Is Spring in the Bag at Last?

Daffodils are in bloom and wild leeks aplenty pushing up underfoot in the woods. Sandhill cranes are back from winters in the sunny South, announcing their presence vocally in Leelanau (so far overhead that I haven’t had a glimpse of them yet, but they’re definitely here). Only last week we had another big snow, and it could always snow again; however, the air feels as if the season has turned the corner at last, not teasingly but sincerely. We shall see. I’m enjoying the increasing hours of sunlight, anyway.

 

Sunny Juliet and I have not yet resumed our agility work, except on an ad hoc basis in the woods, where a large fallen tree is an opportunity for her to “Walk it!” and “Table!” the signal for her to jump up on a stump. She is very happy, though, to have a new neighbor playmate and to tear around with Griffin while humans stand by and supervise. “A tired dog is a happy dog,” we tell each other contentedly. Then, “Watch out! Not right under our feet!”

[No new photos because their play date last night was cancelled.]

 

School is back in session in Northport following spring break, families back from their self-prescribed “cabin fever” vacations, and summer people returning to open houses and cottages for the nonwinter months. The annual migration holds once again, for cranes and humans alike.

 

One question bedeviling me occurred to a couple of friends, also, I learned when I mentioned it. We are struck by the number of fallen trees in the woods. It almost seems that there are as many big old trees lying on the ground, horizontal or nearly so, as there are upright specimens. Is this a misperception, or can it be true? And, if true, did the northern Michigan woods always have this appearance in the spring (and we are only now noticing), or has there been a recent massive die-off? Are all the fallen individuals perhaps ash trees and beeches, victims of recent pest invasions? Bottom line: Has the woods looked as it does now ever since county residents abandoned woodstoves for furnaces – or not?

Is there a forester out there with an answer to this question?

 

Three different people sent me the link to a story in The Washington Post (if you are not a subscriber, maybe a friend who is will gift you the article) about bookshops specializing in books that have been around the block before, and I appreciated most of the advice given in the article: Take your time; have a spirit of adventure; don’t crow to the owner when you find a book marked at a fraction of its value (just buy it and be happy, I say); look at the books and not at your handheld device. I loved the remark about small shops tending to be “zealously curated,” and I wanted to cheer at “Try never to leave a bookstore without making a purchase, if only a used paperback. It is the least you can do to support these defenders and bastions of civilization.” (Is that what I am? Not such small potatoes, then!) I was not as thrilled by “Bring a flashlight and expect to get dirty.” You wouldn’t want to eat off the floor of my shop, but then, it isn’t a restaurant, is it? 

In Northport, in addition to reorganizing subject areas in the bookstore recently to make room for new arrivals, I’ve also been planning for the future. Here are a few important days coming up on my calendar, which I urge you to put on your calendar, too:

 

Monday, April 22. Earth Day

 

Saturday, April 27. Indie Bookstore Day

 

Saturday, June 22. Visit to Dog Ears Books by author Bonnie Jo Campbell

 

In honor of the Earth Day 2024 theme, “Planet vs. Plastics,” and as a belated brag on 2023’s 30^th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, I will be offering beautiful new canvas book bags ($12), which will be no less appropriate on Indie Bookstore Day (always the last Saturday in April, and this year I’ll be here!) and perfect for carrying home your signed copy of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters -- plus, of course, any other treasures you find in my “zealously curated” collection on Waukazoo Street!

As we were in 2011 --

Tiny Bookseller Claims Title

(This was just to lure you in!)

One of the occasional hazards of baring one’s soul passionately on serious subjects is that it can invite hostile comment. After I allowed myself a blogging outburst recently – sick and tired of holding back diplomatically in the face of continual and repeated public outrages, I should add – a hostile comment came my way from an anonymous source. In that first comment from Anonymous, I was called an “agitator” and a “nihilist leftist.” Anonymous also called me a “book enthusiast,” which would not be my own chosen self-descriptor but one I don’t find offensive. “Nihilist leftist,” though? That's just plain not who I am. A little left of center, maybe. Nihilist, never! As for agitating, maybe I should do more, but generally I try to be take a diplomatic route. The post in question was a departure from my usual public persona. It was a cry of anguish. 

