event?

The Tattered Cover offers a wide
variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each
year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical,
educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few. All of this
said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated
to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can
provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author
who is the draw.

What role does technology play in
your store?

If one considers the modern printing
press a technological wonder, not to mention the various elements of
production, these are the very basis of our existence as a business. However,
technology, as we tend to think of it today, plays a significant role in
database information and searches, communication, business record keeping,
marketing, and, increasingly, the presentation and download of “the book”
itself into handheld and/or computer devices.

What has been the biggest challenge
for Tattered Cover in the last decade?

Maintaining a strong customer base that
will continue to support the booksellers; offering customers a substantial inventory
in a faltering economy and a highly competitive atmosphere.

What is the most important service
that bookstores provide their communities?

The free flow of ideas in print through
a sense of place within the community, offering an opportunity for people and
ideas to come together.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers
Review
.

Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

5.1.10

When I walked into Women & Children
First, the
feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann
Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding
feeling I
experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a
late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books
stacked
on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the
handwritten
recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves,
everything
feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of
the store, a
painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top
hangs from
the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar
sign,
this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ
section.
Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women
&
Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.
The
literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of
photography
collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines
as
diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though
conceived as a
feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its
current
location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a
large
population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has
since
evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse
range of
locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe
house,
and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become
as
much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has
become
popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as
likely
to be made up of men as women.

Still, books
related to women
and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality,
literature,
criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus.
Such
lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie
Leibovitz,
and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers
such as
Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane
Hamilton
got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children
First has
a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known
writers
themselves. So on any given night you’ll be as likely to be sitting next
to
authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara
Paretsky,
Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak
from
the podium.

Like co-owner
Bubon, Women
& Children First doesn’t take itself or its mission too seriously,
despite
its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front
windows
facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front
counter; and
tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater
performances
and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black,
scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red,
orange, and
cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for
their
comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit,
Bubon
took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour.
Women &
Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one
large
open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as
well as
journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds
to its
coziness.

But nothing
captures the
laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden
kitchen
table that sits in the back, near the children’s section. Around it are
four
unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it
seems
a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.
Several
times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her
and I
was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself
politely to
help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn’t reach. But never did
these
interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the
course of our
conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb
and flow
of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made
me feel
more welcome.

When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both
getting a
master’s degree in literature, and we became very good friends.

Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our
class and
the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine
Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were
finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a
business
together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one
local
chain at the time, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and there were probably
sixty or
seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of
Chicago.

That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores.
It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all
thought of
ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough
readers
to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after
five
years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store,
two
blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.

Did you decide from the beginning
that you
wanted to specialize in books for women and children?

Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and
in our
politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of
feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the
Newberry
Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked
us to
join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The
Reproduction
of
Mothering
had just
come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!”
because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group
of
academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen.
These
were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch’s
&
Brentano’s or Barbara’s Bookstore, I wasn’t finding. Similarly, as an
academic,
I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for
Virginia Woolf
and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs.
Dalloway.
Or A Writer’s Diary. But we envisioned a store
where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And
everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would
be
there.

It’s interesting to hear you
describe these
authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up
they were
people I was reading from the beginning.

Oh, back then you had to go lookin’,
lookin’,
lookin’, lookin’ to
find these writers. And they certainly weren’t being taught. Alice
Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian
had come out. But all the
stuff that you think of as classic women’s literature—Margaret Atwood,
Toni
Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling
writers.
It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian
literature.
None. I mean, it just didn’t exist. We put a little sign on the shelf
that
said, “If you’re looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
May Sarton, Willa
Cather….” You know, writers who historians had discovered had had
relations
with women. [Laughter.]
Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back
then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight
inches
apart.
]
Now, thirty years later, it’s incredible to look back and see the
diversity of
women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and
lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that’s being published.

I
still think
women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in
getting
critical attention. So there’s still a need for Women & Children
First and
stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that
time,
we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of
this
one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a
challenge to
find enough serious women’s literature to stock the shelves. Because we
didn’t
want to do romances. And it’s not that we didn’t have a vision of a
bookstore
that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and
eventually
a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there
would be
this renaissance in women’s writing. That it really would happen. That
women
would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I
would
finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and
American or
British. I mean, the internationalizing of women’s literature has been
very
exciting, I think.

What precipitated the move to 
this
neighborhood and this bigger store, then?

In those first ten years we had
double-digit
growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don’t
think
we even made returns until we’d been in business three years. We were
just
selling. I had no ordering budget. “Oh, new stuff by women?” I’d say.
“Great!
We need it.” Business was growing.

Was that because nobody else was
selling this
type of literature?

Yes, and because women’s studies was
developing as
a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great
programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but
interesting stuff.

So like the first store, you outgrew
the second
one.

We outgrew it. Our landlord had also
sold the
building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed
any
more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that
we’d
been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to
Chicago.
You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side,
off the
highways…yet we couldn’t really afford to stay there, and we couldn’t
find a
new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here
by the
Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of
Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to
Ravenswood. They
literally came to us and said, “The people in our community would love
to have
a bookstore in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of spaces that are being
renovated, and we wonder if you’re thinking of opening a second store,
or if we
could encourage you to.”

This happened by coincidence, while
you were
already considering a new location?

Yes! And we said, “Well, you know, we
need more
space. We’ll come up and look.” At the same time, there were two women
who were
opening a women’s arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, “It
doesn’t matter where you’re located as long as you’re next to or on the
same
block with Women & Children First.” So we came up to Edgewater to
look, and
they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was
being
renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, “We
want the
corner and we want this much space.” The arts-and-crafts store opened
next
door. They
stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997,
we
took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20
percent
the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year
people
came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, “Thank you for coming
to our
neighborhood.” It was just great.

But
the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring
operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy
volunteers.
Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people
moved every
book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day.
We
organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, “Okay, you
have the
Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them
‘Bio,’
pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to
the new
space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up.” We had other
women
who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the
volunteers.
We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the
afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really
officially
closed for one day. And women still tell me, “I remember helping you
move.”
They’ll come in and they’ll say, “That’s my section; I put this section
back together.”

Have readings and events been a part
of this
store from the beginning?

They’ve been a huge part of the store.
Getting to meet
all these wonderful writers whom I’ve read—in person—is also something
that’s
kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of
discovering a
new writer is always great.

We have a lot
of local
politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support
Barack
Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here.
She asked if she could use
our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support
behind him
in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, “If we can just get
people to
not call him Osama.” I mean, that’s where we were at that time. Nobody
knew who
he was.

So the store has been important for
the
community in many ways.

A political gathering place, and a
literary
gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read
sometimes. We’ve developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy
discussion
group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you’d see twenty to
thirty
preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it.
I just
love it. It’s absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background
in
theater and oral interpretation, so it’s just so much fun for me.

Has that grown over the years as the
neighborhood has developed?

Grown, grown, grown. For many years I
would have
nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five
years
ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty
to
thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That’s
why
everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I
sit
here. For regular readings, it’s the opposite—authors read from the
stage and
we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a
hundred
and fifty people in here.

A year and a
half ago, we
started Sappho’s Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an
evening
of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it’s open mike; sometimes it’s
acoustic
music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her
girlfriend,
Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up
little
tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We’ve even had
strippers. [Laughter.]
But right from the beginning we conceived of having a
weekly program night. Author
readings weren’t happening much, so we decided we’d have
discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of
teachers
from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the
process
of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a
presentation
on an idea.

Then we
conceived of having
a topic for each month. For example, “Women in the Trades.” So every
Tuesday
night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would
come and
talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering,
or what
kind of discrimination she’s experiencing on the job and what her
recourses
were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was
on the
subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or
ninety
women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn’t have chairs and
stuff
like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints
discuss the
issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time,
and
people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or
not.
Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one
pamphlet
available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because
you would put a
handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what
your
sexual proclivity was.

It’s amazing how subtle the coding
had to be.
It was so discreet.

I remember the first time I saw two
women walk out
of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later
because
somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I
cried. Because it was so
rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each
other’s
hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they’d come out of
this
atmosphere in which it was okay.

At
our thirtieth
anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women’s History
Conference
recorded people’s memories of Women & Children First. They had a
side room
at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go
in and
talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when
they
saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that
when
their daughter told them she was gay and they didn’t know what to do
about it
they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And
that’s
going to be part of our archive too.

This celebration was
also a
benefit for the Women’s Voices Fund, which you started five years ago.
Can you
talk about its mission?

Several years ago, Ann
and I were
looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn’t enough money coming in
for the
expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our
twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some
extra
money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us
said,
“People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep
your
programming going.” So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print
and
mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the
programs, and
then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty
thousand
dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, “If
there’s a
way to remove that expense from the budget and use people’s donations to
fund
that, that would be a smart thing.” So that’s what we did. Now anytime
we have
an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing
refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women’s Voices
Fund.

So the store’s not a
nonprofit,
but it has a nonprofit arm.

It’s not a 501c3 on its
own. We are
a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can
send
Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for
the
Women’s Voices Fund.

Few people realize
how expensive
readings and events can be.

Occasionally there are
readings that
are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice
turnout of
twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books.
Maybe five
or six. But it’s not paying for the program. And from the beginning we
didn’t
want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to
make
money: “If we have this author
we gotta
sell ten books or we’re not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the
freight.” No. Having the fund
means we
pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty
dollars. But
sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty
thousand
dollars at this benefit.

But
obviously something
changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn’t have had to hold
this
fundraising event. You
said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had
double-digit growth. What happened?

Well, the rest of that story is that a
year and a
half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next
year, they
fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a
store
that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in
the
suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this
hit us,
Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the
south of
us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in
Evanston.
Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is
just a
mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles.
More recently,
B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced
over
two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.

They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to
downsize,
Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in
Uptown.
And, you know, we’d almost gotten past the point where the chain stores
were
affecting us, because they’ve had to stop widespread discounting. But
the month
this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over
the
year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5
percent. But, you know, it’s been an underperforming store. They put it
in
between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more
economically
depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.

Do you think five years from now
they’ll be
gone?

I do. I do.

Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe,
Barnes &
Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put
stores in
locations where there’s actually a need, and to close stores down when
needed
and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very
carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times
since
1990. I just don’t see how they are going to survive. When I go in there
now
all I see is…sidelines. Candy.

I think what’s been
particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have
developed a
reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and
bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to
fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a
real base
in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, “Oh,
but the
Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that’s a better
location.”

Why does that happen?
They
don’t always realize
that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind
of
clientele. And I’ve seen situations where we’ll have a local author—one
who we
have a close relationship with, and who’s done every launch with
us—whose
publisher will now say to her, “You know, two thirds of your books are
sold in
the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store.”
But
those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra
business.

The author tour itself seems to be
waning. I
don’t blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the
road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an
author’s
travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event.
But
people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.

Right. Because I’ve read the book, and
so has one
of my coworkers, and we’ll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We’re
going to
keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we
look at
our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost
always
written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here,
they’ve done
an off-site event that we’ve been in charge of. Those books turn out to
be our
number one sellers for the year.

So what does the future look like for
you?

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist
bookseller.
Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m
not
sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer
viable?” And
I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a
general
bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist
reading
series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my
life
is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about
their
lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and
women’s
lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we
take
the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes
we’re
discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these
things.
Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not
stopped. We don’t
have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we
did.

The goal of my
life has been
to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to
evolve
and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to
have a
full share of the world.

page_5: 

INSIDE WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST WITH ANN CHRISTOPHERSEN
What were some of your best-selling
books in
2009?

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout; Her
Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger; Yes Means Yes!
Visions of Female Sexual Power and
a World Without Rape
,
edited
by Jaclyn
Friedman and Jessica Valenti; Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa
Lahiri; The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The
Sisters
Grimm
Book
1: Fairy-Tale Detectives
by Michael Buckley; In
Defense of Food
by Michael Pollan; Fun
Home
by
Alison Bechdel; Hardball by Sara Paretsky; The Mysterious
Benedict Society
by Trenton Lee Stewart; Everywhere
Babies
by
Susan Meyers; Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Mama Voted For
Obama!
by Jeremy Zilber; The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz; and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg
Larsson.

What is the best-selling section in
your
store?

Paperback fiction.

What do you look for in terms of an
author
event?

First we consider whether the book fits
with our
specialty—books by and about women—or ones that offer a feminist
perspective
on any subject. It is also important to us that we can provide an
audience for
the author. Finally, though we always want to host women writers with a
national reputation, we are strongly invested in supporting local
writers and
those launching their careers with debut novels, poetry, or nonfiction.

In what ways have your events
changed over the
years?

In the store’s early days, many of our
events
were feminist issue–based, sometimes with an author or book involved but
not necessarily. We were a hub of feminist and lesbian politics and
culture,
and produced feminist plays and women’s music concerts, sponsored
women’s
sports teams, and provided support for almost every women’s/lesbian
project in
our city. Over the past number of years, however, we have focused our
energies
and events on books and other written material, knowing that that was
our
unique role in the women’s movement.

What challenges do
women still
face that you hope your store can help address?

Women writers are still
vastly
under-represented in review vehicles, which means their books are less
visible.
This can be verified by keeping a gender tally of writers reviewed in
the NYTBR or the New
Yorker
, for example, during any
given month. Though women
artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still
struggle for opportunity and recognition. Women in general have also,
obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a
long way
to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being
challenged;
we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few
good
options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of
us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and
children;
women are seriously unrepresented in political decision-making. I could
go on,
but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and
bookstores—that focus on women.

How does feminism in
the
twenty-first century differ from when you opened this store?

The main difference is
that the
second wave of the feminist movement in the seventies was just hitting
the
streets and was brilliantly, feverishly, and obviously active. New
organizations were being created every day to deal with issues like
incest,
domestic abuse, healthcare, job opportunities, equal pay, the absence of
political power, and many others. The work that began then has become
institutionalized over the years since. It continues to advance, but
people
don’t always notice it now since it’s become deeper, more complex, and,
some
might say, mainstream. Another significant difference is that many of
the
growing pains have been outgrown: Feminism has been able to overcome
many of
the challenges posed by race, class, and national boundaries, becoming
truly
global. 

What role does technology play in
your store?

It has played an important role since
we bought a
computer and began using POS/IM bookstore software in 1985. We had a Web
site
for marketing purposes and then took advantage of the American
Booksellers
Association’s Web solution so we could sell books online; we switched
from
print to e-newsletters several years ago; we use social media, first
MySpace
and now Facebook and Twitter. And we have the technology—and desire—to
sell
e-books.

How do you think the rise of digital
reading
devices will affect your future?

The extent to which e-books affect our
future
depends on how large that segment of the market grows and whether there
are any
real opportunities for stores our size to get a share of online sales.
There’s
little to no local advantage online, and when your competitors are large
enough
to dictate market prices, it is somewhere between extremely difficult
and
utterly impossible to get even market share to scale.

Where would you like to see Women
&
Children First in ten years?

I would like to see us still finding
ways to serve
our community and fulfill our mission of giving voice to women.

How about feminism?
Continuing to make steady
progress toward
a world in which women are free to live an unobstructed, rich, creative
life.

What do you most love
about
bookselling?
Going through my days surrounded
by books
and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and
talking
about them. 

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of
the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Ann Christophersen photo by Kat Fitzgerald.

The Future of Barnes & Noble

by

Michael Bourne

8.14.19

Can James Daunt save Barnes & Noble? This is the question on the minds of publishing insiders in the wake of news earlier this summer that a hedge fund had bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Daunt, who oversaw the successful turnaround of the British book chain Waterstones, as the new CEO of the largest surviving bookstore chain in the United States.

Daunt will certainly have his work cut out for him. Facing withering competition from the online retailer Amazon as well as from newly resurgent independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble has shuttered 150 stores over the past decade—at its peak, in 2008, the chain operated 726 stores nationwide—and seen its stock price plummet from $30 a share in 2006 to just $4 a share before it was bought in June by New York City–based Elliott Management.

But Madeline McIntosh, CEO of Penguin Random House in the United States, says she is heartened that the chain will now be helmed by Daunt, a former JP Morgan banker who founded Daunt Books, a small British bookstore chain, before taking over at Waterstones in 2011. “He was an independent bookseller in the U.K. and then became the head of Waterstones, and I think that having that depth of experience should give us all a sense of optimism,” McIntosh says.

Once pilloried for crowding out quirky independent bookstores with its mall-based superstores, Barnes & Noble is now viewed by writers and publishing industry experts as a bulwark against Amazon, the online behemoth that now claims more than half of all sales of books in the United States and has opened nearly twenty brick-and-mortar stores in the past four years. The survival of Barnes & Noble is doubly important to authors of literary novels and children’s books, whose success depends largely on the kind of leisurely browsing that is hard to do on a screen.

Online platforms like Amazon, where sales are largely driven by web searches and by algorithms designed to direct customers to books similar to ones they’ve already bought, can be hostile to debut fiction or creative nonfiction, which often isn’t in any obvious way similar to books a reader has already purchased. 

Novelist and journalist Douglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, likens Amazon’s curation to “a kind of censorship of the market” that threatens to drown out unpopular opinions and underrepresented voices. “You walk into a physical bookstore, unlike Amazon, and you see all these books together, some of which you’re going to agree with and some you’re not,” Preston says. “With Amazon, they have algorithms. They’ll only show you the books they think you want to see, and that’s a serious problem because we’re becoming balkanized in our thinking. When you go into a bookstore, there’s no balkanization. All the books are right there.” 

Independent bookstores, which have thrived in recent years by tailoring their book selection to their local areas, emphasizing a personalized approach to curation, as well as adding cafés and wine bars and hosting readings and book talks, have picked up some of the slack created by the closure of Barnes & Noble locations and the 2011 bankruptcy of its onetime rival Borders. The American Booksellers Association now claims 1,887 members, who run 2,524 stores, up 53 percent from the 1,651 stores ABA members owned ten years ago, according to figures compiled in May of this year.

At Waterstones, Daunt seemed to draw on his experience as an independent bookseller, shuttering underperforming locations and giving store managers the power to order books that might not appeal to customers at other locations. In interviews earlier this summer, Daunt suggested he may try a similar approach at Barnes & Noble. “The main thing is that there isn’t a template; there’s not some magic ingredient,” he told the New York Times. “The Birmingham, Alabama, bookshop, I imagine, will be very different from the one in downtown Boston. They don’t need to be told how to sell the exact same things in the exact same way.” (Barnes & Noble directed press inquiries to Elliott Management, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But such a strategy can take the chain only so far, industry experts warn. Indie booksellers are local entrepreneurs who in many cases are choosing a pleasant working life among books over a potentially more lucrative career in another field, notes Mike Shatzkin, coauthor of The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is a national corporation with more than six hundred retail locations, most of them large and built for a mass audience. “That’s not going to change because they made the store look sprucier or because they changed the selection of books somewhat,” Shatzkin says.

