The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul How did we get here? And how do we get back?
“Don’t think for one second that we don’t need independent writers. The forces of conformity and centralization of power are stronger now than ever. Books have always been our safeguard in such troubled times. But when books are controlled and constrained by the entrenched system, they fail to provide us with meaningful alternatives.”
Clogged toilets, trade unions and Google researchers: this is the saga of the Scarlett Letters
Now, the bookshop is a husk, almost entirely empty apart from the posters announcing future plans to reopen as “The People’s Letters” — a co-operative run by the booksellers that they believe will adhere to more leftist principles than its predecessor.
The beloved local bookstore is moving from White Street in Cambridge after 20 years. Its new location is at Lesley University, down the street.
“We hired expensive movers to start moving us on Tuesday but we thought, to get it started, it would just be more fun to let our customers and our community start the move. So we made a chain of people from there to here, it’s about 1,000 feet, and we passed about, I don’t know, a few hundred books to get started and they moved the romance section,” said David Sandberg, owner of Porter Square Books.
Moves are spreading in Japan to set up private libraries where each bookshelf is owned by individuals who display books on their hobbies or those that they recommend.
Such libraries are helping revitalize local communities by creating a place where people can mingle through events. Around 50 such facilities have been created throughout the country.
“It’s a unique inventory,” Kristi imparted to me. “There’s so much here. Each book has been lovingly curated. I love the books. I have a connection with the books. It’s like a madness. When I go to people’s houses in Buffalo, I scan the rooms for book titles, to see what sort of people they are. I can’t engage without knowing what books they own [laughing].”
Overwhelmed With Orders, Some Black-Owned Bookstores Ask for Patience “We are running as fast as we can,” a Boston shop told customers who are clamoring for antiracism books that are soaring in popularity but hard to keep in stock.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/books/black-owned-bookstores-frugal.html Overwhelmed With Orders, Some Black-Owned Bookstores Ask for Patience – The New York Times
The NYTimes has a nice\”Story on a woman in Africa who still deals books the old fashioned way.
Oddly enough, there can still be romance in being a bookseller, an embattled yet ennobled calling these days. More accurately, let\’s say there can be passion and adventure in trafficking in books: buying, selling and bartering them, rather like dealing for salt along the old trade routes. A woman who owns a bookstore in Cape Town, South Africa, does just that. She bargains in books and jokingly refers to herself as \”the last of the great salt-trading people.\”
The NYTimes has a nice\”Story on a woman in Africa who still deals books the old fashioned way.
Oddly enough, there can still be romance in being a bookseller, an embattled yet ennobled calling these days. More accurately, let\’s say there can be passion and adventure in trafficking in books: buying, selling and bartering them, rather like dealing for salt along the old trade routes. A woman who owns a bookstore in Cape Town, South Africa, does just that. She bargains in books and jokingly refers to herself as \”the last of the great salt-trading people.\”
So in the profession of independent booksellers, which is filled
in fact and myth with people who think of themselves as selfless
evangelists, I was struck with one who could be called a true
literary explorer, if not revivalist. She is Henrietta Dax,
proprietor of Clarke\’s Bookshop. In a pickup truck or car she
wanders southern Africa, the lands south of the Zambezi River, as a
sort of Marco Polo of books. Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana,
Angola, Lesotho, Swaziland and, of course, South Africa. Dax buys
books at each stop with cash or through barter, books that are
indigenous to the land she\’s in, and then sells them to customers
throughout the world.
Her clientele includes collectors and governments and
universities. \”I have standing orders from a number of American
universities,\” she said. \”Yale says it will buy everything it can
get that is published in Mozambique and Namibia.\”
Usually when she leaves on her journey, the space under the
canopy of her pickup truck (or the back of the car, whichever she
happens to be using) is empty. But sometimes she takes a pile of
titles, mostly South African, to use in certain places to barter
for other books. This is particularly true in Mozambique, where the
buyers and sellers most often want books, which are hard to get,
not money.
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