That’s all background to what I want to say today. Because today Anonymous came back with a second comment, which in a roundabout way seems to imply that I am a “slave” to some kind of “circular rhetoric” promulgated by some unnamed group of “masters.” 

Anonymous is difficult to answer – impossible to respond to directly, as s/he makes only unsupported assertions, not arguments, and does not make clear any of the connections vaguely implied. And why would Anonymous bother to argue with me, since s/he clearly believes I am not an independent thinker but a mental “slave”? Okay, so Anonymous doesn’t argue. More to the point, though, why does Anonymous bother with me at all? Perhaps the idea is to convince my handful of readers to throw me overboard? We few, we happy few!

Well, the best events in my sequestered, self-quarantined life this past week have been a few private, personal, honest, heartfelt and respectful exchanges with people whose views are very different from my own. We spoke to each other. We heard each other. We felt respected by each other. As different from potshots from an anonymous source as June is from January. 

But it isn’t the anonymity that’s so bothersome, because some people don’t have Google accounts and don’t want Google accounts, and I don't have a problem with people who comment as Anonymous. What’s so troubling is the lack of context, absence of argument, and omission of any citations or examples to help me make sense of the accusations against me, so that what could be genuine dialogue remains instead a hollow mockery. And surely, I think helplessly, the fog of name-calling from Anonymous hides some deep hurt. There is a person behind the veil of anonymity, after all, someone who is hurt and afraid and angry, as well as someone who doesn’t know me at all. Someone I cannot reach, don't know how to connect with. That is the sad part, the part that troubles me.

One little laugh brightened the gloom, however. Anonymous referred to me as a “tiny book seller.” Tiny! Not as tiny as I used to be, many long years ago! Now in my eighth decade of life, I might just as well be called a “little old lady bookseller.” Perhaps, though, “tiny” refers to my business rather than to my person, and it’s true that I have never been able to afford paid employees and have struggled along for years with a single part-time volunteer. Yeah, that’s pretty tiny. 

Tiny but independent! Not subject to a corporate straitjacket, not held back by a board of directors, not burdened with business debt (although offers to plunge into debt have never been lacking), and certainly not shackled to any particular viewpoint other than my own, which has shifted and evolved over the decades and may yet enlarge and mature as long as I have my marbles. 

Once a customer from France asked me the secret of my success (i.e., survival) in the age of the online behemoth’s world domination. I told him I am stubborn. 

So let me claim, here and now, the title that Anonymous has foisted on me and declare myself to the world as the Tiny Bookseller! Tiny -- and fiercely, stubbornly independent. As a little third-grader I tutored once in reading said to me once, so memorably, “That’s what I am, and I’m proud of it!”

Stubbornly, independently yours, 

The Tiny Bookseller of Northport, Michigan

I Am in Mourning For Our Country

In Minneapolis, many bookstores were already closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now more have been damaged in rioting following demonstrations over the brutal murder of George Floyd, but you will not find self-pity in the words of these booksellers. As one of them acknowledged, property damage is the "least tragic" aspect of the story. So while I feel sympathy for bookstore owners and employees, most of my sympathy has to go to the murdered man's family -- and to our country at large.

Since March, we have been reeling under a global pandemic that reached our shores. One hundred thousand Americans died of coronavirus. Businesses across the country closed, and people lost their jobs. High school and college graduates had no graduation ceremonies, and children's birthdays had to be celebrated with drive-by parades of friends waving from their cars. That alone has been difficult. A long haul. Unprecedented, to use a word that has never been used so many times in so short a period in my lifetime.

The absence of meaningful national leadership has been appalling and tragic, but unsurprising. Who could have expected anything different or better, given the last three and a half years? Queen Elizabeth, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and past presidents George Bush and Barack Obama stepped forward with calm words of comfort and encouragement. We could have used comfort and encouragement on a daily basis, but we did not get it.