Barnes & Noble’s core problem, Shatzkin says, is that its business model—drawing customers by having more books at better prices than smaller shops could possibly manage—has been outmoded by the e-tailing revolution, which allows shoppers to carry the world’s largest mall in their hip pocket. “I think the large store is a dinosaur,” he says. “It was built for another paradigm. It was built for, ‘I want to find what I need and I don’t want to go six places looking for it,’ which is not something anyone under thirty relates to.”

Still, authors and publishing houses alike have good reason to hope Daunt can make a nationwide bookstore chain work in an online shopping era. Barnes & Noble is a key player in the publishing ecosystem, industry experts say, because it has an efficient supply chain and sells books in parts of the country where indies may not thrive. At the same time, because its stores are brick-and-mortar, it encourages serendipitous purchases that help publishers break out new authors.

“We all want Barnes & Noble to continue and to be a thriving bookseller,” says McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House in the United States. “When any location closes, whether it’s a single store or a set of stores, you lose a portion of sales. There’s no way to say exactly how many sales are lost, so our goal is to ensure there is a diversity of retail options and physical locations where a consumer could choose to go.” 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The Amazon Conflict

by

Kevin Nance

9.30.14

They were a team, once. In the mid-1990s, the fledgling e-retailer Amazon and the major New York publishing houses—the Big Six, as they were then known—professed themselves partners in a new era of online bookselling. One senior executive recalls Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announcing his enthusiasm for their common cause. “I remember sitting at a conference table with Jeff telling a handful of us about what he wanted to do,” says the executive, who asked to remain anonymous. “We said, ‘That’s great.’” And for years the partnership was mutually beneficial. As Grove/Atlantic’s president and publisher Morgan Entrekin conceded back in July, at a forum at the New York Public Library (NYPL), Amazon provided “a smooth transition to digital” that kept publishers happy: “It was primarily that there was a reliable vendor; we didn’t have piracy problems, and we got paid decently.” Good times, those.

But that age of convivial cooperation seems to be over, replaced by accusations and acrimony. For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group—one of the Big Five publishers, as they’ve been known since the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House—have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers. On the simplest and most immediate level, Amazon wants to be allowed to sell e-books more cheaply, which it argues will benefit readers and lead to increased sales and higher royalties paid to writers. Hachette, whose divisions include Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing, among others, begs to differ. (Although Amazon and Hachette have refused to grant most media interviews about the details of their ongoing negotiation—both declined to comment for this article—they have issued statements summarizing their positions.)

Is the current dispute just about e-books, or does it have more fundamental, perhaps existential implications? “In the publishing business, people tend to think you’re either going gangbusters or you’re on your way to death, but in reality, people are just evolving,” says Edward Nawotka, editor in chief of the trade journal Publishing Perspectives. “It’s like marriage. Husbands and wives will blow up at times, and the smallest, most insignificant thing can start a fight that appears to be the be-all and end-all. But people are just evolving. It’s the small stuff that makes you crazy.” Others, however, tend to view the Amazon-Hachette fight as less of a lovers’ squabble and more of a prelude to a real crisis that could damage American literary culture by crippling traditional publishers’ ability to publish books with great artistic merit or scholarly value but far lower commercial prospects than more popular books. “Publishers don’t make a lot of money,” the megaselling thriller writer James Patterson said at the NYPL forum. “The great fear for me is that if [traditional publishers] get squeezed down any more than they’re getting squeezed now…they’re not going to have money to bring authors along, they’re not going to have money to buy [books like] Infinite Jest.”

In this way of thinking, the dispute is about far more than the price of e-books; it’s about the future of literature itself. Some fear, for example, that Amazon’s drive to increase its already dominant share of the e-book market could spill over into hardcovers, ultimately depriving traditional publishers of a sustainable business model and making it impossible for them to offer advances that many authors depend upon. And if Amazon continues to increase its market share by underselling its competitors (including chain and independent bookstores as well as other e-retailers), many believe that it will eventually become effectively a monopoly, concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of a single corporation—one that treats books as commodities rather than as intellectual capital whose intangible value to the culture transcends economics.

“Perhaps I’m biased, but I think that books are more than commodities like vacuum cleaners,” says Amy Berkower, a leading New York literary agent and a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc. “I don’t know the terms of the Hachette-Amazon dispute, but I suspect Amazon is seeking more than lower e-book prices, and I fear they are asking for greater discounts that will seriously affect the already slim profit margins on which publishers operate. Unlike Amazon, publishers can’t depend on other products like vacuum cleaners to pay the bills. If their profit margins are seriously diminished, they won’t be able to afford to pay the kind of advances that finance serious works of fiction and nonfiction. I’m all for self-publishing, lower prices, and higher e-book royalties, but not at the expense of destroying a model that, however faulty it may be, provides the capital for books that require years to research and write.”

Whether such a scenario comes to pass or not, only time will tell. In the short term, Amazon argues that e-books should be cheaper because they cost less than physical books to produce. Furthermore, they say, cheaper e-books will strengthen, not harm, the culture of reading. “For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99,” the company stated in an open letter to readers. “So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that at the lower price, total revenue increases 16 percent. This is good for all parties involved: The customer is paying 33 percent less. The author is getting a royalty check 16 percent larger and being read by an audience that’s 74 percent larger…. The total pie is bigger.”

But as book-industry observers point out, this formula is unlikely to apply to many books, such as literary novels, with great cultural importance but far lower commercial expectations than popular or genre fiction. “What Amazon says might be true for some writers, but it’s not necessarily going to be true for all writers,” says Roxana Robinson, president of the Authors Guild—the nation’s leading professional association for writers—and the author of eight books, including the novel Sparta (Sarah Crichton Books, 2013). “That means if their sales don’t increase, they’ll just get a drop in revenues. So for Amazon to say they’re doing this to benefit writers, it doesn’t ring true.” And one publishing executive at a Big Five house, who asked to remain anonymous, calls Amazon’s position on e-book pricing “disingenuous at best, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace. There are costs associated with e-books. It’s true that the profit margins are better on e-books, but e-books are not published in isolation. E-books are published in tandem with physical books, which are very costly to produce.”

In August, Michael Pietsch, the former Little, Brown editor and publisher who is now Hachette’s CEO (and is also a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc.), responded to Amazon’s statement with his own open letter. Hachette’s e-book prices are far below those for print books, he noted, with more than 80 percent of its e-books priced at less than ten dollars, and the prices for e-books are lowered when the paperback version of the original hardcover is published. “We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all e-books, and that all e-books do not belong in the same $9.99 box,” he wrote. “Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and e-book. While e-books do not have the two- to three-dollar costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.”

For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group…have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers.

The single most controversial aspect of the current dispute has been Amazon’s tactic of using sanctions against Hachette’s writers as leverage to force concessions from their publisher. For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers, including members of Authors United, a group led by Douglas Preston that in August purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on Amazon to stop putting writers in the middle of its battle with Hachette. About nine hundred writers signed the statement, including household names such as Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Nora Roberts, and Suzanne Collins, along with Sherman Alexie (who went on The Colbert Report to discuss the dispute with Stephen Colbert, a Hachette author), Paul Auster, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Siri Hustvedt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dennis Lehane, Ann Patchett, Scott Spencer, and Donna Tartt. “As writers—most of us not published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want,” the group said. “It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’… Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage.”

The Authors Guild has also officially not taken sides in the dispute, but most of its leadership—including Robinson and co–vice president Richard Russo—deplores what Robinson calls Amazon’s “punitive and intimidating” tactics. “It’s the dirtiest kind of dirty pool,” says Russo, whose novels include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls (Knopf, 2001). “Amazon and Hachette may both be ruthlessly pursuing their own interests, but Hachette isn’t forcing Amazon to abuse authors.”

Amazon’s treatment of Hachette writers has been widely condemned by a wide swath of authors, including Louise Erdrich, author of the National Book Award–winning The Round House (Harper, 2012) and the owner of Birchbark Books & Native Arts, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. “This a form of blacklisting,” says Erdrich, adding that she’s particularly concerned by the prospect of Amazon becoming a monopoly in all but name. “Allowing one company to get so big that it controls all of the information is dangerous,” she says. “Do we have the freedom to speak and write as we wish? Presently. But if we allow one distribution point, we have a dangerous bottleneck. Amazon is basically holding the books, the information, the writers, the editors, and all who contribute to the book world, hostage.” Entrekin, at the NYPL forum, issued a similarly dire warning. “We’re concentrating the flow of information in our society into the fewest hands ever in the history of the world,” he said. “That’s not a healthy thing, for all the obvious reasons.” 

In its open letter, Amazon responded to criticisms of its sanctions against Hachette writers by pointing the finger back in Hachette’s direction. “We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies,” the company’s book team said in a letter to readers. “Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100 percent of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and parent company Lagardère, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1 percent of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.”

And as Amazon pointed out in the letter, not all authors are united in their opposition to the retailer or its negotiating tactics. Indeed, more than eighty-five hundred people—largely self-published writers, many of whom have been rejected by the New York legacy houses but found success distributing their work on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform—have signed an online petition calling on Hachette to “stop fighting low prices and fair wages.” Calling the Big Five a “collusive cartel”—a reference to the Department of Justice’s 2012 lawsuit alleging that the largest New York publishers conspired with Apple in a price-fixing scheme—the petitioners attacked Hachette and the other big publishers as greedy, elitist, and high handed, while praising Amazon for its consumer focus and willingness to help writers shut out by the New York establishment and give them a chance to find an audience. “Amazon provides us the freedom to express ourselves in more creative ways, adding to the diversity of literature,” the writers state in the petition. “Hachette believes you’ll read whatever Hachette tells you to, and rejects and dismisses many worthy writers.” With regard to Amazon’s negotiating tactics targeting Hachette writers, the petition was sanguine: “Unfortunately for Amazon, a company that prides itself on customer service, a breakdown in negotiations has meant making decisions that are hard on customers and authors in the short run in order to fight for the rights of those same customers and authors in the long run.”

One early signer of the petition was C. J. Lyons, a former emergency-room pediatrician who now writes best-selling medical thrillers published independently and by the New York houses, and who is a member of the Authors Guild board of directors. “I totally see why [Hachette] authors are upset,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Without these extras [such as preorder buttons] that Amazon used to provide, their publisher has to work harder to market and sell their books and, quite frankly, Hachette has not been able to do that. I’ve seen reports of sales dropping by 50 percent or more.” On the other hand, she wrote, “Is it Amazon’s fault that publishers have given it such a large market share or that publishers themselves have created a business model where they have become dependent on Amazon? Several years ago, the same could be said of Barnes & Noble—in fact, Simon & Schuster authors suffered when they were in negotiations with B&N [in 2013]. That’s business. And if you don’t like the business model your own company has created, change it.”

As for nonfiction books that take years to research and write, “Those authors are clearly passionate about their work, as are their readers (however limited),” Lyons says. “While I applaud that, it would be up to each publisher to decide whether a work and author should be subsidized with a large advance. I don’t think we can lay that onus on any one distributor. Perhaps the answer lies in crowd-sourcing, increased grants and endowments for the arts, as well as self-publishing models where the author recoups more of the profit as well as has the chance to connect with [the] audience and create multimedia income streams.”

For now, the health of the publishing business is “extremely important to the health of literary culture,” Nawotka says. “They’ve published a lot of books that advance our culture that will be difficult to fit into the self-publishing structure, which is largely relegated to genre fiction and self-help books. You’re not going to see a lot of self-published biographies of Abraham Lincoln.”

For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers.

Because the details of the Amazon-Hachette negotiations are so closely held, it’s impossible to predict how much longer they will continue. One thing that does seem likely is that traditionally published authors are unlikely to back down in their adamant opposition to Amazon’s policies with regard to Hachette writers. In mid-September, Authors United took the unusual step of calling upon Amazon’s board of directors to reconsider sanctions against Hachette authors’ books, which the group says have caused some authors’ sales—including hardcover, paperback and e-books—to drop by as much as ninety percent.

“Several thousand Hachette authors have watched their readership decline, or, in the case of new authors, have seen their books sink out of sight without finding an adequate readership,” the Authors United letter stated. “These men and women are deeply concerned about what this means for their future careers…. Amazon chose to involve twenty-five hundred Hachette authors and their books. It could end these sanctions tomorrow while continuing to negotiate. Amazon is undermining the ability of authors to support their families, pay their mortgages, and provide for their kids’ college educations. We’d like to emphasize that most of us are not Hachette authors, and our concern is founded on principle, rather than self-interest. We find it hard to believe that all members of the Amazon board approve of these actions. We would like to ask you a question: Do you as an Amazon director approve of this policy of sanctioning books?”

Pressing its argument, Authors United made the case for traditional publishers as curators, guarantors of quality and champions of books ill-equipped to compete in a marketplace dominated by bestsellers. “Publishers provide venture capital for ideas,” the letter went on. “They advance money to authors, giving them the time and freedom to write their books. This system is especially important for nonfiction writers, who often must travel for research. Thousands of times every year, publishers take a chance on unknown authors and advance them money solely on the basis of an idea. By assuming the risk, publishers expect—and receive—a financial return. What will Amazon replace this process with? How, in the Amazon model, will a young author get funding to pursue a promising idea? And what about the role of editors, copy editors, designers, and other publishing staff who ensure that what ultimately ends up on the shelf is both worthy and accurate?”

Most recently, top literary agent Andrew Wylie has been successfully recruiting his stable of blue-chip clients, including Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie, along with the estates of Roberto Bolaño, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller, to join Authors United. That group has reportedly drafted a letter calling on the Department of Justice to begin an antitrust investigation of Amazon and its tactics.

It’s unclear whether Amazon was prepared for such vociferous opposition from traditionally published writers, a group it once counted among its most vocal supporters. “Whatever one would say of negotiating better terms from a vendor, this wasn’t the ideal way of handling it,” says Joe Regal, CEO of the start-up e-retailer and literary-curation site Zola Books, which is trying to position itself to challenge Amazon. “Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.”

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinNance1.

Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.

Amazon and Hachette Battle Gets Orwellian, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Cunningham Talk Genre, and More

by

Staff

8.11.14

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

In response to the open letter to Amazon signed by more than 900 members of the group Authors United, Amazon created a group of its own called Readers United, and wrote a letter to supporters over the weekend urging them to e-mail Hachette. In the letter, the Amazon Books team offered a number of suggested talking points including, “We have noted your illegal collusion” and “stop using your authors as leverage”; they also used a George Orwell quote out of context in an attempt to bolster their argument against publishers’ perceived reservations about e-books. Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch responded to Amazon supporters with an e-mail saying, “This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves. Both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment, but we do believe in a book industry where talent is respected and choice continues to be offered to the reading public.” (New York Times, Digital Book World)

At the Atlantic, novelists and twin brothers Lev and Austin Grossman—whose parents were also writers—discuss family, influence, taste, and the paths that led them both to writing.

“When the characteristics of a genre are controlled, systematized, and insisted upon by publishers, or editors, or critics, they become limitations rather than possibilities.” At Electric Literature, Ursula K. Le Guin talks with Michael Cunningham about the “arbitrary division between ‘literature’ and ‘genre.'”

Flavorwire’s Emily Temple rounds up fifty novels by women writers under fifty that everyone should read.

Meanwhile, the Millions offers up a reading list for the dog days of August.

In bookstore news, a new “nerd mecca” in New Orleans, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, crime, and mystery books, will open at the end of this month. Meanwhile, a new LGBTQ bookshop, Queer Books, is in the works in Philadelphia, in an effort to fill the space that recently defunct Giovanni’s Room left behind. (Publishers Weekly)

The new musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home will head to Broadway next spring. (New York Times)

Authors United Heads to DOJ, Banned Books That Kids Should Read, and More

by

Staff

9.26.14

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

In its latest move against Amazon, the group Authors United—led by best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston—confirmed on Wednesday that it intends to contact the Department of Justice requesting an antitrust inquiry into Amazon’s tactics against publishers. Amazon has been embroiled in a months-long battle with Hachette Book Group over e-book prices, throughout which the e-retailer has removed pre-order buttons on select titles and delayed deliveries to customers. (Publishers Weekly)

In celebration of the thirty-second annual Banned Books Week, the Huffington Post has asked educators which banned books they teach their students and why. Check out more of the conversation on Twitter under the hashtag #TeachBannedBooks.

Meanwhile, the blog What Do We Do All Day? has rounded up eight banned books that kids should read, including Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Shel Silvertein’s A Light in the Attic.

In the latest installment of By the Book, the New York Times talks to science writer and linguist Steven Pinker—author of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and, most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century—who says he’s never gotten in trouble for reading a book, only for writing them.

NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour gets giddy about detective stories and forthcoming fall books.

Three small presses—Civil Coping Mechanisms, Broken River Books, and Lazy Fascist Press—are teaming up to start an independent bookstore and beer shop in Astoria, Oregon. (Electric Literature)

The Guardian is offering an exclusive sneak preview of Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming book, The Strange Library. The ninety-six-page illustrated novella will be published in December by Knopf.

Bluewater Productions has created a comic book profiling Lean In author and Facebook COO and Sheryl Sandberg. The new project is part of a series called Female Force, which has featured the stories of women such as Mother Teresa, Hillary Clinton, Tina Fey, and more. (GalleyCat)

Wylie Asks Authors to Unite Against Amazon, Gaiman and Palmer Celebrate Indie Bookstores, and More

by

Staff

9.29.14

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

Literary agent Andrew Wylie, whose client list bears some of the most well known names in literature, is asking his writers to join the group Authors United in its battle against Amazon. Among those who have agreed are heavyweights Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, and Milan Kundera. “It’s very clear to me, and to those I represent, that what Amazon is doing is very detrimental to the publishing industry and the interests of authors,” Wylie told the New York Times. “If Amazon is not stopped, we are facing the end of literary culture in America.” As reported last week, Authors United intends to bring complaints against Amazon and its tactics against Hachette throughout the companies’ ongoing e-book pricing impasse to the Department of Justice, as early as this week. 

Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly reports that Amazon has reached a new deal with Perseus Book Group over e-book prices. The agreement will affect not only all of Perseus’s imprints, but the more than four hundred independent presses that use Constellation, the publisher’s e-book distribution service.

The American Booksellers Association has recruited author Neil Gaiman and his wife, musician Amanda Palmer, to serve as spokespeople for this year’s Indies First campaign, an initiative launched last year by Sherman Alexie that celebrates independent bookstores. As part of the event, which takes place on Saturday, November 29, authors will serve as volunteer sellers at their favorite indie shops across the country. (GalleyCat)

“You know when a novel’s done, but not so much with short stories. In fact, short stories [are] a venerable form, but it’s diabolically hard to master.” Author Paul Theroux, whose latest story collection, Mr. Bones, is released this week, talks to NPR about the short form.