Then came the murder of yet another black man by a police officer, murder committed by someone pledged to protect citizens, murder captured on video for all the world to see. Rage is understandable. Don't you feel it, too? "Violence doesn't solve anything," many people say -- but tell me, what has? Peaceful demonstrations? Cases of brutality and murder brought to the courts? More extensive police training? Body cameras? 

[Update: Here is what we got from the White House today, since this post first went up.] 
[Update 6/2: Houston police chief weighs in.]

I am in mourning for this country. 

I understand the rage. I understand the impulse to destruction, even knowing it "won't solve anything." When nothing reasonable has worked, what is left?

And yet -- from so many credible reports, much of the destruction was not caused by demonstrators from the Twin Cities but by outsiders who came in for the sole purpose of, it would seem, discrediting legitimate protest. What could be more reprehensible? I do not understand that.

And I do not understand disrespect taken to the extreme of causing death. I don't understand how it is allowed to go on and on. I don't understand why so many white Americans fail to get the message of "Black Lives Matter," misinterpreting it by inserting an "only" that was never there. Black lives matter, too. How can anyone not see? I don't understand the lack of understanding.

Another thing I don't understand -- and some of you may disagree with me on this -- is why the launch of a rocket into space is supposed to fill us with hope for the future of our country. "The heavens are opening"? Great! So now we can go mess the heavens up, too? While the mess here on earth worsens? How is that supposed to make anyone feel good?

I am in mourning for this country. My country. Your country. Our country.

But mourning by itself solves nothing. It is a luxury we cannot afford.

Can You Help Staci, Too?

Moving a bookstore is very hard work. Dog Ears Books has been in its present location for over a decade now, but I still remember every move we ever made – from Waukazoo Street in Northport (photo above) to Union Street in Traverse City; from Traverse City back to Northport; from the corner of Mill and Nagonaba to the building next door on Nagonaba (you wouldn’t think moving to a neighboring building would be so much work, but it is); and finally from Nagonaba back to Waukazoo Street. Lots of volunteers stepped in for that last move, and I don’t think David and I could have done it without them. We wouldn’t have had the courage.

Last week I shared a story on Facebook from my daily Shelf Awareness newsletter about booksellers whose move resulted in tragedy. Jim and Staci Stuart bought the former Books and More from Dorothy Dickerson in April of this year and closed for renovations, planning to re-open as Books and Brew on May 1. (That’s in Albion, Michigan, just down the pike a way.) Two days before their opening, they were moving a bookcase – and it fell on Staci, as a result now paralyzed from the waist down.

To make matters worse, because Jim had changed jobs there was a two-day lapse in their health insurance, so most of Staci’s hospital bills, totaling $177,000, are not covered by insurance.

I’ve said before that having a dream (such as owning a bookstore) is a lot easier than making that dream come true and keeping it alive, but I cannot even begin to imagine what Staci Stuart is going through, now in a wheelchair, getting ready to open her bookstore on the 4^th of July after she completes rehab and returns home this Wednesday, June 21^st.

There’s no trust fund or retirement pension behind my own bookstore’s year-to-year continued existence, but I have to send a check to this bookseller in Albion, facing challenges far greater than my own. It’s little enough and all I can manage from this distance. If you can help out, too, follow this link to see how to do it. 

Staci, an independent bookseller is never alone. We are colleagues in a mutually supportive community. It's just one more aspect of this life that makes the dream worthwhile.

Musings on a Book: THE SNOW CHILD

I don’t want to call this a “book review,” but I do want to write something about this lovely first novel, written by a bookseller colleague up in Alaska. We’ve never met. I know her only through her book, and not until I reached the end of the novel did I read “A conversation with Eowyn Ivey” and learn that she is a bookseller. There, when asked to tell a little bit about what energizes her, the author replied:

One of the reasons I left the newspaper business and joined Fireside Books [in Palmer, AK] is because I wanted more time and energy to write. What I didn’t expect is how stimulated I would be by the actual work of bookselling. To be constantly surrounded by all these ideas and stories and art!

The “more time and energy” part comes from being an employee, I guess, rather than the business owner, but I can certainly relate to the stimulation a bookstore atmosphere provides.

The Snow Child is a mysterious book. As readers, we are not sure, early on or even by the last page, whether we are meant to understand it as a fairy tale or realistic fiction, that is, a fantasy or a story with characters who could be real people in situations that life might present us with ourselves, were we to be transported through time and space to an Alaska homestead in 1920. The place feels real enough.

The morning was so cold that when Jack first stepped outside and harnessed the horse, his leather boots stayed stiff and his hands wouldn’t work right. A north wind blew steadily off the river. He’d have liked to stay indoors, but he had already stacked Mabel’s towel-wrapped pies in a crate to take to town. He slapped himself on the arms and stomped his feet to get the blood flowing. It was damned cold, and even long underwear beneath denim seemed a scant cotton sheet about his legs. It wasn’t easy, leaving the comfort of the woodstove to face this alone. The sun threatened to come up on the other side of the river, but its light was weak and silvery, and not much comfort at all.

The author’s inspiration for her novel was a used paperback she ran across by chance at Fireside Books, and what initially captivated her in the book was the role of place in the story. (Shades of Lynn Kimball!)

...Black spruce and dark winters spoke of lonely isolation, and the fresh, sparkling snow brought hope and magic. 

Growing up in Alaska, I’ve at times felt a foreigner in the pages of my country’s literature. All the books I had read and loved, but not one of them told of my home. The characters didn’t live the way we did. ... But the setting of the old Russian fairy [tale] was hauntingly familiar.

The paperback book led her to a fairy tale telling of an elderly childless couple who fashion a child out of snow. The snow maiden comes alive – and from there various versions of the tale spin out differently, but all somehow involve joyful childhood, love, marriage, and death.

In Ivey’s The Snow Child, the homesteading couple at the center of the story are in their fifties and childless, the sole pregnancy of their marriage having ended in a stillbirth. It was the loss of that infant that ignited Mabel’s desire to leave familiar surroundings, family and friends, to make a life in the wilderness that would encompass just the two of them. When Jack meets their nearest Alaskan neighbors, Mabel is initially reluctant to socialize. Making new friends and becoming known again is not why she came to Alaska. But somehow meeting George and Esther begins to thaw something in Mabel, providing an opening for fun and joy. Thus when that winter’s snow comes, she and Jack, at her suggestion, fashion a girl of snow.

In time the snow girl disappears, but so do the scarf and mittens. Human footprints, the size of a child’s feet, lead into the woods. Jack follows the trail but does not immediately share his discovery or his search with Mabel. He is uneasy.

As readers, we hardly believe the girl is real even after she comes to be a regular part of Jack and Mabel’s life. She comes to their cabin again and again, but she never stays, and no one else sees her. No one else believes a child could survive alone in the wilderness. Esther thinks winter’s isolation has made Mabel a little bit crazy. One day Jack and Mabel and the girl, like three children at play, lie in the snow and make snow angels. That will prove the girl’s existence to Esther, Mabel thinks, but by the time Esther gets around to visiting, the angel prints in the snow are no longer discernible.

Is Faina real, or have Jack and Mabel imagined her? We read on, expecting to receive a clear answer in time. As the girl comes to seem more and more real, however, the author somehow continues to keep us in a state of uncertainty, suspended between belief and doubt.

I love books, fiction or nonfiction, with women characters surviving in nature and pitting themselves against wilderness. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River; L. E. Kimball’s Seasonal Roads; Down the Wild River North, by Constance Helmericks, and so on. In the early chapters of The Snow Child, while the girl (real or imaginary) was a creature of the wilderness, the role of Mabel, the homesteading wife, was pretty much restricted to housework. Then Jack meets with an accident while plowing, and while he is laid up their neighbors come to help Mabel with the spring planting. From then on, throughout and following Jack’s recovery, Mabel takes her part in the hard work of the farm.

...She had never understood how Jack could fall asleep in a chair without washing up, talking to her about his day, or even removing his filthy boots. Now she knew. Yet for all the sore muscles and monotony, the days of working in the fields filled her with a kind of pride she had never known.

They became true partners in the farm. As for the snow child, she grows up into a young woman, but what are we to make of her?