Thomas Pynchon, the legendary and elusive novelist who rarely makes public appearances (and whose photo hasn’t been published in more than fifty years) might soon appear on the big screen. In the first authorized film adaptation of Pynchon’s work—Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming Inherent Vice—the Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon author could be making a cameo. (New York Times)

Last night at KGB Bar in New York City, PEN American Center hosted a reading with the five finalists for this year’s PEN/Bingham Prize, given annually for works of debut fiction. The finalists, whose readings can be heard in their entirety on the PEN website, include Anthony Marra, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Ian Stansel, Shawn Vestal, and Hanya Yanagihara. The winner will be announced tonight at the 2014 PEN Literary Awards ceremony.

To fight the Monday doldrums with a little literary prowess, a new Buzzfeed quiz asks, How well do you know the first lines of classic books?

The Amazon Conflict

by

Kevin Nance

9.30.14

They were a team, once. In the mid-1990s, the fledgling e-retailer Amazon and the major New York publishing houses—the Big Six, as they were then known—professed themselves partners in a new era of online bookselling. One senior executive recalls Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announcing his enthusiasm for their common cause. “I remember sitting at a conference table with Jeff telling a handful of us about what he wanted to do,” says the executive, who asked to remain anonymous. “We said, ‘That’s great.’” And for years the partnership was mutually beneficial. As Grove/Atlantic’s president and publisher Morgan Entrekin conceded back in July, at a forum at the New York Public Library (NYPL), Amazon provided “a smooth transition to digital” that kept publishers happy: “It was primarily that there was a reliable vendor; we didn’t have piracy problems, and we got paid decently.” Good times, those.

But that age of convivial cooperation seems to be over, replaced by accusations and acrimony. For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group—one of the Big Five publishers, as they’ve been known since the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House—have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers. On the simplest and most immediate level, Amazon wants to be allowed to sell e-books more cheaply, which it argues will benefit readers and lead to increased sales and higher royalties paid to writers. Hachette, whose divisions include Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing, among others, begs to differ. (Although Amazon and Hachette have refused to grant most media interviews about the details of their ongoing negotiation—both declined to comment for this article—they have issued statements summarizing their positions.)

Is the current dispute just about e-books, or does it have more fundamental, perhaps existential implications? “In the publishing business, people tend to think you’re either going gangbusters or you’re on your way to death, but in reality, people are just evolving,” says Edward Nawotka, editor in chief of the trade journal Publishing Perspectives. “It’s like marriage. Husbands and wives will blow up at times, and the smallest, most insignificant thing can start a fight that appears to be the be-all and end-all. But people are just evolving. It’s the small stuff that makes you crazy.” Others, however, tend to view the Amazon-Hachette fight as less of a lovers’ squabble and more of a prelude to a real crisis that could damage American literary culture by crippling traditional publishers’ ability to publish books with great artistic merit or scholarly value but far lower commercial prospects than more popular books. “Publishers don’t make a lot of money,” the megaselling thriller writer James Patterson said at the NYPL forum. “The great fear for me is that if [traditional publishers] get squeezed down any more than they’re getting squeezed now…they’re not going to have money to bring authors along, they’re not going to have money to buy [books like] Infinite Jest.”

In this way of thinking, the dispute is about far more than the price of e-books; it’s about the future of literature itself. Some fear, for example, that Amazon’s drive to increase its already dominant share of the e-book market could spill over into hardcovers, ultimately depriving traditional publishers of a sustainable business model and making it impossible for them to offer advances that many authors depend upon. And if Amazon continues to increase its market share by underselling its competitors (including chain and independent bookstores as well as other e-retailers), many believe that it will eventually become effectively a monopoly, concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of a single corporation—one that treats books as commodities rather than as intellectual capital whose intangible value to the culture transcends economics.

“Perhaps I’m biased, but I think that books are more than commodities like vacuum cleaners,” says Amy Berkower, a leading New York literary agent and a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc. “I don’t know the terms of the Hachette-Amazon dispute, but I suspect Amazon is seeking more than lower e-book prices, and I fear they are asking for greater discounts that will seriously affect the already slim profit margins on which publishers operate. Unlike Amazon, publishers can’t depend on other products like vacuum cleaners to pay the bills. If their profit margins are seriously diminished, they won’t be able to afford to pay the kind of advances that finance serious works of fiction and nonfiction. I’m all for self-publishing, lower prices, and higher e-book royalties, but not at the expense of destroying a model that, however faulty it may be, provides the capital for books that require years to research and write.”

Whether such a scenario comes to pass or not, only time will tell. In the short term, Amazon argues that e-books should be cheaper because they cost less than physical books to produce. Furthermore, they say, cheaper e-books will strengthen, not harm, the culture of reading. “For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99,” the company stated in an open letter to readers. “So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that at the lower price, total revenue increases 16 percent. This is good for all parties involved: The customer is paying 33 percent less. The author is getting a royalty check 16 percent larger and being read by an audience that’s 74 percent larger…. The total pie is bigger.”

But as book-industry observers point out, this formula is unlikely to apply to many books, such as literary novels, with great cultural importance but far lower commercial expectations than popular or genre fiction. “What Amazon says might be true for some writers, but it’s not necessarily going to be true for all writers,” says Roxana Robinson, president of the Authors Guild—the nation’s leading professional association for writers—and the author of eight books, including the novel Sparta (Sarah Crichton Books, 2013). “That means if their sales don’t increase, they’ll just get a drop in revenues. So for Amazon to say they’re doing this to benefit writers, it doesn’t ring true.” And one publishing executive at a Big Five house, who asked to remain anonymous, calls Amazon’s position on e-book pricing “disingenuous at best, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace. There are costs associated with e-books. It’s true that the profit margins are better on e-books, but e-books are not published in isolation. E-books are published in tandem with physical books, which are very costly to produce.”

In August, Michael Pietsch, the former Little, Brown editor and publisher who is now Hachette’s CEO (and is also a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc.), responded to Amazon’s statement with his own open letter. Hachette’s e-book prices are far below those for print books, he noted, with more than 80 percent of its e-books priced at less than ten dollars, and the prices for e-books are lowered when the paperback version of the original hardcover is published. “We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all e-books, and that all e-books do not belong in the same $9.99 box,” he wrote. “Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and e-book. While e-books do not have the two- to three-dollar costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.”

For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group…have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers.

The single most controversial aspect of the current dispute has been Amazon’s tactic of using sanctions against Hachette’s writers as leverage to force concessions from their publisher. For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers, including members of Authors United, a group led by Douglas Preston that in August purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on Amazon to stop putting writers in the middle of its battle with Hachette. About nine hundred writers signed the statement, including household names such as Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Nora Roberts, and Suzanne Collins, along with Sherman Alexie (who went on The Colbert Report to discuss the dispute with Stephen Colbert, a Hachette author), Paul Auster, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Siri Hustvedt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dennis Lehane, Ann Patchett, Scott Spencer, and Donna Tartt. “As writers—most of us not published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want,” the group said. “It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’… Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage.”

The Authors Guild has also officially not taken sides in the dispute, but most of its leadership—including Robinson and co–vice president Richard Russo—deplores what Robinson calls Amazon’s “punitive and intimidating” tactics. “It’s the dirtiest kind of dirty pool,” says Russo, whose novels include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls (Knopf, 2001). “Amazon and Hachette may both be ruthlessly pursuing their own interests, but Hachette isn’t forcing Amazon to abuse authors.”

Amazon’s treatment of Hachette writers has been widely condemned by a wide swath of authors, including Louise Erdrich, author of the National Book Award–winning The Round House (Harper, 2012) and the owner of Birchbark Books & Native Arts, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. “This a form of blacklisting,” says Erdrich, adding that she’s particularly concerned by the prospect of Amazon becoming a monopoly in all but name. “Allowing one company to get so big that it controls all of the information is dangerous,” she says. “Do we have the freedom to speak and write as we wish? Presently. But if we allow one distribution point, we have a dangerous bottleneck. Amazon is basically holding the books, the information, the writers, the editors, and all who contribute to the book world, hostage.” Entrekin, at the NYPL forum, issued a similarly dire warning. “We’re concentrating the flow of information in our society into the fewest hands ever in the history of the world,” he said. “That’s not a healthy thing, for all the obvious reasons.” 

In its open letter, Amazon responded to criticisms of its sanctions against Hachette writers by pointing the finger back in Hachette’s direction. “We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies,” the company’s book team said in a letter to readers. “Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100 percent of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and parent company Lagardère, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1 percent of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.”

And as Amazon pointed out in the letter, not all authors are united in their opposition to the retailer or its negotiating tactics. Indeed, more than eighty-five hundred people—largely self-published writers, many of whom have been rejected by the New York legacy houses but found success distributing their work on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform—have signed an online petition calling on Hachette to “stop fighting low prices and fair wages.” Calling the Big Five a “collusive cartel”—a reference to the Department of Justice’s 2012 lawsuit alleging that the largest New York publishers conspired with Apple in a price-fixing scheme—the petitioners attacked Hachette and the other big publishers as greedy, elitist, and high handed, while praising Amazon for its consumer focus and willingness to help writers shut out by the New York establishment and give them a chance to find an audience. “Amazon provides us the freedom to express ourselves in more creative ways, adding to the diversity of literature,” the writers state in the petition. “Hachette believes you’ll read whatever Hachette tells you to, and rejects and dismisses many worthy writers.” With regard to Amazon’s negotiating tactics targeting Hachette writers, the petition was sanguine: “Unfortunately for Amazon, a company that prides itself on customer service, a breakdown in negotiations has meant making decisions that are hard on customers and authors in the short run in order to fight for the rights of those same customers and authors in the long run.”

One early signer of the petition was C. J. Lyons, a former emergency-room pediatrician who now writes best-selling medical thrillers published independently and by the New York houses, and who is a member of the Authors Guild board of directors. “I totally see why [Hachette] authors are upset,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Without these extras [such as preorder buttons] that Amazon used to provide, their publisher has to work harder to market and sell their books and, quite frankly, Hachette has not been able to do that. I’ve seen reports of sales dropping by 50 percent or more.” On the other hand, she wrote, “Is it Amazon’s fault that publishers have given it such a large market share or that publishers themselves have created a business model where they have become dependent on Amazon? Several years ago, the same could be said of Barnes & Noble—in fact, Simon & Schuster authors suffered when they were in negotiations with B&N [in 2013]. That’s business. And if you don’t like the business model your own company has created, change it.”

As for nonfiction books that take years to research and write, “Those authors are clearly passionate about their work, as are their readers (however limited),” Lyons says. “While I applaud that, it would be up to each publisher to decide whether a work and author should be subsidized with a large advance. I don’t think we can lay that onus on any one distributor. Perhaps the answer lies in crowd-sourcing, increased grants and endowments for the arts, as well as self-publishing models where the author recoups more of the profit as well as has the chance to connect with [the] audience and create multimedia income streams.”

For now, the health of the publishing business is “extremely important to the health of literary culture,” Nawotka says. “They’ve published a lot of books that advance our culture that will be difficult to fit into the self-publishing structure, which is largely relegated to genre fiction and self-help books. You’re not going to see a lot of self-published biographies of Abraham Lincoln.”

For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers.

Because the details of the Amazon-Hachette negotiations are so closely held, it’s impossible to predict how much longer they will continue. One thing that does seem likely is that traditionally published authors are unlikely to back down in their adamant opposition to Amazon’s policies with regard to Hachette writers. In mid-September, Authors United took the unusual step of calling upon Amazon’s board of directors to reconsider sanctions against Hachette authors’ books, which the group says have caused some authors’ sales—including hardcover, paperback and e-books—to drop by as much as ninety percent.

“Several thousand Hachette authors have watched their readership decline, or, in the case of new authors, have seen their books sink out of sight without finding an adequate readership,” the Authors United letter stated. “These men and women are deeply concerned about what this means for their future careers…. Amazon chose to involve twenty-five hundred Hachette authors and their books. It could end these sanctions tomorrow while continuing to negotiate. Amazon is undermining the ability of authors to support their families, pay their mortgages, and provide for their kids’ college educations. We’d like to emphasize that most of us are not Hachette authors, and our concern is founded on principle, rather than self-interest. We find it hard to believe that all members of the Amazon board approve of these actions. We would like to ask you a question: Do you as an Amazon director approve of this policy of sanctioning books?”

Pressing its argument, Authors United made the case for traditional publishers as curators, guarantors of quality and champions of books ill-equipped to compete in a marketplace dominated by bestsellers. “Publishers provide venture capital for ideas,” the letter went on. “They advance money to authors, giving them the time and freedom to write their books. This system is especially important for nonfiction writers, who often must travel for research. Thousands of times every year, publishers take a chance on unknown authors and advance them money solely on the basis of an idea. By assuming the risk, publishers expect—and receive—a financial return. What will Amazon replace this process with? How, in the Amazon model, will a young author get funding to pursue a promising idea? And what about the role of editors, copy editors, designers, and other publishing staff who ensure that what ultimately ends up on the shelf is both worthy and accurate?”

Most recently, top literary agent Andrew Wylie has been successfully recruiting his stable of blue-chip clients, including Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie, along with the estates of Roberto Bolaño, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller, to join Authors United. That group has reportedly drafted a letter calling on the Department of Justice to begin an antitrust investigation of Amazon and its tactics.

It’s unclear whether Amazon was prepared for such vociferous opposition from traditionally published writers, a group it once counted among its most vocal supporters. “Whatever one would say of negotiating better terms from a vendor, this wasn’t the ideal way of handling it,” says Joe Regal, CEO of the start-up e-retailer and literary-curation site Zola Books, which is trying to position itself to challenge Amazon. “Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.”

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinNance1.

Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.

A New Hub for Literary Culture

by

Jonathan Vatner

4.15.15

As the Internet continues to disgorge an ever-flowing river of reviews, essays, and articles about literature, deciding where to look for intellectually stimulating content can sometimes feel like wading through a massive slush pile. And while a number of trusted arts and culture websites produce a good deal of reliable content, finding an engaging read amid a sea of click bait and 140-character links can often be overwhelming. But the hunt for serious discourse about books became a little easier with the recent launch of Literary Hub (lithub.com), a joint endeavor between independent publisher Grove Atlantic and digital publisher Electric Literature. Founder Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic, says he long desired to create a home on the web for lovers of literature. “It’s this problem of discoverability—it’s a dreadful word—but we’re all struggling with the idea that we can produce this stuff, but how can we bring people to it?” he says. “Now, if you’re interested in literary culture, there’s one place you can go to for your news and information.”

The site curates literature-related content from all corners of the web, while also offering commissioned essays about books and the writing life, as well as excerpts from newly released and forthcoming books. “It’s a site with the best, smartest writing about the best, smartest writing,” explains editor in chief Jonny Diamond.

While other websites round up and produce daily content on literature, Literary Hub distinguishes itself through its broad network of partners. Entrekin has been busy signing those partners—including imprints of all five major trade publishers, independent and university presses, literary magazines, bookstores, literary nonprofits, even college English and creative writing departments—whose job is to submit content and promote the site on social media. When the venture was announced in February, sixty-five such partners had agreed to participate; Entrekin hopes to grow that number to well over a hundred. Partners so far include indie publishers Graywolf Press, McSweeney’s, and Melville House; literary publications AGNI, n+1, the Paris Review, and Poetry magazine; and the nonprofit arts organization PEN American Center.

Entrekin also enlisted help in creating the website. Rather than hiring a traditional web developer to build it, he looked to partner with an existing site that aligned with his mission. Electric Literature, which was established as an online magazine in 2009 and attracted 2.9 million readers last year, seemed the perfect fit. Editorial director Halimah Marcus and founder and chairman Andy Hunter agreed to partner with Entrekin; the website’s staff built Literary Hub and will help keep it running. Grove Atlantic has committed to funding the site for its first three years, and while he isn’t turning away any ads, Entrekin isn’t soliciting them either.

To oversee the content, Hunter hired Diamond, the former editor of the L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine, as Literary Hub’s editor in chief, and John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, to be the executive editor. Writer and critic Roxane Gay, fiction writer Alexander Chee, and poets Rebecca Wolff and Adam Fitzgerald serve as contributing editors, and rounding out the masthead are about a dozen correspondents from across the country, reporting on the literary scene beyond New York City.

Each day the website’s editorial team aims to push out a significant amount of content, including a book excerpt, contributed by one of Literary Hub’s publishing partners; a critical or personal essay about books and literary culture; an e-mail roundup of interesting reading about the literary world; and quotations and other archival material aimed at drawing clicks on social media. The editors accept pitches from writers, though Diamond says a traditional book review isn’t enough to merit inclusion. “I’m looking for longer essays that discuss multiple titles, critical pieces that engage with ideas, pieces that talk about trends in the literary conversation, pieces that can take stronger positions and become conversation starters,” he says.

Hunter acknowledges that it can take years to build a loyal audience. “The average person only checks out eight websites regularly,” he says. “To become one of those websites is a very tall order. There’s a lot of tricks, with search-engine optimization and shareable headlines, but ultimately what works in the long run is putting out great content and giving people material they love and relate to—and feel at home in.”

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

 

Prize for Thrillers Sparks Debate

by

Gila Lyons

6.12.19

Be it Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, novels that feature violence toward women have dominated the thriller market in recent years, selling millions of copies and leading to major screen adaptations. Concerned about the popularization of these kinds of stories and how they might warp public perception of the dangers women face, in early 2018 British author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless created the Staunch Book Prize—an award given to a fictional thriller in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered. “I decided to launch a book prize that didn’t reward violence to women as entertainment,” says Lawless. “The original aim of the prize was to get the proliferation of violence toward women in popular culture—books, film, and television—into the conversation…. We soon learned how fed up with and genuinely concerned about graphic and sexual violence in fiction many people were.”

The award is now in its second year, with submissions of thrillers (including the subgenres of crime, mystery, historical, science fiction, cyber, comedy, psychological, spy, suspense, political, satirical, and disaster thrillers, with the notable exception of horror and fantasy) open until July 14. Although the contest charges an entry fee of £20, or approximately $26, the prize of £1,000 ($1,300) comes straight from Lawless’s pocket. “We aren’t sponsored, no one on the team gets paid, and entry fees only cover costs,” she says. “As it’s not a huge prize pot, we felt that the publicity our shortlisted authors and winner get is worth more to them in the long run than the cash.” Lawless will judge this year’s award alongside actor, author, and British Parliament member Lola Young, who has served as chair for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction), the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the Booker Prize; psychologist Dominic Willmott, who specializes in legal and criminal psychology; and editor Elaine Richard, who has worked at Little, Brown and Gourmet.

While many have applauded the prize designed to challenge the normalization of violence and recognize inventiveness in the thriller genre, the award has received some pushback, particularly from thriller writers. “If we can’t stop human beings from viciously harming one another, we need to be able to write stories in which that harm is subjected to psychological and moral scrutiny, and punished,” wrote best-selling thriller writer Sophie Hannah in the Guardian in January 2018. “There is no life-changing experience that we should be discouraged from writing and reading about.” Hannah argued the prize could have instead honored the thriller that “most powerfully or sensitively tackles the problem of violence against women and girls.” She went on to quote fellow thriller writer Steve Cavanagh, who offered an analogy in a tweet: “Which book highlights racism and prejudice better? A book which is not about those issues or To Kill a Mockingbird? Wouldn’t it be better to celebrate a book that could challenge prejudice rather than celebrate a book which ignores it?”

In response, last year’s prizewinner, the Australian novelist Jock Serong—his winning thriller, On the Java Ridge, follows a group of refugees at sea trying to reach the Australian shore—told the Washington Post that the award isn’t designed to censor or silence real conversation about violence against women but rather to address “that laziness that creeps in, the tropes where women and girls are used unthinkingly as default victims in the story.” 

Lawless hopes the prize will encourage a greater range of plots and themes in the thriller market, which she describes as being dominated by crime fiction, and notes that the inaugural prize’s shortlist included a mix of styles and subjects such as terrorism, art theft, social media, police corruption, racism, and global injustice. “There are so many really interesting settings and ideas—the scope is endless,” she says. “I can’t wait to see what writers come up with in the future.” 

 

Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for, among other publications, the New York Times, Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, Good, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.

 

Bridget Lawless, founder of the Staunch Prize.

(Credit: Clare Park)

#MeToo: Crafting Our Most Difficult True Stories

by

Tracy Strauss

8.15.18

Five years ago I published an essay in this magazine called “A Topic Too Risky.” It was about the process of writing my story of childhood sexual abuse, a subject that agents, editors, and other publishing professionals had told me was taboo. I didn’t share their viewpoint. “Writing about trauma,” I wrote, “is more than simply documenting experience…. It’s about transforming tragedy into art, and hoping that somehow that piece of art may help someone else who’s gone through something unbearable and who doesn’t yet see that there truly is a light at the end of the dark tunnel.” 

In today’s #MeToo era, of course, the writing and publishing of personal narratives about sexual abuse, assault, and harassment has proliferated. Even more, it has become a force for social change. Yet many people still respond with aversion to such stories. Some refuse to believe #MeToo accounts or respond with misogyny, criticism, or inflammatory attacks. Reading about traumatic events can also cause victims to shut down and witnesses to turn away in fear. Without the protective veil of fiction to mitigate such experiences, essayists and memoirists face the challenge of crafting personal stories that engage, educate, and empower readers.

It’s important to remember that, as writers with #MeToo stories to tell, we don’t owe anyone anything. For many survivors the important thing is to simply get the story on the page, to break the silence, and, perhaps in the process, allow other survivors with similar experiences to do the same. But for writers it’s also true that we want our most deeply personal stories to make the greatest impact. When we write our #MeToo stories, we want our pieces to be as strong as we can make them in the hopes that they might reach, and resonate with, as many people as possible. 

We can accomplish this goal by using several tools of craft, style, and form—techniques we employ in any other piece of writing—to illuminate our audience and keep them reading. First, a combination of reflection and instruction can guide readers through emotionally challenging subject matter. In her memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper, 2017), Roxane Gay guides the reader into the story of her rape by stating up front how difficult it is for her to talk about it. After reflecting on her own complicated feelings about the story she is about to share, she then tells her readers what to expect. She tells them what she wants. She also tells them what she doesn’t want: 

I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “Something terrible happened.”

Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to tell you what happened to my body. I was young and I took my body for granted and then I learned about the terrible things that could happen to a girl body and everything changed.

Something terrible happened, and I wish I could leave it at that because as a writer who is also a woman, I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me.… At the same time, I don’t want to be silent.… If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s what matters and is even more a travesty here, that having this kind of story is utterly common. I hope that by sharing my story, by joining a chorus of women and men who share their stories too, more people can become appropriately horrified by how much suffering is born of sexual violence, how far-reaching the repercussions can be. 

Gay provides parameters for reading and responding to the details of the assault that she hasn’t yet depicted. By sharing both her own perspective and her wishes for how her story is received, Gay provides a disclosure road map, an emotional “safety net” for not only the narrator but also the reader, as they both venture deeper into trauma’s terrain.

Sometimes the adage “less is more” is key. Showering readers with graphic details can flood their minds; it can feel like too much to bear, too painful or horrifying to read further. That’s not to say one should write around or avoid the truth. Rather, just like any good piece of writing, metaphor and pacing can be important and useful tools. For example, in one of my essays for HuffPost, “Leaving My Abusive World,” I portray a #MeToo scenario without mentioning blow-by-blow specifics: 

I sat next to my father on his side of the bed he and my mother shared, beside the mahogany bureau where the checkbooks were located. As I stared at the scratched gold-colored handle of the closed drawer, my father bent forward, leaning his tanned arms across his thighs and folding his hands between his knees. He said he’d dispense the funds, but I had to give him something in exchange.

I agreed.

In this passage I employ a fairly traditional craft technique to create an intensely traumatic scene: I draw attention to my father’s gestures, creating tone and tension through description, bringing the focus to his thighs. In the last two sentences of the passage, I mention the tit-for-tat expectation, creating a euphemism to convey briefly but plainly the coercion and sexual favors around which the exchange is based. I don’t linger there, but as a reader you know what follows. Less, I trust the reader will agree, is more.

Another craft tool, the epistolary form, can cultivate intimacy between the writer and her readers while revealing a #MeToo story, effectively taking readers into the writer’s confidence. I employ this technique in my forthcoming book, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet, a #MeToo-themed work of nonfiction that is structured as an open love letter to my future life partner. In it I share my innermost thoughts and reflections about dating experiences, overcoming personal struggles, and the lessons I learned along the way; each epistolary passage speaks to the content of the ongoing narrative and is written to “you,” my future partner—which, by extension, becomes an address to each, and all, of my readers. 

Another useful tool is thematic threading, which can also provide a backdrop or a second story of resonance that runs parallel to the main story. Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House (New Rivers Press, 1995), for example, intertwines the story of the deaths of his brothers and mother with his loss of innocence from childhood sexual abuse. In The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron Books, 2017), Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich also employs braided story lines—the author’s uncovering of a murder and her own story of sexual abuse—as well as flashback, a tool that makes past trauma come alive and simultaneously portrays the post-traumatic effects of sexual abuse on a survivor: 

Where does the mind go in these moments, while the body trembles? For me it is a white-hot slipstream blank-out, the nothingness of no time and nowhere and no one. It used to be a feeling, a single concentrated excruciating feeling: the smooth hot texture of my grandfather’s penis against my hand, for example, or the specific purple-pink color his penis had, a color that still makes me uncomfortable no matter where I see it, though the discomfort is vague now, the signal no longer traced back to its origin, with only the effect felt. But as the years have blotted the origin out (I am grateful), they have blotted the sensations, too, as though the film reel of the memory has been played so many times it has gone torn and blotched. Now I have only to ride the panicked blankness. “Oh, fuck,” I say when the wave of sensation starts to break over me, inside me, and then I breathe to keep up with the panicked race swell of my body, the heartbeat and the breath. The wave builds and builds, it crests and breaks.

The flashback, which Marzano-Lesnevich says was written to “illustrate some of the consequences of abuse,” focuses on vivid sensory information while also conveying the “blotted-out” sense of experiencing a flashback many years after the trauma.

Clockwise from upper left: Marisa Siegel, Roxane Gay, Sue William Silverman, Tracy Strauss, Sam Brighton, Elissa Washuta, and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Credit: Gay: Jay Grabiec; Silverman: Angie Chen; Marzano-Lesnevich: Nina Subin; Washuta: Amber Cortes; Brighton: Michael Edrington)

During sexual assault or abuse, many victims experience dissociation, a coping mechanism of detachment or psychological escape from an unbearable, threatening reality. For survivors and nonsurvivors alike, a common response to reading about or otherwise being exposed to traumatic content is to similarly dissociate, to “go somewhere else” in their minds. (Some believe that trigger warnings can be a useful way to avoid this reaction, while others think that such disclaimers promote silencing and shelter people from a reality that is necessary to fully see and know in order to stop our societal tolerance for such violence.) A craft technique that can help combat the dissociative response is to ground readers in a specific time and place. When setting is at the forefront, the reader enters the space of the narrator’s experience. Placing oneself in a well-defined space can help a reader feel more stable and safer to proceed with the story. In her essay “2 Corinthians 65:14,” which she published in ENOUGH, a weekly series of #MeToo essays at the Rumpus, Sam Brighton focuses on the setting of a church hall and the facts of a sacred space—along with irony and dark humor for levity—leading up to a memory of sexual abuse:

For about sixteen hundred dollars, at the hall named after a child molester, a newlywed couple may boogie down with four hundred and ninety friends to celebrate their holy heterosexual matrimony. Specifically, the hall is for heterosexual couples. Even if we wanted to, my wife and I couldn’t rent the hall to gather our people—our families, our friends, the gender-benders with buzz cuts and wing-tips and wives—to slow-dance the night away to k. d. lang—even if otherwise we fulfilled the contract and followed the facility rules….

The hall charges a six-dollar corking fee, which makes me want to write jokes about when Jesus and his mom attended the Wedding at Cana and Jesus converted water into wine, did the venue charge Jesus a corking fee?…

From the pictures posted on the website, the dance floor is constructed from blond, narrow wood resembling a bowling lane. The walls are simple, decorated only with windows and fire extinguishers—no statues of crucified bodies to turn one’s appetite away from wedding cake. The windows are tall and the carpet inconspicuous. It’s a humble ambiance that someone like Jesus might enjoy—the austere social-justice Jesus, not the bejeweled and super-judgmental Jesus.

Where memories are made. My body, my sacred space, remembers the priest. An accidental touch, because sometimes my wife forgets, because the abuse isn’t just under the surface in every sexual encounter for her like it is for me. A borderline tickle in the wrong place converts pleasure into nausea.

Brighton connects the setting of the sacred space of the hall with the sacred space of her body. The double use of the word sacred accompanies the writer’s double use of convert: Jesus converted water into wine; pleasure converts into nausea. In this way the prose couples the setting with the experience of sexual abuse. 

“The church hall, for me, converges two separate sources of longstanding painful issues—childhood sexual abuse and homophobia,” Brighton says about the piece and her use of setting to tell her story. “The hall gives a tangible quality to something that was once more theoretical or based in assumption. Without the hall, in my adult life, I could assume the church wouldn’t want me using their space to celebrate my same-sex marriage, and I could assume they don’t prioritize the interests or experiences of the sex abuse survivors harmed by their clergy people. And the hall is just a very disappointing confirmation that these ideas are true.” 

Highlighting a concept from an outside source can also be a useful tool to educate, contextualize, and universalize a #MeToo-themed story for readers. In her essay for the ENOUGH series, “A Thousand Stories,” Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life (Harper Perennial, 2017), quotes an expert on fear, then follows with reflection: 

I’d like to tell you that I spat in his face or kneed him in the balls or staked him through the heart, but I can’t. “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them,” wrote Gavin de Becker in The Gift of Fear. “While at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” I hate admitting that. I hate knowing how fast and often these moments turn violent. I hate that afterwards I asked the bouncer to walk me to my car. I hate how I still don’t listen to that band. I hate the memories that show up uninvited every time I go out dancing, or park my car on a side street, or swim, or clean the floor, or walk into the stairwell at the college where I worked or the restaurant where I worked or the L or the street between the L and my apartment or the alley where I walk my dog every morning or any of a thousand places. There are a thousand stories. Here’s why I chose this one…

“The quote takes it out of the anecdotal and into the universal,” Stielstra says about crafting her essay. “That’s the challenge of writing the personal essay: moving from why does this matter to me to why does this matter?

After finishing a #MeToo story, just as with any piece of writing one hopes to publish, paying attention to the submission guidelines and the publication style of prospective outlets is integral for success. Marisa Siegel, owner and editor in chief of the Rumpus, and creator of the ENOUGH series, shares her mission and vision for #MeToo writing. “The descriptive philosophy of the ENOUGH series states that rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence subject matter is timely as well as timeless,” she says. “We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect change. We are looking to publish the strongest writing and to represent a diversity of voices around the issues of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse. We are also looking to feature a variety of styles and genres within the series.”

Just like writers and readers, working with #MeToo pieces can be challenging for editors. “Beyond logistics [of receiving hundreds of submissions a day], it takes an emotional toll to read these pieces,” Siegel says. “In reading these submissions I’ve also had to confront past experiences that perhaps I’d chosen not to label as assault or abuse and have come to realize that those experiences weren’t as okay as I’d let myself believe. This is a powerful but difficult consequence of editing this series.” 

When one’s #MeToo story is declined, it’s hard not to feel discouraged. Elissa Washuta’s memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules (Red Hen Press, 2014), was rejected by nearly forty editors. But she persisted and found a publisher who “understood my aims completely,” Washuta says, “and accepted the manuscript on the terms it set without wanting it to be anything but what it was.” 

As with any piece of writing, once a work of #MeToo writing is published, the writer faces audience reaction, which has the potential to be both rewarding and challenging. For some writers, having such personal stories in the world may cause a great deal of anxiety. It’s important for writers to have a support system in place—whether a good friend, a writers group, or a professional. 

“The process [of writing and publishing] can be triggering, so it’s good to check in with a therapist regularly,” advises Washuta, who received positive reviews of My Body Is a Book of Rules but also received, as she put it, “some alarming responses.” 

“One man I knew, who ended up stalking me, seemed to be using the book for a sort of manual for how to get into my head,” Washuta says. “Another broke up with me over it because he couldn’t get over how messed up he thought I was. People’s responses to the work have shown me who they really are. Some loved ones have struggled with the contents but really worked at understanding the book and worked to process their reactions without making me do that work for them, which deepened my appreciation and love for them. Strangers have all kinds of negative reactions, which I now ignore.”

Sam Brighton echoes this sentiment: “When publishing anything, personal and vulnerable content suddenly becomes public and available for feedback, helpful or hurtful.” But when she published her ENOUGH essay, Brighton  says, “I was surprised when my social media page bloomed with support.”

For memoirist Sue William Silverman, the author of three books about sexual abuse and a pioneer of the genre, telling her story has been similarly difficult and rewarding. Her first memoir, the AWP Award winner Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press, 1999), was dismissed by some reviewers. While a number of women’s magazines covered the book, mainstream and traditional book-review outlets ignored it—and in some cases declined to cover it based solely on the subject. Silverman’s second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction (W. W. Norton, 2001), was adapted into a film by the Lifetime television network, which has historically marketed its programming toward women. But she still struggled to get broader coverage, and when she did it was often negative. Even so, Silverman has forged ahead with her work and continues to believe in the importance of telling her stories.

“Readers better understand their own lives by reading how you coped with adversity, and what you learned from it,” she writes in her craft book Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Silverman, who is on the creative nonfiction faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, admits that it hurts to receive negative reactions, particularly when responses are misogynistic, sexist, or simply ignorant. 

Instead, she has chosen to focus on the positive feedback she receives about her work. For Silverman, this means taking to heart the hundreds of letters she has gotten over the years from readers who have related to her story and the men and women who have approached her at readings and said, in various ways, “Me too.” 

 

Tracy Strauss, named by Bustle as one of eight women writers with advice to follow, has published #MeToo essays in Ms. magazine, Salon, HuffPost, the Rumpus, Publishers Weekly, and others, including a six-month blog series for Ploughshares called “Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence.” She was the 2015 Writers’ Room of Boston Nonfiction Fellow, the 2013–2014 vice president of the Women’s National Book Association Boston Chapter, and was formerly the essays editor of the Rumpus. Her debut #MeToo-themed narrative nonfiction book about relationships, self-growth, and empowerment, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet, will be published in spring 2019 by Skyhorse Publishing. Follow her on Twitter, @TracyS_Writer.

The Smart Approach to Contest Submissions

by

Staff

5.1.13

You write something great—no, brilliant—so you fire it off to a bunch of contests, and wait for word that you’ve won, filling your downtime taking selfies that will no doubt appear in the Recent Winners section of this magazine. It sounds too good to be true because it usually is. Being lax when it comes to entering contests is typically a waste of time and money—unless of course you fancy yourself a patron of the arts, which is likely all you’ll be if you continue to take a slapdash approach to writing contests. Here are seven strategies for a more efficient (and hopefully more effective) process of submitting your work to contests.

1. Finish first. Before you submit your manuscript, make sure you’ve pushed it as far as it can go. Revise, revise, and revise some more. Send it to five friends and ask them for constructive criticism. Pass it around your writers group. Workshop it. Stick it in a drawer for a week and then read it. It’s still brilliant? Great. Stick it back in the drawer and submit it next week after you’ve reread it again and asked yourself, “Is this better than the five hundred other manuscripts that have already been submitted to this contest?” If you’re paying an entry fee, there should be no doubt in your mind.

2. Know your sponsoring organization. Do you read the magazine that sponsors the contest? Do you subscribe? Have you read all the books published in the past year by the press that’s running the contest? Do you disagree with any of the editorial policies of that magazine or press? Familiarize yourself with the organization’s website and read some of the marketing copy. Does the sponsor present itself as one you’d like to be associated with? Are you comfortable with the idea of having your name—not to mention your writing—associated with that sponsor for the rest of your career?

3. Judge your judge. Read that famous poet’s work as well as the work of winners that judge has chosen in the past. Read interviews with that well-known novelist, reviews of her latest book, articles and essays she has published in magazines. Try to figure out not only how she writes but also how she thinks, how she reads. Never heard of the judge? Double your efforts and proceed with caution. (See number two.)

4. Follow the rules. You may have written a story for the ages, but it won’t matter if you printed your last name on the top of every page when the rules explicitly forbid any identifying information on your manuscript. Don’t e-mail it as an attachment when you’re supposed to upload it to a submissions manager. The Deadlines section of this magazine is the perfect place to start gathering information about legitimate contests with upcoming deadlines. It provides all the details you need (how much, for what, by when, and so on) in order to make a decision about whether you should research the contest further. If a contest sounds like a good match, follow the instructions and request the complete guidelines. Then follow those guidelines to the letter.

5. Don’t get fancy. Let your words win the contest, not your paper or your ink or your fonts or your formatting. Don’t print your manuscript on special paper. Keep it in a standard font—for the love of God, no script fonts—and don’t include an Oscar-worthy thank-you speech on an acknowledgments page. (Save that for the published book.) In your cover letter, don’t include the endearing anecdote about the first time you picked up a crayon and realized you wanted to be a writer. If you’re submitting a paper manuscript, don’t recycle the folded-up, paged-through, and rejected copy from the last contest. Save that for your doodles and your grocery lists; consider the extra money you’re going to spend on ink and paper as an investment in a submission with a better chance at winning. No reader or judge wants proof that an entry has already been rejected. Don’t plant doubt: It will grow.

6. Keep track. Start logging your submissions on some sort of spreadsheet. It doesn’t need to be fancy (see number five); just keep a record of which contests you enter, how much you paid, when you were notified of the results, and so on. Not only will you have a better sense of how much you are investing in writing contests, you may also allay some anxiety about when you’ll get that phone call or e-mail of congratulations.