I don’t want to give any hints about Faina’s evolving role in the homestead and neighborhood world of this bit of wilderness Alaska, because you should not be deprived of discovering her world as I did, page by page. In the end, one thing you will know for sure is that you have been transported, carried on story’s wings to another world. Do you need more certainty than that?

And how delightful that the author is a bookseller! For me, that is icing on the cake!

What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like

The late Prudy Meade of Leland, founder of Leelanau Books, was famous for her spot-on book recommendations. That will never (sigh!) be my legacy. (1) I am not a fast thinker (my husband says I “grind exceeding slow”); (2) I’m never up-to-date on the latest bestsellers (however many shades of whatever, I haven’t read it); and (3) I am only too aware that what excites me as a reader may well elicit nothing but yawns from some of my closest friends. When on occasion I do make a recommendation that hits the mark, my delight probably exceeds that of my happy customer. So on December 26, my first two bookstore customers brought joy to my heart.

The first person in the door on Wednesday wanted a book I’d written about on my blog (an indirect recommendation) and happily, at my suggestion, added Donald Hall’s String Too Short To Be Saved to his purchase, along with one of my new Dog Ears Books book bags. I am thoroughly confident that he will not be disappointed in either book (especially the Donald Hall), so that felt good. Then the very next customer came for a second copy of Iron Hunter, autobiography of Chase S. Osborne, our most colorful Michigan governor and the only governor ever elected from the U.P.,  a book I’d recommended to her two days earlier as a gift for someone on her list. The recipient was so enthralled that he couldn’t stop raving about the story, and everyone else in the family wanted to read it right away! Luckily, I had another copy in stock.

In the midst of December anxiety this year (surgery, storms, and power outages, to name only a few), I went on a binge of escapism, reading three Alexander McCall Smith novels back to back. I’m still escaping but in smaller doses now, a chapter or two at a time in a book of geology essays by Ronald Parker called The Tenth Muse: The Pursuit of Earth Science. How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

If rocks do not argue, however, geologists sometimes do, and Parker’s essays touch from time to time on controversies in the field. His own theory of energy buffers flew in the face of the old gradualist dogma. The laws of crystallography were overturned by the discovery of a fivefold symmetry “forbidden” by said laws. But while graduate students have nightmares, and academic careers rise and fall, those of us outside academic geology departments can remain calm and unruffled while surveying outbreaks of heresy, defense of orthodoxy, heated debate, and outcomes that make or break academic careers. It’s somewhat akin to reading of philosophical and military conflicts in medieval China.

Then there are the lovely, intriguing thoughts. Parker writes of the “safe” world of crystallography, the “security” to be found in its laws, and he finds it significant that the study arose in the West, where symmetry has always been held in high regard.

We see it in architecture, poetry, politics, and machines—indeed in almost every element of our lives. The angles between the edges of paper are universally 90 degrees, and it is unthinkable that it could be otherwise. The size of the [right]* shoe is the exact mirror-image duplicate of the left, even though with most of us the right foot is larger than the left.

Many friends who think they know us would probably be surprised that David, the artist, is the lover of symmetry, while I, the bookwoman, prefer asymmetrical balance. I think people would expect the reverse of the two of us, but I felt much more at home in the next paragraph of Parker’s essay on crystals:

Objects in the Zen world should lack symmetry, just as the natural world lacks symmetry. Left is not the same as right any more than yesterday is the same as tomorrow. ... A bowl from a German factory is perfectly shaped, with no variation from the circular cross section at any cut parallel to its base. A Japanese raiku bowl is intentionally made asymmetrical by being picked out of the kiln with tongs while the hot silicate mass is still plastic. Each Western bowl is, ideally, just the same as every other. 

... Each raiku bowl is obviously unique, just as each carrot or tree or person is unique.