7. Keep writing. Your writing career does not necessarily hinge on winning or losing a contest—winning can help, no doubt, but there are plenty of brilliant, well-respected writers who publish book after book and never win a contest. The most important thing to focus on is your writing. Submit your work to contests when the writing is finished (see number one). And when you’re done, start writing again. 

Hub City’s New Southern Fiction Series

by

Gila Lyons

4.10.19

This spring, Spartanburg, South Carolina–based Hub City Press is partnering with Charles Frazier, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), to launch a new series that will highlight literary fiction from the South. The Cold Mountain Fund Series will further the independent press’s mission to publish place-based books and strengthen literary culture and community in the region. 

Hub City Press director Meg Reid says the publisher has had high-profile support before, but the partnership with Frazier is unique. “We do have a lot of New York Times best-selling authors sharing about us on social media, blurbing our books, and getting books into the right hands. But this is different because Charles is a long-term icon of Southern tales and feels like a very natural part of what we do. Next year is our twenty-fifth anniversary, and this series is cementing our path as a nationally recognized independent press.” 

Frazier, who in addition to Cold Mountain is the author of the novels Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods, and Varina, published last year by Ecco, will help fund the advances for books in the new series as well as marketing and publicity initiatives. He will also make occasional appearances with series authors and at Hub City events. “I’ve been interested in Hub City books for a long time,” Frazier says. “I like independent presses. I was looking around my office right now and so much of what’s lying on my desk and the tables is from independent presses like Copper Canyon, Hesperus, and Graywolf. I wanted to support a strong and thriving Southern independent press, with regional authors who often get excluded from the more corporate New York publishing world.” 

Hub City Press, which also publishes poetry and nonfiction, tends to sign writers from nontraditional writing backgrounds. “Because the South doesn’t have the literary networks other regions have, writers have to get day jobs and find alternative routes to publication,” Reid says. “As we grow we’re hell-bent on preserving a democratic approach to sourcing our books.” The press is part of a larger organization, the Hub City Writers Project, which is dedicated to building literary community in the South through its bookstore in Spartanburg, which frequently hosts readings and events, along with an annual writing conference, a residency program, and a contest series, among other programs. 

The first title in the Cold Mountain series, Jessica Handler’s debut novel, The Magnetic Girl, was published in April. It tells the story of an adolescent girl who develops a vaudeville act in small-town Georgia two decades after the Civil War. In October the press will release Mark Barr’s debut novel, Watershed, about a couple struggling to make a living in rural Tennessee after the Great Depression. And in April 2020, Carter Sickels will publish his novel The Prettiest Star with the series; it revolves around a man seeking to return to his hometown in Appalachia after living in New York City during the AIDS epidemic. 

Reid and Frazier are both interested in representing the diversity and racial complexity of the South. “Part of Hub City’s mission is championing lesser-heard perspectives,” Reid says. “In our books we’re looking for diversity in voices and experiences in a region that’s really quite huge. It spans from Arkansas to Kentucky, from Virginia to Texas, which is over 110 million people. We’re looking to reinterpret and reimagine and interrogate the South, in ways modern, imagined, and historical.”

Frazier notes the historical legacy Southern writers face. “There’s so much that’s changing in the culture in terms of the Civil War, which has been the elephant in the room of Southern fiction for a long time,” he says. “A Southern voice has a particular perspective of the history of this region and the ways we deal with the legacy of race and persistence of racism here. With [my novel Varina] I was trying to look at how that legacy lives on, that we as a nation have not been able to rid ourselves of the original sin of slavery.” 

Hub City plans to publish two titles each year as part of the Cold Mountain series and is open to agented submissions year-round and non-agented submissions in March, April, September, and October. Reid hopes the series will spotlight books that offer a new understanding of the region’s historical legacy. “The South has been through so much economic and racial turmoil,” she says. “The stories that cross my desk and interest me the most are the ones that have something new to say and show a new way forward.”               

 

Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; Salon; Vox; Cosmopolitan; Good; and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.

Charles Frazier

(Credit: Mark Humphrey)

Top Ten Retreats for Emerging Writers

by

Staff

2.13.19

Retreats can be a vital source of inspiration and support for writers at any stage of their careers. But for those just starting out, an opportunity to take some time away from daily life and devote a few days (or weeks, or months) to writing—to develop and deepen one’s practice, to workshop new pieces, to learn about the publishing industry, and to make lifelong friendships and professional connections—can be invaluable. The following ten retreats, workshop programs, conferences, and festivals are geared especially toward emerging writers.

Cave Canem Retreat 
Cave Canem offers a weeklong retreat for emerging poets of African descent, held annually in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The retreat includes workshops, craft talks, readings, and time to write. Tuition is $1,050; the fee for lodging and meals is $590. Scholarships are available based on need. Application fee: $20. Typical deadline: December 21. Cave Canem, 20 Jay Street, Suite 310-A, Brooklyn, NY 11201. (718) 858-0000. www.cavecanempoets.org

Emerging Poets Fellowship Program at Poets House 
Poets House offers ten fellowships from March to June for emerging poets living in New York City. Each fellow receives a $500 honorarium, a $100 travel stipend, and access to weekly workshops, mentoring sessions, craft discussions with visiting poets, and other events at Poets House, located in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City neighborhood. There is no application fee. Typical deadline: December 1. Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282. (212) 431-7920. poetshouse.org

Hub City Writers Project 
The Hub City Writers Project offers two fifteen-week residencies each year at the Writers House in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for emerging poets and prose writers who are pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing or who have completed an undergraduate or graduate degree in creative writing within the past five years. Residents are provided with lodging and work space in a historic downtown cottage, as well as a $650 monthly stipend in exchange for community service with Hub City Press or Hub City Bookshop. Application fee: $30. Typical deadline: April 15. Hub City Writers Project, 186 West Main Street, Spartanburg, SC 29306. (864) 557-9349. www.hubcity.org/residencies

Jack Jones Retreat 
The third annual Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat for emerging women poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers of color will be held October 26 through November 8 at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The retreat offers time to write as well as daily master classes and meetings with agents, editors, and women in publishing to promote networking, learning, and engagement. Residents are provided with full tuition, private lodging, writing space, and all meals. Application fee: $35. Deadline: April 20. Jack Jones Literary Arts, P.O. Box 291672, Los Angeles, CA 90029. www.jackjonesliteraryarts.com

Kimbilio Retreat
The Kimbilio Retreat for emerging African American fiction writers will be held July 21 through July 27 at Southern Methodist University in Taos, New Mexico. The retreat offers workshops, craft classes, lectures, readings, and time to write. The cost of lodging and meals ranges from $350 to $700. There is no application fee. Deadline: March 15. www.kimbiliofiction.com

Kundiman Retreat 
The Kundiman Asian American Workshop Retreat is held annually in June at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx in New York City. The retreat features poetry and fiction workshops, one-on-one mentoring, manuscript consultations, and a public reading. Tuition, which includes lodging and meals, is $375. Application fee: $25. Typical deadline: January 15. Kundiman, 229 West 109th Street, Suite 22, New York, NY 10025. 
www.kundiman.org

Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices 
The Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices is held annually in August or September at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. The retreat offers weeklong intensive workshops in poetry, fiction, genre fiction, and nonfiction for LGBTQ writers, along with opportunities to meet publishing industry professionals and build a strong community of peers. The cost of the retreat is $1,650, which includes room and board. Application fee: $25. Typical deadline: February 1. Lambda Literary Foundation, 811 West 7th St, 12th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90017. (213) 277-5755. 
www.lambdaliterary.org

Starry Night Retreat 
Starry Night Retreat offers one- to eight-week residencies from May through September and from November through March to emerging poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers in New Mexico. Residents are provided with private lodging, shared studio space, and access to a communal courtyard. The cost of the residency is $900 per week. Financial aid is available. There is no application fee. Admissions are made on a rolling basis. Starry Night Retreat, 718 Van Patten Street, Truth or Consequences, NM 87901. www.starrynightretreat.com

VONA/Voices of Our Nations Workshop
The VONA/Voices of Our Nations Foundation offers one- to two-day workshops for poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers of color, held in various locations throughout the year, including New York City, New Orleans, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The 2019 program will feature workshops with Faith Adiele, Daniel José Older, Shay Youngblood, and others. The cost of the workshops ranges from $125 to $450. Registration is first come, first served. www.vonacommunity.org

Writefest: A Festival For Emerging Writers
Writefest: A Festival For Emerging Writers will be held from May 27 through June 2 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The festival features workshops in poetry and short prose,  as well as presentations, critique sessions, editor panels, author readings, and a literary journal fair. The cost of the conference ranges from $95 for a day pass to $495 for a full-event pass. Student discounts are available. Registration is first come, first served. Writefest, 2000A Edwards Street, Suite 212, Silver Street Studios, Houston, TX, 77001. www.writefesthouston.com 

Some Room to Breathe: A Conversation in Praise of Quiet Books

by

Leesa Cross-Smith

4.11.18

As part of her research into the pleasures of reading and writing quiet books, for her essay “Some Room to Breathe: In Praise of Quiet Books,” which appears in the May/June 2018 issue, novelist Leesa Cross-Smith spoke with fellow author Silas House, whose novel A Parchment of Leaves she holds up as one of her favorite quiet books. What follows is Cross-Smith’s interview with House, which she conducted earlier this year.

Do you set out to write quiet books? And what do you think about calling them quiet books? Is that a label you would ever apply to your own work?
I don’t think I set out to write those, but to me good literature examines the way the biggest moments of life happens in the quiet moments. I think the characters I create tend to be quiet observers, people who might lead quiet lives but are very sensory. I love the idea of examining what some might think of as “small, quiet lives.” To me, those are the most interesting people. I certainly wouldn’t mind that label being applied to my work. I think that “quiet” is often thought of as a negative in our culture but actually it is actually a quality we need more of in our world.

Do you enjoy reading quiet books?
I much prefer introspection to explosions. I want to live with characters through those quiet moments. That’s where we get to know them the best. One of my favorite books is Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, mostly because of how quiet and slow it is. Despite the quiet stillness, however, we are experiencing great drama through the main character’s longings. It is exquisite.

Are you a person who enjoys the quiet in general? Do you seek it out? Has that changed in your heart, in our current, vitriolic political climate? I always avoided the noise before but even more now!
The older I get the more quiet I become, I think. I grew up in a very communal house where people were always bursting in to tell epic tales or to sing songs. My childhood home was sort of a community center. I think that led to me being someone who craves the quiet but also someone who can’t go very long without interaction. I love being alone and being quiet but I also love a dance party with thirty people packed into our living room. But quiet is absolutely essential for me as a writer. The best thing I ever do for my writing is to take a walk alone in the woods behind our house. Nothing else gets my writing juices flowing so well. And yes, I think that I absolutely need more quiet in our current fractured world. I’ve made my circle of people much smaller and I look at social media far less. Speaking of which, there are few things more silent than scrolling through a newsfeed but Lord, it is so loud. It will drive a person crazy if they do it too much without seeking stillness.

How does the quiet inform your process? Do you need a quiet space inside or out in nature to write? (I love how you describe landscapes, the sky, etc. Do you need extra time and space to be out in nature to do this? To be able to describe it so beautifully and perfectly in new ways?)
The biggest part of my writing process is going for walks. Usually in the woods, but even if I’m in the city I can go inside my own head and become still the best if I’m walking and observing. I wrote my first three books with babies on my lap or at my feet so I don’t really need a lot of quiet during the actual act of writing but in preparation I need stillness, I need the woods. I spend a lot of time in the woods, down by the creek. Even though I’m not physically putting words on the page, that’s where I get the most of my writing done. Whenever there is a scene of nature in my books, I go out and experience that. In Parchment, for example, there’s a scene where Vine is picking blackberries and she gets hot and sits down in the creek with her clothes on. I did the same thing, to totally capture that experience, from the thorns biting into her hands while picking berries to the heaviness of my clothes when I walked out of the creek. I call that “spiritual research” and it allows me to go far deeper with my characters than I’d be able to otherwise.

 

Leesa Cross-Smith is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018) and Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). She lives in Kentucky. Her essay “Some Room to Breathe: In Praise of Quiet Books” appears in the May/June 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Listen to Cross-Smith read an excerpt from that essay in the latest episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast. 

Leesa Cross-Smith, author of the novel Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, March), and Silas House, whose sixth novel, Southernmost, is forthcoming in June from Algonquin Books.

Episode 19: Leslie Jamison, Carmen Giménez Smith, Jenny Xie & More

Related Reading: 

May/June 2018

Summary: 

Our annual Writing Contests Issue features over 100 contests with no entry fees, a look at the money behind free contests, a special report on extended deadlines, and tips for smart contest entries; interviews with nonfiction writer Leslie Jamison, poet and activist Carmen Giménez Smith, novelist and critic Laila Lalami, and Library of America editorial director John Kulka; plus audiobook options for writers; a defense of quiet books; writing prompts; and more. 

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In the nineteenth episode of Ampersand, editor in chief Kevin Larimer and senior editor Melissa Faliveno preview the May/June 2018 issue, featuring over 100 contests with no entry fees, a look at the money behind free contests, a special report on extended deadlines, and tips for smart contest entries. The episode also features readings by two authors who are featured in the new issue, Leslie Jamison and Carmen Giménez Smith; an excerpt of an essay in praise of quiet books by Leesa-Cross Smith; a poem by Jenny Xie from her debut collection, Eye Level; and more.

00:01 Leslie Jamison reads an excerpt from her new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath.

01:17 The cohosts explore the sticky-note lexicon that is growing on the edges of Kevin’s computer monitor. The collection of “words that are not words but should be words” includes liminary (“a person in the middle, in transition, of the in-between; not yet a luminary”) and préage (“the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of how much editorial faith one has in the producer of said projects”), plus a few specifically coined for the current Writing Contests Issue, such as submaster, or supermit (“to send an application, proposal, or piece of work to an editor with purpose, power, and pride”).

11:22 “If I had to say where my drinking began, which first time began it, I might say it started with my first blackout, or maybe the first time I sought blackout, the first time I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life.” Leslie Jamison reads from her new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, published by Little, Brown in early April. In the current issue, contributor Michele Filgate asks Jamison, whose first book was a novel, The Gin Closet, what she is drawn to in nonfiction. “Part of what feels freeing about nonfiction is that you are working from the infinite world. That is honestly how the world feels to me: infinite, which is not to say that it’s always perfect or easy.”

 

17:37 Kevin and Melissa talk to star fact-checker Nadia Ahmad, the current Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine, about the importance of finding and confirming the truth in this “fake-news, post-fact world.” Nadia points out one of the facts she checked in the current issue: a reference to a Peruvian poetry movement from the eighties called Kloaka, which Nadia says is often compared to the Beat movement of the fifties. We did not know that. Lucky for us, Nadia knows.

21:57 Poet, editor, professor, and critic Carmen Giménez Smith, who was interviewed for the new issue by contributing editor Rigoberto González, reads a poem from her new collection, Cruel Futures, published this month by City Lights Books. “My belly triggers memories of the living and the dead. My belly is a good armrest for texting. I like my belly because all female bodies are intoxicating terrains” —from “Liberate Me.”

 

26:15 The cohosts discuss one of the pieces in the current issue’s special section—an investigation of extended deadlines. In “Two More Weeks to Submit! The Question of Extended Deadlines,” former editorial fellow Maya C. Popa takes a look at this common and, for some, thorny practice: “Whatever the reason a sponsor might extend a deadline—whether for a contest, a reading period, or a fellowship—one can hardly imagine a room full of suited, greedy editors or administrators laughing raucously as the twenty-five-dollar fees roll in,” she writes. “Still, the lack of transparency that often accompanies deadline extensions can leave the motivations of a contest sponsor up to the writer’s imagination.” Read Popa’s article and let us know what you think by sending an e-mail to editor@pw.org.

27:37 “In a noisy, confusing world where so many people love to constantly scream their opinions as loudly and as quickly as they can on social media, I am drawn to longer works that take their time. Ideas and situations that give me room to think.” Novelist Leesa Cross-Smith reads the first section of her essay in the new issue, “Some Room to Breathe: In Praise of Quiet Books.” As part of her research into the pleasures of reading and writing quiet books, Leesa Cross-Smith spoke with fellow author Silas House, whose novel A Parchment of Leaves she holds up as one of her favorite quiet books. Read their conversation here.

33:50 Yet another former editorial fellow, Jenny Xie, now an award-winning debut poet whose debut collection, Eye Level, won the Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets, reads “Invisible Relations,” from her new book. “Far off, you are being stitched into a storyline in the smooth lobe of another’s mind.” 

35:50 Kevin and Melissa prepare to do a little préage for the summer months, in all of their disgusting humanity. (Seriously, supermit some words that aren’t words but should be words so we don’t feel alone in this languagery.)

 

Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast is a production of Poets & Writers, Inc., and is edited and mixed by Melissa Faliveno. Music for this episode is provided by Podington Bear, Kevin MacLeod, Ryan Little, the Vivisectors, Ikebe Shakedown, and Planet Wardo. Comments or suggestions? E-mail ampersand@pw.org.

Some Room to Breathe: In Praise of Quiet Books

by

Leesa Cross-Smith

4.11.18

Quiet books are often misread, misunderstood, or, sadly, missed altogether. If a book is labeled quiet in a review or in literary conversation, an author and her readers will likely see it as an insult—sharp criticism of some deep-rooted flaw in the writer’s storytelling abilities. But for me, someone who leans toward anxiety and is easily overstimulated, startled, and stressed out—especially these days—quiet books offer a calming space, a place of rescue. I’ve been told more than once that my writing is quiet, and I always take it as a high compliment because I know how much I long for moments of rest and reflection in the books I read, the movies I watch, the places I go, and the people I encounter along the way. I suspect I’m not alone. 

In my debut novel, Whiskey & Ribbons, a widow and her brother-in-law are snowed in together during a blizzard, forced to deal with the complications of their newish romantic feelings for each other after the sudden loss of someone they both loved ferociously. Throughout the book they circle each other, with their intense grief and their confusing feelings, from the warmth and comfort of their home. A lot happens—loud secrets, loud jealousy, loud emotions, loud sexual tension, loud love—but there is also quiet. It is a quiet book, and that’s just the way I want it.

In a noisy, confusing world where so many people love to constantly scream their opinions as loudly and as quickly as they can on social media, I am drawn to longer works that take their time. Ideas and situations that give me room to think. Characters and plots that require my patience and pay off in real, satisfying ways. I don’t like to be shocked or surprised on every page when I’m reading. I don’t necessarily need a big twist or reveal to be entertained. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good story—I’m not defending the boring and pointless—but I will always believe there is treasure to be found in small, quiet moments. In the rambling half-asleep conversations right before bed. The hushed confessionals on the way home from the awkward dinner party. A silent glance between lifelong partners. The whisper. 

There’s a song by Feist called “Gatekeeper” in which she sings, “They tried to stay in from the cold and wind / making love and making their dinner,” and I think of that often when I’m writing. I like writing about those simple, everyday things we do to get through our lives. 

I do some of my best writing away from my noisy laptop. I walk two to three miles in the morning at least five times a week. I usually walk alone and enjoy my solitude. It’s where I get my energy. I pause to take notes on my phone if I see something that sparks my heart. I walk in the rain and I walk in the cold. I walk when spring is just beginning to wake the flowers. I walk when the first leaves begin to turn and fall. I make note of these things, these cycles, and I remember them when I sit down again to write. I remember how important it is to my mental health to take the time to look around, to take the time to look up. 

After my walks, when I’m in that calming, comfortable writing space of my own, I can re-create that same sort of space for my characters in my books and stories. A room of their own. Most of the time I write in my quiet bedroom, on my made-up bed by the window. We have several huge trees on our property in Kentucky, and I love being by the window so I can watch the birds, the squirrels. I’m a birder, and birding requires quiet. Stillness. I can open my window when it’s warm enough and hear the birdsong, the wind chimes, the rustle of leaves. I can also see my garden from the window. The birdbath, my peonies, tomato plants and marigolds, the weeping willow at the edge of the yard. I have an essential oil diffuser that I fill with drops of lavender and lemon, sometimes rosemary and lime. Peaceful, quiet smells. I rarely listen to music when I’m writing—preferring instead the quiet around me—but when I do, I listen to period-piece soundtracks or classical music. Far From the Madding Crowd, Atonement, and Pride and Prejudice are some of my favorites. I also love Bach’s cello suites, Debussy, Mozart, Chopin. Music without lyrics but heavy with mood.

I have always craved quiet spaces, avoided loud noises and enormous crowds, but even more so in this mind-numbing, vitriolic political climate, where there is more than enough anxiety to go around. I work even harder to protect those quiet places in my real life and in my heart as well. I rely on writing and reading fiction that counters the inevitable anxiety of being human with some quiet—some room to breathe. Quietness can be a beautifully defiant radical act. Deliberately slow cooking, slow living, taking time to be grateful and to absorb things and aggressively avoiding the need to quickly comment on everything—these things spill over into both my writing practice and the stories and worlds I create.

One of my favorite quiet books is C. E. Morgan’s All the Living (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). The short novel takes place on a Kentucky tobacco farm during a devastating drought. There’s a small cast of characters (another thing I love in both books and movies). It’s a slim, sexy book full of summer heat and desire. Sadness and grief, too. The main characters are learning to love each other properly and learning to foster healing in each other as they tangle and tend to the violent, wild land that has been left to them. Morgan writes some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. Sentences like “The smell of the hillside was redolent with honeysuckle and grass and some of the heavy tartness of ripe pears,” and “The oven’s heat pressed her like a hand from behind,” and “Aloma shrank behind the piano wall, sat there hunched in her ill ease, unable to reconcile herself to the tenderheartedness of mountain boys.” I love All the Living because it’s allowed to be the book it is. There’s no sharp hook here. It’s a tender story about a woman blooming into her best self and a man who’s trying to be better. All the Living takes the patient form of the topic it discusses. A farmer and his crops, waiting for rain. A woman, aching. There is a hilarious kitchen scene in All the Living that involves some underpants, an argument, and a hellacious desire to commit rooster murder. Lots of sexy, funny, exciting, suspenseful, surprising things can and do happen in quiet novels, but the reader also has time to let them soak in. 

Another quiet book I love is A Parchment of Leaves (Algonquin Books, 2002) by Silas House. It is also set in Kentucky, and like Morgan, House describes things in a gentle, quiet way that never for one moment left me bored. I read it in a matter of hours, not moving much from my chair. It wasn’t the twists and turns that kept me reading, although there are some of those. It was the language of daily life. Making dinners, nights around the fire, the relationships among women, the mothering, the sun setting and rising again. House takes his time and writes about the sky and how it changes from moment to moment, the smells. He writes, “Today the world smelled like honeysuckle and clean water. The shade was so cool and fresh that anybody could have laid down right on the grass and went straight to sleep.” And he writes, “The night was so black that it looked like you could cut a patch out of it with a kitchen knife.” I love those descriptions, that feeling like I’m experiencing every little bit, no matter how small. Loud books can do this well too, of course, but not quite in the same way, and I was pleased to learn that House agrees.

“Good literature examines the way the biggest moments of life happen in the quiet moments,” he told me. “I think the characters I create tend to be quiet observers, people who might lead quiet lives but are very sensory. I love the idea of examining what some might think of as ‘small, quiet lives.’ To me, those are the most interesting people. I certainly wouldn’t mind that label being applied to my work. I think that quiet is often thought of as a negative in our culture, but actually it is a quality we need more of in our world.” 

I asked House about his writing process to see if, like mine, it included proactive periods of piece and quiet. “The biggest part of my writing process is going for walks, usually in the woods,” he said. “I wrote my first three books with babies on my lap or at my feet, so I don’t really need a lot of quiet during the actual act of writing, but in preparation I need stillness, I need the woods. Even though I’m not physically putting words on the page, that’s where I get most of my writing done. Whenever there is a scene of nature in my books, I go out and experience that. In Parchment, for example, there’s a scene in which Vine is picking blackberries and she gets hot and sits down in the creek with her clothes on. I did the same thing, to totally capture that experience, from the thorns biting into her hands while picking berries to the heaviness of my clothes when I walked out of the creek. I call that ‘spiritual research,’ and it allows me to go far deeper with my characters than I’d be able to otherwise.”

Like House I wrote my first book, Every Kiss a War, with a child or two on my lap or underneath my desk. I vividly remember feeding my son crackers as he sat at my feet while I was finishing the story collection. I was used to the noise, the distraction—at times delightful, at times out of control—because it was the real chaos of being a stay-home mother of two small children. Now that my children are older, in school all day, I have reclaimed my quiet spaces. I don’t require them in order to work; I prefer them. I wrote Whiskey & Ribbons over a long stretch of both quiet and loud seasons of my life, but I wrote the final draft in the quiet of my bedroom. And I set the book during a blizzard—the characters snowed in, unable to venture far—to force stillness and reflection. I was inspired to dig deeper and allow them to slowly explore their truth, their grief, their lives next to each other as they become a new family.

Quiet books and movies can mean something different to everyone. When I use the term “quiet” I mean “not constantly stressing me out.” I mean books that are comforting to me when I’m worried about things or when the world is too much. I enjoy quiet period pieces in which it takes the lovers an entire year to reunite, but I know everything will be okay. I love movies in which there are only two or three characters I have to keep up with. I love the little leaning-in conversations in hotel lobbies over dark red wine that may not necessarily reveal every secret in the characters’ hearts but that let us get to know them better. Slowly. The sexual tension left to crackle, the words tickling the tips of tongues. 

It stresses me out when I read a book and there’s so much happening on every page, I feel like I have to put it down. A death every chapter, an emergency hospitalization, a missing child—all these heavy, anxiety-inducing things that don’t allow me to escape the real world at all. Reading those things makes me feel like I’m simply reading the news. Yes, I want truth, but also I want beauty and slowing down, especially in my fiction, in the worlds I create. Because I am the one creating those worlds. And since I have so little control over the things that happen in the world outside of my personal life, writing quiet stories and quiet books and developing my own quiet writing practice helps me deal with a loud world even when I’m away from my computer or books. I can still go there in my mind, remembering the sweet little scenes I’ve read and worked on. Remembering the ways characters and stories can teach us all how to take a break from reality when we need one. That’s why so many of us read. That’s why so many of us write.

While researching quiet novels, I came across a group of cancer patients, warriors who pass book titles around that are a comfort for them. Books that feel safe to read during chemotherapy or in waiting rooms or super-stressful times. I’d love for someone to stumble across my books in an airport or a doctor’s office and feel like they were safe, feel like the story was soothing to them in some way. I’d be honored to know that some readers consider Whiskey & Ribbons to be a quiet novel they can return to, one that whispers. I’d be honored to know that readers feel like they truly get to know the characters in my book because they were able to spend so much quiet time with them. The same way most of us feel like we get to know one another better when we share quiet space and listen to what others are saying. Really listen. I choose quiet and tenderness in my work because the world is loud and hard enough.

As an introvert, I get my energy from quiet and solitude, and those are things I look for in the books I choose to read, too. Here are a few more of my favorite quiet novels: 

Call Me by Your Name (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) by André Aciman 
The Mothers (Riverhead Books, 2016) by Brit Bennett 
Circle of Friends (Delacorte Press, 1990) by Maeve Binchy 
The Past (Harper, 2016) by Tessa Hadley 
Lions (Black Cat, 2016) by Bonnie Nadzam
The Blue Hour (Counterpoint, 2017) by Laura Pritchett
Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing, 2016) by Teri Vlassopoulos 

These are books that lean toward the deep-blue night-whispers, the pauses in conversation, the reverent, the contemplative. I like having the space to take a breath and process what has just happened, what is surely (and not-so-surely) to come. And while I understand the desire to read and write a gripping page-turner that you can’t put down, I am writing in defense of the books that handle grief and brutality and the rough beasts of life in tender ways. Books that don’t feel the need to scream. Books that can whisper while still telling their stories fully and beautifully. Books that can be, especially upon the comfort of rereading, safe places in an unsafe world. Books that let us linger. Books that recognize and reveal the storms raging around us but also let us rest in the eye of it for just a little longer.

 

Leesa Cross-Smith is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018) and Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). She lives in Kentucky.

Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

by

Jonathan Vatner

2.15.17

In March of last year Pat Conroy, the best-selling South Carolina author of such lyrical, semiautobiographical Southern epics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died of pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after, his closest friends established a nonprofit writers center and museum to pay tribute to the author’s legacy. Officially launched in February, the Pat Conroy Literary Center offers a growing roster of workshops, readings, lectures, book clubs, and special events to nourish a vibrant creative community in Conroy’s adoptive hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. “We want the center to be a haven for writers and readers, a nexus point in Southern literary life,” says Jonathan Haupt, the center’s executive director.

The idea for the center started with Marly Rusoff, Conroy’s friend of forty years and his agent for the past decade. At Conroy’s funeral, someone suggested erecting a statue in Beaufort; the idea was quickly dismissed. “My reaction was, ‘My God, Pat would hate that,’” Rusoff recalls. “What you need is a writing center, helping people the way he wanted to be helped when he was a young writer.” Conroy self-published his first book, The Boo, in 1970, and when Houghton Mifflin offered him $7,500 for his memoir The Water Is Wide, he naively replied that he couldn’t possibly raise that much money to print the book. Once he established himself in the publishing industry, Conroy dedicated himself to launching the careers of talented writers, offering advice, encouragement, and critique—not to mention effusive blurbs. Rusoff sees the center as an extension of this lifelong pursuit. 

Rusoff herself has experience in building such organizations: In the seventies, her Minneapolis bookstore became the site of the Loft, now one of the nation’s largest nonprofit literary centers. For the Pat Conroy center’s headquarters, Rusoff and her partner, Mihai Radulescu, rented a house in downtown Beaufort, owned by the mayor and his brother. The house is not unlike the one described in The Great Santini—a columned antebellum Charleston-style affair, rocking chairs on the porch and all—and it’s within walking distance of Tidalholm, the mansion used in the film. The center held a soft opening in October with a rotating exhibition of Conroy materials, including his writing desk, his father’s flight jacket, and the handwritten opening pages of The Prince of Tides.

Haupt and the board, chaired by Jane T. Upshaw, the distinguished chancellor emerita of the University of South Carolina in Beaufort, have organized the center’s programming around Conroy’s two central lessons for writers. “He believed that the best thing for being a better writer is to be a better reader,” Haupt says. “We want to honor that with an elaborate book-club model to help people read more intensely, more deeply, and with greater empathy. To writers, he said to go deeper. When you think you’re there, you’re not even close.” 

In keeping with this second lesson, the center invites local instructors and visiting writers to offer craft workshops focused on character development as well as talks and master classes. The faculty includes Bernie Schein and his daughter Maggie Schein, both loyal friends of Conroy’s; New York Times best-selling authors Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe; and South Carolinian novelist Bren McClain. 

The center will sponsor numerous special events in Beaufort and Charleston. The Watering Hole, a group of Southern poets of color, will be teaching workshops in August at the Penn Center on nearby St. Helena Island, where Conroy is buried and where he first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A series called “Evenings of Story and Song,” also planned for this year, will blend literature and live music. And the center will offer guided tours of Beaufort and Charleston, the two places most steeped in Conroy lore. Haupt also plans to extend the center’s reach by sponsoring book festivals and other events throughout the South.

The center’s signature event is the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, which will be held October 20 to October 22 in Beaufort and features readings, performances, panels, screenings, and workshops. Haupt created the festival in 2015 as a seventieth birthday celebration for Conroy, who attended nearly all the sessions. In 2016, the second annual event was held in his memory. “That first festival was such a gift to us,” Haupt says. “No one knew, not even Pat, that he was sick.”

Those who can’t make it to Beaufort can read and contribute to Porch Talk, the center’s new blog, which is hosted by writer Janis Owens and features essays on craft and publishing. “It’s not a shrine to Pat,” Haupt says of the blog. “We’d love writers at all levels of their career to participate, to make writing and publishing a little less mysterious.”

For novelist Cassandra King, Conroy’s widow and the center’s honorary chair, the new institution honors his memory perfectly. Conroy was a voracious reader and rapt listener, King says, generous to a fault. “I’m thrilled that we’re able to keep his spirit going in this way,” she says. “I just know he would be proud.” 

 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Publishing Books About Grief

by

Gila Lyons

10.10.18

One of the most painful aspects of grief is how isolated one can feel when experiencing it. Literature has often comforted the bereaved, provided solace and wisdom to those suffering, and aided readers in the painstaking journey of recovery. To ensure that this continues, Akashic Books, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, New York, has created an imprint especially for books focused on grief, loss, and recovery.

Best-selling author Ann Hood will head the new imprint, named Gracie Belle, after Hood’s daughter, who died at age five and is the subject of her memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (Norton, 2008). Hood, who has taught writing for many years and in June launched a low-residency MFA program at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, noticed that many of her writing students had excellent manuscripts about grief, loss, and recovery but weren’t able to find a publisher for them. “The rejections pretty much said that it’s just too sad and no one will want to read them,” Hood says. “Well, of course it’s sad—but I think a good grief memoir not only helps others who are suffering loss, but also gives hope that they can get to the other side.”

Hood says that most titles about grief on the market are written by health-care professionals and serve more as self-help guides and resources for readers looking for tools to cope. Gracie Belle’s books, meanwhile, will consist of good narrative writing about what grief feels like. “These are stories of survival and incredible spiritual and psychological resilience,” says Johnny Temple, Akashic’s publisher and editor in chief. “An audience that needs these books needs them more than the average reader needs the average novel. It’s more psychologically urgent. My needing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I do feel I need, is different than someone who has lost a child needing Comfort by Ann Hood. They read to cope with reality, to stay alive, and to remember why life is worth living.”

The imprint’s first title, the memoir Now You See the Sky by Catharine H. Murray, will be published in November. Of the book, which recounts the loss of Murray’s six-year-old son to cancer, Hood says, “A good grief memoir like [Catharine’s] not only takes us through the grief journey, but reminds us that part of that journey is love and ultimately hope.” 

Although Gracie Belle is not currently open for submissions, Hood plans to publish one or two memoirs a year. She says in the future she may consider expanding to poetry and fiction that is “well-written, faces grief head-on, and offers hope and affirmation.” For now Hood’s goal is to publish work that helps readers and authors feel less alone. “Literature helps people through all kinds of experiences and emotions,” she says. “In times of joy and celebration as well as times of great sadness, literature reminds us what it is like to be human.”           

 

Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for the New York Times, Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Good, and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.

Ann Hood

(Credit: Catherine Sebastian)

How Deep This Grief: Wrestling With Writing As Therapy

by

Ian Stansel

8.16.17

I have always found the idea of “self-expression” to be rather solipsistic, embarrassing even. It smacks of arrogance, this idea that I would have to express all the special wonder that exists inside me, and that people might want to listen. Maybe this comes from spending the majority of my life in the Midwest, the land of self-effacement. Maybe it comes from being raised, for the most part, by a single mother who, through my formative adolescent years, took care of three children and her aging father. When food or shelter isn’t a given, you tend to develop a quick eye-roll reflex when notions of individual creativity come up.

And yet from an early age I also felt the desire to write, to tell stories. It wasn’t until college that I began to figure out how to reconcile this seeming contradiction, when a writing teacher, the essayist Joe Bonomo, scrawled a quote from V. S. Naipaul on the board: “No one cares for your tragedy until you can sing about it.” This was a moment of revelation as huge as any I’d experienced in my then nascent writing life. The words on the blackboard transformed the idea of writing from self-expression into something I was much more comfortable with: a job.

A few years later, in graduate school, I had the pleasure and sometimes terror of studying for a semester with Frank Conroy, famed writer and infamous writing teacher. Frank’s instructional antics were legendary: tearing up student manuscripts in workshop, making people cry. By the time I took his class, he was nearing the end of his life, and it might have been that he’d lost some of the fire he’d had in his prime. He was still Frank, though, and he’d still go after a piece, sometimes directly and sometimes more slyly, lulling the nerve-racked writer into a false sense of literary success before going in for the kill. 

But what often, in the heat of the moment, seemed like random attacks from our instructor now, in retrospect, make perfect sense. I see now that the thing that consistently raised Frank’s ire, regardless of style or subject matter, was writing that struck him as lazy or self-indulgent. Frank was, I believe, a reader, first and foremost. Even more than a writer, he was a reader. And I believe he felt personally insulted by lazy, self-indulgent work.

And this is why if you’d asked me even five years ago whether or not one should use writing as a form of therapy, I’d have replied with a quick and certain No. Or, more specifically, I’d have said one could use writing as therapy, but it wouldn’t be real writing. It would be journaling, an unedited and unmediated pouring-out of feelings and memories. It wouldn’t be anything anyone else should want to read.

What I learned from my teachers and from my own innate sense of the world is that storytelling is more about the reader than the writer. If the writer is too focused on self-pleasure, self-improvement, or self-anything, then the reader gets left behind. I was certain that writing should be more about breaking or lifting the reader’s heart than, say, mending my own heart.

And then I lost somebody.

What writing had become for me, horses had always been for my sister, Kelly. She rode from an early age and grew to become a trainer, teaching kids and adults, even taking an opportunity to become certified in therapeutic riding in order to work with autistic children. Horses were her life, her passion. Her car was forever festooned with errant lengths of hay and alfalfa. Her jeans and boots were caked in mud from the pasture. Her whole life, it seemed, carried the odor of leather and saddle soap and just a sweet hint of manure. The way I’d entertained fantasies about winning the Pulitzer Prize, she imagined herself taking gold in the equestrian events at the Olympics.

One afternoon in May 2014 my wife was at the ob-gyn, pregnant with our second child. I was at home with our first kid, who was napping. My phone rang and my stepfather’s number registered on the screen. He didn’t call me often, but it wasn’t unheard-of, and I didn’t think much of it. I said hello, asked him how he was. He hesitated.