Two memories emerge as I re-read these lines, pausing with delight and repeating aloud, “Left is not the same as right any more than yesterday is the same as tomorrow,” my mind’s eye glancing fondly in Henri Bergson’s direction. One is a memory of the small museum buildings just to the east of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. At least, I am remembering them as two. Perhaps they are one building with two separate exhibit rooms, but that is really beside the point. The first large exhibit space contained crystals. I explored each case and dutifully admired the colors and facets, but they left me unmoved. In the second exhibit space were fossils of prehistoric mammals, and I shiver now to remember my feelings as I gazed on the remains of an ancient proto-mouse. A fellow creature! It lived and breathed, “saw sunset glow,” ate and procreated and died. I could feel for the animal fossil.

Then there was the summer a friend happened to mention that her kitchen lacked a good wooden salad bowl. My weekend flea market trips took on the flavor of a mission, and finally, having examined and rejected any number of possibilities, I bought my friend not one but two wooden salad bowls. Each seemed perfect to me in a different way, one in the regular, Western way, and the other in the imperfect Zen way. “So I bought them both.” Her husband immediately judged the regular bowl to be the better, saying of the other one that it was too heavy at the base and had a sloping rim. “I know, I know--.” My friend smiled at me and understood without explanation.

Despite his love of symmetry, David shares my fondness for animal bones and recognizes what I treasure in irregular oddities. He finds me rather an oddity sometimes. When I turn to geology as escape reading, he shakes his head and laughs.

I’ve looked into the remaining pages of my current book and see, to my great relief, that there is nothing there on fracking. It isn’t that I’m sticking my head in the sand permanently, you understand—I’ve faced and will face again this important geological and economic issue—but for now it’s holiday time, the last week of the year, with long, cold nights and short, chill days, and I’m thrilled to see, coming up in the very next essay (am reading about salt at present) a reference to those “Chinese paintings with a mystical-looking land with towering, steep-sided hills rising above a flat plain.” Oh, boy! Yes! We have seen that landscape in travelogues and marveled to realize that it is realistically represented, not stylized, in the Chinese paintings.

This is what I call very relaxing reading. There's a lot to be said for aesthetic distance.

[*There was a typographical error in the sentence, with "left" appearing twice and "right" not at all, but the intended meaning was clear in context.]

Another Full Weekend Gone By

Friday: Parade Serendipity and Poetry Mystery

Leaving my bookstore to walk to the post office on Friday morning, at the last minute I grabbed my camera. Good impulse! Right up at the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba I encountered an unexpected surprise: the Northport Children’s Center on parade! The occasion for the parade was the fund-raiser auction to be held on Friday evening.

Another surprise greeted me at the post office. Remember the mysterious poem someone sent me in the mail? The p.o. box held a second poem from H., again typed on lined paper folded to form its own envelope and bearing interesting stamps. John at the post office deciphered “Metroplex” and tells me that means the poem was mailed from somewhere in the Detroit area. More than that he could not determine.

Here is the new poem:

Saturday: One of My Old Favorites Finds a New Home, Booksellers on Holiday Visit Northport, and Wildflowers Bloom in the Woods

Was it only coincidence, or was it the magic of touch at work again? Coming to the bookstore on Saturday, I’d picked up one of my favorite books (one my son and I enjoyed many times over when he was little, though not this copy) and photographed it for my blog, and that very day someone bought the book.

Silly Petunia thought owning and carrying a book around made her wise. The beginning of true wisdom came with her realization that she had to learn to read.

Any surprise it was a grade school teacher who bought Petunia?

There is no telling on any particular day who will walk in the door and what they will buy, though it’s always obvious which ones are the dog-lovers, and Sarah (I’m a little embarrassed to admit) is quick to detect which pockets hold dog treats. Only after one couple had been thoroughly and shamelessly—and successfully!—propositioned by Sarah did I learn that they were colleagues of mine from Ohio. Yes, real, dedicated independent bookstore proprietors everywhere in the world see each other as colleagues, not competitors. It was very pleasant making shop talk with Joe and Linda Diamond from Beehive Books in Delaware, Ohio. Joe and Linda travel the same way I do--from bookstore to bookstore. Here they are with Linda’s purchase (yes, I strongly recommended the book), Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust: A Memoir. Since their store sells all new books, I didn’t want them to miss this one.