Kelly, he told me, had suffered a brain aneurysm and was being helicoptered to a hospital outside of Chicago. We hung up and I called my wife, who was still in the middle of her exam. The doctor had left the room and so she answered the phone. I told her what happened. She got dressed and left immediately. 

We lived in Cincinnati at the time, and while my wife was on her way home I packed a bag, getting ready for a seven-hour drive back to Illinois and an indefinite stay. After that I Googled “brain aneurysm.” I knew generally what it was, of course, but I was looking for something else, something beyond the mechanics of it. I was looking for something that said, essentially, “She’s going to be fine.” I found no such reassurance.

I stopped for gas somewhere in Indiana and called my mother to get an update. There was a long, terrible pause. It isn’t good, she finally told me. “Just get here.” I hung up and cried and watched all the people entering and exiting the gas station fifteen feet from my windshield.

I arrived sometime around 9 PM. The hospital lobby—a towering steel-and-glass space—was abandoned save for a person stationed at the information desk. I don’t recall a thing about this person, not even if it was a man or woman, but I do remember appreciating the matter-of-fact way I was directed to the ICU. No chitchat. No sympathetic smiles. Just the directions I needed. I ran up a long ramp to a bank of elevators.

The author’s sister, Kelly, with her daughter, Brooke, at Fox Chase Farms in Maple Park, Illinois, in 2012.

Three years later, hardly a day goes by when I don’t picture Kelly in that ICU bed, though the image itself is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. The tubes, yes, they are there. There was a covering on her head, though I can’t remember what exactly it looked like. And there was some kind of inflatable plastic thing over most of her body, but its actual form I can’t quite recall. I both fear and long for the details I am missing. 

I do know my brother-in-law was there. We hugged and cried into each other’s shoulders. I probably asked for the latest from the doctors, but damn if I can recollect what he told me. At some point in the night I went to the ICU waiting room and lay down. There were others there, most of them friends of a man who’d been brought in after a motorcycle accident. More of his friends came in. One woman kept repeating the story, what she knew and how she’d heard. But, they all said with relief, he was going to be all right. Thank God. 

I hated them. I hated their stupid voices and I hated their stupid friend who was stupid enough to ride a motorcycle without a helmet on. He’s going to be all right. Dandy. But, I wanted to say to them, my sister is not going to be all right, so would you kindly shut the hell up and let me live out this horror in silence?

I remember my anger at those people, I suppose, because it was the one thing that managed to reveal itself, ever so briefly, from behind the all-encompassing fog of my sorrow. Grief, after all, happens to us without our having any say about when or how it might manifest. Anger, though: Anger is a choice. Anger is pointed and focused. Anger gives us the semblance of control when it seems as if the world has been stripped of all meaning.

My sister died the next day. After a couple of hours filled with tears and paperwork and desperate embraces, my mother and I drove from the hospital to her house. In that hour we said little. What was there to say? What could I say to a woman who just lost her child? Nothing. I remember recognizing, though, in a moment of strange, detached clarity, that I was right then in the midst of the worst day of my life. I have no doubt some similar thought wound its way through my mother’s mind, too.

In the next few weeks and months, people suggested to me, usually subtly and indirectly, that I might write about Kelly. But to me the idea was beyond ludicrous: It was unthinkable. I had a book out, a story collection, but no tenure-track job, and so I was still in the manic CV-building phase, wherein I regarded nearly everything I wrote as a new line for prospective jobs. Publishing an essay about her would feel like cashing in on the loss of her. I refused to use the experience of her death as material.

At the time, I was working on a novel set during World War II. It was a large story, told in four parts. I had finished a draft of the first two parts, and the book was already more than three hundred pages long. This would be my first novel, and like many first-time novelists, I wanted to go big. I wanted to be that where-did-he-come-from writer, that writer who emerges from nowhere with a doorstop of a book, which of course also happens to be brilliant. 

But when, a few months after my sister’s death, I opened my laptop and clicked on the last draft of the book, I had no interest in continuing it. The sentences were either overwrought or flat and lifeless. The characters seemed like random collections of actions and thoughts. The story meandered. And worst, I couldn’t quite remember just what made me want to write it in the first place.

So I didn’t write anything for a while. I’m not sure how long. I taught classes. I probably read here and there. I know I cried a lot, and at seemingly random intervals, hiding around corners from my child and pregnant wife. 

A couple of months after Kelly’s death I had a chance to go to New York for a few days for a literary function and asked my brother to join me. We spent two days wandering around a city he knew far better than I did, and I was happy to play the tourist with him as my guide. We stayed with friends in Brooklyn and took the train into Manhattan each day, coming up with destinations as a formality, excuses to walk and walk and walk. The time together, so soon after we’d lost our other sibling, the third in our lifelong three, was surreal and terrible and beautiful. 

For those writers out there enduring the deepest of grief right now, I recommend going somewhere teeming with millions of people coming and going with absolutely no concern for the volcanoes of sadness erupting within you and laying waste to everything you thought was important. 

Those people are your readers.

No one cares for your tragedy until you can sing about it.

Over the years my sister would give me story ideas—the way people often do—most of which I can’t remember. I don’t fault myself for this. Ideas latch themselves to a writer with a mysterious magnetism. You don’t know why you write the stories you do.

One of the stories my sister proposed stuck with me, though. It had to do with two brothers, both of them horse trainers, caught in a feud. That was it, as I recall. It wasn’t a bad idea, but at the time it was easy to relegate it to the back of my mind. I didn’t have much interest in writing about horses or the horse world back then. And anyway, I had my Big World War II Novel to write.

Now, though, that novel seemed flabby and insignificant, polluted by my narcissistic dream of being the next big big-book writer. It had, in other words, become about me. Somewhere along the line, I’d left the reader behind.

Consumed with thoughts of Kelly, with the entirety of the rest of the world seeming utterly inconsequential, I found myself without a project. What can a writer do when the one thing your brain clings to is also the one thing you can’t write about?

Then one day I came back to the idea of the feuding brothers and it occurred to me that if I could not write about Kelly, I might be able to write for her. 

For a long time I’ve used people I know as avatars for my “ideal reader.” For one project it might be my mother. For another it is one of my aunts. (Always, it seems, my ideal reader is a woman and never another writer.) Now it would be my sister. I had the premise of the two horse trainers in a feud and started from there. My goal was simple: to write a book Kelly would love. It would be set in an area of Northern California where we’d spent part of our childhood. It would be a sort of Western, but within the English riding world. It would be free of literary allusions and other pompous posturing. It would develop those brothers she gave me but also be about women—mothers and daughters and girlfriends—who share unyielding bonds. And, most of all, it would be about horses, to whom Kelly dedicated so much of her life.

If I may be so reductive, there are two types of people in the world: those who get older and let go of the steel-hard rules they nurtured through their youth and those who build buttresses and reinforcements to support those rules. I find myself in the former camp. As a younger person you define yourself, in part, by all of your strongly held beliefs. I just can’t muster the energy anymore to argue for one way of living or working and against another. More important, I can’t muster the certainty. 

So I’ve been relaxing my rules lately. 

I never thought of the process of writing my novel as therapy, per se. But it gave me something to do with my grief. It helped me get outside of my own sadness and rediscover a sense of purpose in my days.

I still stand by my belief that writing should be more about the reader than the writer. But if there is some way for people to use writing—or painting or cooking or woodworking or anything—to help heal their own wounds, then so be it. Have at it. God bless. Do what you need to do. I’ll be right over here, hoping like hell it works. 

 

Ian Stansel is the author of the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the short story collection Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. He teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

A Space Odyssey of Healing: Brian Turner and the Interplanetary Acoustic Team

by

Philip Metres

7.13.18

If Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey gets a reboot, the soundtrack is ready: It’s 11 11 (Me Smiling) by Interplanetary Acoustic Team, the brainchild of Brian Turner, best known as the soldier poet whose bestselling Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005) was the first salvo of poetic responses to the Iraq War. Turner, who served in Bosnia-Herzegovina before his time in Iraq, went on to write a second book of poems, Phantom Noise (Alice James, 2010), and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country (W. W. Norton, 2014). His writing has garnered numerous awards, including fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Turner’s latest turn of creative expression is entirely different—and it has everything to do with love. In 2010 he married poet Ilyse Kusnetz; three years later, just after the publication of her second book, Small Hours (Truman State University Press, 2014), Kusnetz was diagnosed with cancer, and on September 13, 2016, at the age of fifty, she left this life. But through 11 11 (Me Smiling), Turner has found a way to hold what he can no longer in life—his wife, in her poems and in her voice. The spoken-word album features Kusnetz’s words, most of them sung or spoken by her, mostly from poetry readings she had participated in, and some in the voice of Turner and others—all set to a landscape of sound that forms a lyrical and narrative journey. 

I asked Turner more about this posthumous collaboration with his wife. 

Brian, can you talk about the genesis of the project—both in terms of your passion for playing music in general, and the particular sound of this record, which feels interplanetary, not quite of this world, something that Sun Ra would have done for a Kubrick movie?
I had a strong stammer as a child, and I recognize now that a wild freight train of language had no means of escaping from my head—and my attempts at speech derailed whenever I tried to speak. My family moved from the city of Fresno to Madera County while I was in elementary school, and that move proved crucial to my development as an artist in many ways. Our new home sat between cattle rangeland and grape vineyards on a flat kingdom of dirt. It was a solitary existence. I practiced the trumpet out in the back yard, phrasing musical figures over waves of dead grass that stretched for miles. 

That auditory landscape was as austere as the visual one, with a root note of silence. The end result is that I’m much more attuned to the auditory landscape than to the visual one. So it makes complete sense to me when you mention the cinematic quality of this album —as I find my way into story mostly through sound. 

I want to get to the deep heart’s core of this project. I read it as a tribute and a way of keeping your love of your late wife, Ilyse Kusnetz, alive. In her words that appear in the second song, “Cyborg 3.0: Implant,” it’s as if “you can change suffering by reworking it through the imagination.”
I was separated from the earth when the idea for this album came to me. I was on a plane flying somewhere over the southwest, flying toward the dusk. My life made no sense at all, as Ilyse had been killed by cancer just a few months earlier. I was desperate in so many ways—and one of those included simply wanting to hear her voice. I wanted—as I still do—to find any means to continue being alive with her. I wanted to keep making art, to keep our conversation going, to somehow cross into the wide expanse of the cosmos so that we might continue to love each other. 

I gathered all of the audio and video recordings of Ilyse that I could find. I then isolated conversations and poems connected in some way to what is, at its core, a very spiritual journey—though the surface level of the narration and soundscape seems focused on cybernetics, robots, computer code, and the uploading of human consciousness. 

Along the way, I was assisted by a number of other artists: Benjamin Kramer, who engineered the album and played bass and some keyboards; Jared Silvia, who was part of the core of the album, playing modular synth; and Sunil Yapa, also a novelist, who added soulful, gorgeous guitar work. As with most artistic projects, there were many hands in the making.

Listen to “Light Sketch,” the eighth track on 11 11 (Me Smiling):
 

 

One of the things that struck me about the track “A Fundamentally New Idea in Synthesis,” and indeed the whole album, is the element of joy in it, a primal “coming-into-being” delight that contrasts with the grief experience as I understand it. In that song, your spoken words reference the Big Bang (“here is where our heart-fires start”) and ends with the heartbeat of a baby in utero. And similarly, in “Islands in the Cosmos,” the flowing water sounds like clapping, as if the universe were cheering itself on. Can you talk about the longing to go back to the origins of creation here, and how that longing is connected to the elegiac occasion? 

Oh, I’m so glad you hear the clapping sound of the water! That’s spot on. To create that sound we took the sound of the audience clapping at the end of Ilyse’s book launch in 2014. I had this idea of transforming it into water somehow. I worked with Benjamin Kramer to layer that clapping and then we added effects to it until those cheering for Ilyse turned into a kind of waterfall, or cascade. In fact, whenever I’m at a literary event and people clap now, I hear the sound of water in it, as opposed to what I used to hear—a kind of echo of small arms fire. 

All of the words and lyrics on the album are Ilyse’s (except for a couple of short passages from British scientist Kevin Warwick in the first song). In “A Fundamentally New Idea in Synthesis” I’m reciting verses from one of Ilyse’s poems—“The Explosion Museum”—from her poetry collection Angel Bones, forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2019. I’m trying to learn from her. In a sense I’m trying to cheat death, to undermine the fixed station we normally assign to the dead by giving them a terminal spot on the historical record, a gravestone to mark the occasion…. I don’t know if any of my attempts work, but I’m doing my best to refuse the elegiac impulse even though it exists deep within me at physical and emotional levels. That is, I want to upend the final movement within elegiac structures—those that come to rest or a conclusion based in solace or consolation. Solace and consolation are not enough. 

Ilyse isn’t dead within me, and she isn’t dead within the world. I don’t claim to comprehend the universe or the possibility of an afterlife, but the similarities between birth and death are many. Each night we close our eyes and slip into the void of sleep, and afterward wake to discover the word now unfolding the day before us as the Earth travels through space at 67,000 miles per hour. My curiosity takes me to the nature of time itself. I want to explore the topography of space-time in the creative work I do. 

Of course, Ilyse was already doing that. We can hear it in the words she’s given us.  

That’s what I felt quite strongly throughout the work, that Ilyse’s words are almost imagining a posthumous existence. For example, in “Planetary Bird Engine” you include lines from her poem “Ideal City, Dream Sequence,” especially her transcendent ending:

but ahead, at the end of a narrow passageway
an eye-shaped aperture blossoms, expands—
all beyond its radiance invisible, composed of light,
and I wait, in the painted light, to step through.

Perhaps that was her poetic intuition, that she had a sense of mortality and what is beyond the mortal. In the final song, “Goodbye Earth/Goodbye Solar System,” there are echoes of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” but the vision is far more benign and kindly. After all, the title of the work, taken from Ilyse’s poem, “Before I Am Downloaded Into a Most Excellent Robot Body,” notes that “11 11 is me, smiling.” Do you want to talk about her spirit here, her embrace of that unknown future? 
I’m almost defeated from the outset by the very nature of verb tenses in English. We need to invent a new linguistic tool to express a wider range of temporal states, I think. Time out of time. That said, Ilyse was—and continues to be—incredibly brave and courageous. She realized the enormity of all that cancer was taking from her. Love. Beauty. Pain. Suffering. All of it. Her love for this world shines in the poems she’s left for us, and you can hear it in her voice when you listen to the album. 

Ilyse Kusnetz

 

For more information about 11 11 (Me, Smiling) by the Interplanetary Acoustic Team, visit www.interplanetaryacousticteam.com or follow along on Instagram, @interplanetary_acoustic_team.

 

Philip Metres has written ten books, including Sand Opera (2015) and The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018). Awarded the Lannan Fellowship and two Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. 

Brian Turner and his late wife, Ilyse Kusnetz.

Writing the Self: Some Thoughts on Words and Woe

by

Frank Bures

12.14.16

Growing up, I only knew that my grandma had been “sick.” Later I heard more, and learned that she had taken her own life. But it wasn’t until I started researching a book about culture-bound syndromes that I uncovered the fuller version: Late one night, in 1968, my grandma woke up, opened a bottle of barbiturates, swallowed them all, then climbed back into bed. The next morning my grandfather found her body next to his. She was fifty-six years old. They had been married since she was sixteen and he was nineteen.

At the time the doctors said she had a nervous breakdown, or sometimes that she was depressed. But that meant something different to the doctors than it meant to her family. And as I researched my book, it started to become clear that even today it probably means something different to everyone around the world.

Rates of depression vary widely. In Korea or Japan you have a one in fifty chance of having experienced major depression over the past twelve months, while in Brazil your chance is one in ten. Symptoms vary too. According to Handbook of Depression, a textbook on mood disorders, Koreans and Korean Americans experience manifestations that others would never consider related to depression: constipation, abdominal cramps, heartburn, stiff joints, sore muscles, and increased heart rate. In cultures where excitement and happiness are considered normal, people with major depression show low energy and blunted emotional response. In cultures where emotional control is considered the norm, the opposite is true: Intensified emotional responses are a common symptom of depression. The British psychiatrist Christopher Dowrick, author of Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management (Oxford University Press, 2004), has suggested that depression itself should be considered a culture-bound syndrome.

Culture-bound syndromes (or “cultural syndromes,” as they’re now called) are mental illnesses that mainly occur in certain cultures and that are shaped by those cultures. They are things like koro, a genital-retraction syndrome found in Asia and Africa; or khyâl cap, which is a panic-related condition from Cambodia whereby the wind flowing through one’s body is believed to be blocked; or taijin kyofusho, a paralyzing fear of other people’s embarrassment (not your own) that strikes people in Japan.

When I started researching these conditions, there seemed to be a clear line between them and the depression that afflicted my grandmother. But as I dug deeper, that line began to blur. The belief in the United States that depression is biochemical or genetic in nature—always assumed, but never proven—began to seem culture-bound as well. How could something so big, so terrible, and (sometimes) so final differ so much around the globe, or across a family?

My father, my two brothers, and I are all prone to waves of darkness rolling through our lives, which does point to a likely hereditary component. And yet the way it has played out in all our lives is so different that we each might as well be living in his own country: My youngest brother turned to religion at age fifteen, which is still his source of great joy. My other brother spent many years self-medicating before joining Alcoholics Anonymous, after which he felt better. As for me, while I’ve sunk into dark places many times, for a variety of reasons I have never gone all the way down my grandmother’s road.

If depression were a simple biomechanical process, a series of cellular dominoes falling, the effects should be more uniform from Korea to Kenya to Kansas. But they’re not. And after spending several years reading and thinking about these things, I now see that there is something else at work. Something layered over, and woven through, our biology.

I came across this almost by accident, when someone recommended the work of James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who did some of the first studies into the effects of “expressive writing” on health. His interest started in college, at a time when his marriage was falling apart and he fell into a depressive spiral. He started smoking. He drank more. He stopped eating.

Then, after a month, he started writing, first about his marriage, then about his feelings, his parents, his career, death, and so on. “By the end of the week,” he wrote in Opening Up: The Healing Power of Confiding in Others (William Morrow, 1990), “I noticed my depression lifting. For the first time in years—perhaps ever—I had a sense of meaning and direction.”

So he embarked on a series of experiments in which students wrote about various topics—some emotional, some not. Those who wrote about their emotions experienced a bizarre health benefit: Their trips to the campus health center dropped by half. Their immune function increased. Yet those who merely “vented” about trauma, or who wrote on superficial events, saw no such benefit.

Another of his studies focused on almost fifty professionals (average age fifty-two years) who had been laid off from a computer company in Dallas, where most had worked for thirty years. All were fired the same day, with no warning, and, as Pennebaker noted, were “among the most bitter and hostile group of adults I have ever seen.”

One group was instructed to write about “their deepest thoughts and feelings about getting laid off,” for thirty minutes each day for five days. Another group wrote about time management. And a third (control) group didn’t write anything. Within three months, 27 percent of the first group had found jobs, while only 5 percent of the second two groups did. Several months later, 53 percent of the first group had jobs, compared to 18 percent of the other groups.

Having kept a journal since my late teens, I found this fascinating. Writing in it has always made me feel better, though while I was doing it I had no idea why. I told myself I kept it to collect material that would later become essays and stories. But honestly, there was never much worthwhile in those pages. Mostly it was just me trying to figure out why I felt so bad, or working through problems, or trying to figure out what kind of person I was. I rarely looked at the pages I left behind.

But I kept writing in the journal, first when I went overseas alone, then again when I traveled with my wife. Not long after we returned to the States, having settled in Madison, Wisconsin, I stopped journaling without knowing why. Whenever I opened the pages, it seemed tedious, pointless, and painful. The little I did write felt trivial. I wondered for whom I was
writing: Who would care about these things? I started losing touch with old friends and made few new ones. I had no  idea who the audience for my stories might be.

Fortunately, I still had an audience of one—my wife—who grew alarmed at the dark turn I had taken, which showed no sign of passing. I felt a strange, new kind of hopelessness that went all the way to my fingertips. Soon she insisted we leave Madison, and within a few weeks our house was on the market (we had one daughter and another child on the way). This time we moved to Minneapolis, and after that things slowly began to improve. Fitfully, I started writing in my journal again.

All this made more sense when I read Pennebaker’s work. But it made even more sense when I stumbled into the field of “self-affirmation” research (not to be confused with “self-esteem”), which uses short writing exercises to change the way people see themselves. One of the most common is to write for ten minutes or so about your values, about why they are important to you, or about a time when those values came into play.

Repeated just a few times, these exercises can have significant effects. They can boost students’ gpa for years. They can improve subjects’ health and relationships. The reasons for their power are not fully understood, but it seems to have something to do with expanding your sense of self, of who you are, and of what caused you to become that person.

In a 2014 overview of this research, Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman noted that “the self” can be best understood as a kind of “storyteller” with “a powerful need to see itself as having integrity.” We need to believe we are good people, moral people, and that we can achieve the goals we set for ourselves. This is what Cohen and Sherman call a “narrative of personal adequacy.”

Yet the world does not always confirm our adequacy. In fact, it often tells us the opposite, in the clear language of failure, rejection, exclusion, pain, and other unpleasant things. These can threaten the idea of our self. And when the idea of our self begins to crumble and we can’t quite hold it together, it can take an emotional and physical toll. Long before anyone talked about this kind of thing, the psychiatrist George Engel looked at cases of 170 people who died suddenly and unexpectedly. He found that there were various circumstances that precipitated death: the loss of a spouse, child, sibling, or friend; denial of a promotion; loss of a job; a robbery; the demolition of a hotel where one man worked for thirty years; and a reconciliation with long-lost family members. Engel noted that these episodes marked periods of extreme excitement, loss of control, or “giving up.” Many involved the sense that the person “no longer has, or no longer believes that he has, mastery or control over the situation, or even over himself,” Engel wrote. In other words, when your sense of self unravels, your actual self can too.

Writing affirmations seems to offer some protection from these slings and arrows. In one study that Cohen and Sherman cited, both affirmed and non-affirmed people were shown a live caged tarantula. The affirmed group correctly judged the distance between themselves and the spider. Non-affirmed people saw the threat as physically closer than it really was. When the story we’ve told ourselves about who we are is threatened, the world feels more dangerous. Things can look more dire, more risky, more hopeless than they are. That’s a feeling I remember clearly. It’s one I’m sure my grandma knew well.

Culture-bound or not, depression is a complex beast. Even today there are no known physiological causes, despite our perennial assumption that these will soon be found. There is no biological test you can take for it. That’s why, for me, the intersection of narrative and neurology is where a key piece of this puzzle can be found.

Surely nothing as simple as a notebook and a pencil could have saved my grandma, just as when things turned darkest for me, my wife had to intervene. Yet I still feel lucky that I became a writer when I did. Because for years those journal pages helped me hold myself together when the world pulled me apart. They helped me figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to bridge the distance between the two.

But most important, I see now that in all those years when I thought I was writing one kind of story, I was writing another. Now when I open my journal, I know which story that is. I know why I’m writing it. And I know the end is still a long way off.

Frank Bures is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Expanding the Audience for Books

by

Gila Lyons

8.15.18

The National Book Foundation (NBF) is perhaps best known for the National Book Awards, one of the biggest annual events in literature since it began in the 1950s. But $1.4 million in new grant money will help the folks behind the NBF prove the organization is more than just an awards show. “The awards are great and make a big impact, but one night is not how you make readers or expand audience,” says NBF executive director Lisa Lucas. “There are people who aren’t plugged into the next new read. Not every community is supplied with ongoing cultural events and artists doing readings and events. Inclusivity is about being in as many places as possible, especially where there isn’t a lot of programming.” 

The nonprofit organization, which seeks to “celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture,” announced in May that it will put the $1.4 million toward expanding NBF Presents, a series of public programs for regions and populations with limited access to literary events and resources. By partnering with libraries, schools, festivals, and performance venues across the United States over the next three years, NBF Presents will host a series of initiatives to connect literature to cultural and social issues and expand access to books.

The NBF received $900,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, along with additional funding from the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, among other institutions. “A lot of people making these grants understand the power of information and arming people with access to all kinds of information,” Lucas says. “It’s not just about regional isolation or low-income communities; everyone needs a little push toward the book, toward the emotional and practical benefits of reading.” The Pew Center reported in March that 24 percent of American adults did not read a book in the previous year. The aim of NBF Presents is to improve that percentage and to remind people of the power of reading: “We become more empathic, better informed, more aware of the political and personal context of our lives,” says Lucas.

This year NBF Presents will focus its programming on mass incarceration, the work of James Baldwin, and New York City writers and artists. One of the program’s initiatives, Literature for Justice, will bring together a coalition of writers to recommend books that will help people better understand the problem of mass incarceration in the United States. “When you read a whole book, and spend ten or fourteen hours with a text, it becomes part of you,” Lucas says. “We feel like literature has the capacity to change hearts and minds.” The program will release the reading list in September and start hosting events in October.

In mid-August the NBF launched its Author in Focus program, a series of events that center on the work of a different author each year, beginning with James Baldwin. The NBF has partnered with Velvet Film, which produced the 2016 Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, to host nationwide educational and public programming focused on connecting Baldwin’s work to current social issues. And in June the foundation kicked off its Notes From the Reading Life event series, copresented with the New York Public Library. The program hosts discussions in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, pairing nonliterary celebrities like artists, actors, and comedians with authors to talk about books, which are then available to attendees. Four events took place this June, pairing comedian Desus Nice and critic Rebecca Carroll, writers Alexandra Kleeman and Alex Gilvarry, fashion expert and TV personality Tim Gunn and novelist Min Jin Lee, and art curator Thelma Golden and novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge. 

The positive impact of the program is already visible. At the Bronx library event featuring Nice and Carroll, Lucas reports, “There were an enormous number of Desus fans listening to him talk about reading Richard Wright. At the end there was a line of people signing up for library cards.” That’s the kind of engagement the National Book Foundation hopes to see across its new programming. “I live in a book bubble where people believe in books and feel that information and access is really important,” Lucas says. “But we cannot speak to just ourselves anymore. Literature is meant to be disseminated, shared, and valued by all.” 

 

Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for the New York Times, Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Good, and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.

TV personality Tim Gunn and novelist Min Jin Lee at a NBF Presents event in June. (Credit: National Book Foundation)

Barbershop Books

by

Christine Ro

6.13.18

Growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the nineties, Alvin Irby wasn’t much of a reader. “Reading books for pleasure wasn’t a part of my childhood,” he says. It wasn’t until high school—when Irby “started to understand the political and societal implications of reading,” and more specifically which groups of people tend to be excluded from reading—that the activity became something more than a chore. Today Irby is committed to making books and reading fun for children, in particular black boys—who report some of the lowest reading scores among children in the United States—through Barbershop Books, a literacy program that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops and also trains barbers and other adults to help teach early literacy. 

Irby, who now lives in New York City, began installing shelves of children’s books in Harlem barbershops in 2014. He chose barbershops because he wanted to find black male–centric spaces to promote a love of reading among young black boys. The statistics, after all, are startling: In 2010 the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of seventy of the nation’s largest urban public school systems, reported that while 38 percent of white fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, the number for black boys of the same age is only 12 percent. Through Barbershop Books, Irby hopes to reach kids before the fourth grade. In the program’s early days, Irby spent his own money to buy books for all ages. “When I put the books in a barbershop, I observed for hours and hours that it was the young kids who were most likely to engage with the books,” he says. He realized that books for readers ages four to eight, a period critical for reading development, seemed to be the most useful. 

Unlike many early reading programs, Barbershop Books focuses not on reading skills but on what Irby calls “reading identity.” This means building boys’ motivation to read and helping them form a self-image as readers. Developing a reading identity is key to increasing literacy, Irby says, and is a different approach than that taken by most schools, which often focus on assessment, test scores, and skills development. The fun is lacking, Irby says, so reading becomes tied up in pressure and judgment rather than pleasure. 

Barbershop Books attributes the low reading proficiency among black boys in part to schools and educators that are not responsive to individual learning styles, as well as to a lack of black men involved in black boys’ early reading experiences. In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education reported that less than 2 percent of teachers were black men. “There are literally young black boys who have never seen a black man reading,” said Irby in a 2017 TED talk, “or never had a black man encourage him to read.” By working with local community partners to organize training for both barbers and parents to teach kids how to read, Barbershop Books works to address this deficit.

Irby and his team stock the barbershops with books that appeal to the kids who visit. A 2013 report from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of  Wisconsin in Madison showed only 10.48 percent of children’s books published that year featured characters of color, and Irby also notes that a significant number of titles about black children revolve around the same few topics, such as slavery. Although such books are important, he says, it is equally important to supplement those books with more lighthearted stories, like Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day and Maribeth Boelts’s Those Shoes—books about kids with whom children can identify. (Irby’s own children’s book, Gross Greg, which he self-published in 2016, is a humorous story about a boy who likes to eat what he calls “delicious little sugars”—his boogers.) While Barbershop Books titles aren’t limited to those about black boys, Irby asks boys what kinds of books they would like to read, allowing them to help with the decision of what to stock. The organization also gives books away: On July 18 it will host a giveaway of three thousand books at the Boys’ Club of New York in East Harlem.

Since its founding Barbershop Books has been adopted by more than a hundred barbershops in twenty-eight cities across the United States and reaches more than four thousand boys each month. In the next three years Irby hopes to raise $1 million to set up reading spaces in eight hundred more barbershops throughout the country. Eventually he’d like to expand to include Latino barbershops and digital initiatives as well. For now Barbershop Books has already made an impact. Irby reports that before he launched the program, 73 percent of barbers he spoke with never saw a boy reading in their shop. Now 64 percent say they’ve seen a boy reading a book in their shop almost every day. Irby believes that regardless of children’s reading abilities, it’s a step in the right direction. “Whether or not kids can read the books,” he says, “even if they’re just looking at the pictures, that’s a positive reading experience.”

 

Christine Ro writes about books regularly for Book Riot and occasionally for Literary Hub, Vice, and other publications.

Three boys reading at Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop in Harlem in New York City.

At the Center of Hip-Hop and Poetry

by

LaToya Jordan

4.11.18

What began as a hashtag to celebrate black womanhood, Black Girl Magic quickly leapt off social media streams and into the lexicon of writers, politicians, celebrities, and activists. What is Black Girl Magic? No two people will define it the same, but a new poetry anthology released by Haymarket Books in April, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic, is allowing black women who grew up in the hip-hop generation to deepen the conversation through their poetry.

Mahogany L. Browne, who edited the anthology with fellow poets Idrissa Simmonds and Jamila Woods, says the book challenges stereotypes about black women. “We’re not allowed nuance; we’re not allowed to be angry and sad and loving—we’re supposed to be strong, stand up for everything,” says Browne. “This is about how we create ourselves, how we re-create ourselves…how we rename ourselves, how we bring our ancestors into the room, and how we invite those that don’t serve us out. Black Girl Magic as a whole is a resilience, a celebration, and a reclamation of the black woman body.”

The idea for the anthology was born a few years ago, when Browne was the featured poet at Louder Than a Bomb, an annual youth poetry festival in Chicago cofounded by poets Kevin Coval and Anna West. Browne read a poem called “Black Girl Magic,” which she wrote specifically for the event, and the audience response was immediate and visceral. “To see a poem hit the air like that,” Browne says, “after that response, I said, ‘This is bigger than me.’” (Browne later performed the poem on a 2016 episode of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular.”) After the festival, she mentioned to Coval that there should be a Black Girl Magic anthology, and a few months later he phoned her to move forward with the idea.

The anthology features more than a hundred poems from new and established voices, including Elizabeth Acevedo, Syreeta McFadden, Morgan Parker, Aracelis Girmay, and Angel Nafis. Poet Patricia Smith, the 2018 winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, contributed a foreword to the collection. “I relentlessly love my sisters,” she writes. “We have taken back the right to name ourselves.” Each section of the anthology is named after an excerpt from the work of a notable black woman writer or activist. It begins with a section focused on the black woman’s body in all its forms, “Collector of Me,” inspired by poet Sonia Sanchez, and ends with a section centered on joy and resilience, “Jubilee,” inspired by novelist Edwidge Danticat.

The poems in the collection, influenced by the rhythms, lyricism, and expressiveness of hip-hop music and culture, speak to the many dimensions of black womanhood. In “My Beauty,” Justice Ameer writes about gender identity and self-love: “And ain’t that being a Black woman / Being forced to destroy herself / To make a man more comfortable / Me and my beauty stopped looking for him one day / And suddenly / I saw my body / My beauty saw a woman.” In “#SayHerName,” Aja Monet writes about the campaign to remember black women victims of police brutality: “I am a woman carrying other women in my mouth.”

Black Girl Magic continues the work of the first anthology in the series, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, published by Haymarket Books in 2015 and edited by Coval, along with poets Quraysh Ali Lansana and Nate Marshall. Focusing on black women was the perfect next step in the series, Coval says. “Black women have been and remain at the center of hip-hop culture and poetic practice. This anthology is some of the receipts and a peek into the future. Here are some of the most important and freshest of voices on the planet rock.”

The anthology series will continue to be a space for marginalized voices, and work is already under way on the next volume. “Halal If You Hear Me,” edited by poets Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo, will be focused on writing by Muslim women and LGBTQ Muslims and will be published in 2019.         

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

I, Too Arts Collective

by

LaToya Jordan

2.14.18

For nearly ten years the brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was silent. Once the home of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who lived there for twenty years until his death in 1967, the three-story row house sat vacant, its dark stone walls overgrown with ivy, the paint of its once grand interior chipped throughout. The only evidence of the building’s literary history was a small plaque on the facade bearing Hughes’s name and designating it a landmark.

But today, thanks to the I, Too Arts Collective, the brownstone is once again bustling with creativity. On any given day one might hear the voice of a teen writer reciting Hughes’s poem “I look at the world,” or a community member reading at an open mic for the first time, or a distinguished author in conversation about the practice of writing. Established as a nonprofit organization by award-winning author Renée Watson, I, Too provides arts programming in Hughes’s house to underrepresented and marginalized voices. The collective takes its name from Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too,” which opens with the lines, “I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother.”

“People need spaces where they can seek justice and stand up for what they believe in, spaces where they can be their full selves,” says Watson. “Often they are not able to do that in the world, so I wanted to have a space where they can come and create and engage with their community—that was really important to me.”

Watson, who lives in Harlem, walked past the vacant house for ten years, disappointed that nothing had been done with the space. She was inspired to take action in the summer of 2016, after hearing that Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone, located just a ten-minute walk from Hughes’s house, had been sold for $4 million. Determined that another piece of Harlem and African American culture wouldn’t be lost, Watson contacted the owner of Hughes’s brownstone and shared her vision of a space dedicated to preserving the writer’s legacy. The owner also didn’t want to see the building become gentrified, turned into condos or a coffee shop, but told Watson she’d need to come up with a year’s rent to turn her vision into a reality.

Watson, who in addition to publishing several well-received children’s books—including most recently Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017)—has years of experience in business and nonprofit arts administration; she established the I, Too Arts Collective in July 2016 and launched #LangstonsLegacy, an online fund-raising campaign to lease the brownstone. In just a few months, with the help of the literary community and private donors, she raised $150,000 toward the lease, renovation, and programming costs. Watson signed a three-year lease in October 2016 and along with the I, Too team and a group of volunteers, cleaned, painted, and restored the building. On February 1, 2017—Hughes’s 115th birthday and the beginning of Black History Month—the Hughes House opened to the public.

I, Too now hosts weekly open hours at the Hughes House, during which the community and tourists can visit the space, walk the same parlor floor Hughes did, and snap photos of his piano and typewriter. Watson says the brownstone is less of a museum, however, and more of a space for people to create. I, Too runs a number of special programs and events at the Hughes House, including creative writing workshops for adults and young people, a recurring poetry salon with an open mic, a monthly social event for writers and artists, and discussions with writers about their process and work. I, Too also rents the space to other artists and nonprofits to hold workshops, readings, and performances. Writers who have visited the brownstone include Kwame Alexander, Tracey Baptiste, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Grimes, Ellen Hagan, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ibi Zoboi.

Watson and her I, Too colleagues— program director Kendolyn Walker, social media director Jennifer Baker, and graphic designer Ellice Lee, as well as working and honorary boards of directors made up of writers and artists—want to empower artists as well as honor Hughes’s legacy. “I wanted something that would add on to what he left behind,” says Watson. “I think that is a powerful thing, to not just celebrate his work in theory or by reading but also saying, ‘This is what he wrote, this is what he said—what do you want to say, and how are you continuing his legacy?’”

The program closest to Watson’s heart is the Langston Hughes Institute for Young Writers, which hosts writing workshops for young people during school breaks and throughout the summer. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the workshops allow teens to learn about Hughes’s work and share their own poetry. “I always say whenever young people are in the space, that’s when I get emotional and feel like this is why I am doing this work,” Watson says. “What moves me is when I see young people writing and finding their voices and expressing themselves.”

After a successful first year, the collective is working toward its long-term goals, including restoring the second floor of the house to create studio space and a library, as well as raising money to establish a fellowship program for writers. As part of the program, fellows would receive a residency in the Hughes House and hold workshops and readings in return.

The organization’s ultimate goal is to raise enough money to purchase the brownstone. “I want this to be a place that lives far beyond me or anybody involved with it now,” says Watson. “This is not just a trendy thing to do, but a sustainable space with roots in the ground for everyday artists to develop their craft and for established artists to share their stories and their voices.” 

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

Renee Watson, founder of the I, Too Arts Collective, next to Hughes’s typewriter.

(Credit: David Flores)