Before they got out the door, while Linda and I were still chatting, Joe stopped by the April poetry table and picked up Jim Harrison’s Songs of Unreason. He bought that book before he left. Good choice! It made me happy to have two excellent Michigan writers (Jim used to live here, and Ben, not a native, lives in Michigan now) finding a new home and new fans in Ohio.


When we got home later in the day, Sarah and I went out in the woods. That was good, too, as it always is.

Sunday: Morels, Laundry, and (Always) More Books

The morels were only two in number, gift of a friend, so rather than mixing them with our cheesy scrambled eggs, I sauteed them separately and posed them atop a dollop of light sour cream on top of the eggs. It was a good way to start a busy day. I had a lot of laundry to do and a sunny day to hang it out on the line. I also had half a book still to get through before a discussion group meeting in the evening. But the garden beckoned: Its edge needed cutting back. Weeds needed removing. Soil needed to be worked up. And seeds begged to be planted! But it all got done, and a little housework besides. (Will miracles never cease?) And now, as I post this past weekend's highlights, it's already Tuesday. How did that happen? The usual way, I suppose. More another day on my reading of Annie Dillard's Living By Fiction and continued reading about Americans in Paris and the Hellenistic Period in the Old World.


For today, Happy May Day, everyone!

“Rebel” Going “Conservative”?

Forsythia in full bloom

I’ve written about Andrew Laties before, but it’s been a while. Turns out that the author of Rebel Bookseller (and how could I possibly have resisted the title?), is still around, and the name rang a bell, but without a citation to the book I would never have recognized him in the piece published by ForeWord magazine in their Spring 2012 issue.

A bit of background review is in order here. Laties has been a bookseller since he dropped out of college in 1979 and was hired by the manager of a new B. Dalton store in Chicago. He quickly went on from there to bookstore ownership. His book, Rebel Bookseller, advised would-be shopkeepers in his beloved field:

Improvise your own indie.

 Beat back the chains!

That was in 2005. Now? On a panel (Laties was there to promote his book) with bookseller Josh Spencer last September, the “rebel” was sorry that online seller Spencer had opened a storefront in his own neighborhood. Huh? The reasoning is so bizarre that lest I not be believed, I will here quote directly:

Unfortunately, in my experience bookstores like Josh Spencer’s, when successful, can be damaged by the gentrifying forces they unleash. By generating economic growth—because book-lover foot traffic attracts coffee-shop owners and restaurateurs—these kinds of pioneering stores can get priced out of the rental real estate they occupy. The alternative, establishing a bookstore in a library, could ensure that the store would not suffer from changes in real estate values.

You booksellers with open shops or thinking of opening same? You are driving up rents! How dare you? It’s your own throat you’re cutting with your browser-friendly Main Street atmosphere, and you should be ashamed of yourselves! All selling of used books should be done online and only online, or it should be done by Friends of Library groups, not private entrepreneurs!

–Sorry, I have to stop here a minute and ask (1) why Laties thinks bookstores are responsible for driving up rents and (2) why an improvement in a neighbor’s economy is seen as a bad result, other than the possibility that a bookstore will be priced out of the neighborhood. Do we booksellers really influence the rental market that much? Oh, yes, he says, because bookstores are followed by coffee houses and restaurants and overall neighborhood gentrification. (Why not blame the coffee houses?) Well, and is it the responsibility of any retailer to assure that property values remain depressed? This has got to be the most peculiar argument I have ever heard against opening a bricks-and-mortar shop selling used books! Why not credit bookstores with revitalizing neighborhoods? Why shouldn’t coalitions of property owners chase after booksellers, making them good, long-term rental offers in exchange for the gentrification service they provide?

[Skip this paragraph if you like, but I cannot resist a digression. There are people who say we should not be surprised that Aristotle argued in favor of slavery, given the times in which he lived, and they go on to say that we should not criticize him for that view. I cannot disagree more strongly. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, who had some peculiar and reprehensible views of his own (e.g., his penchant for totalitarian government), was able to see that slavery was wrong. More to my present point, however, is the badness of Aristotle’s argument, added to the fact that he felt an argument was necessary. If everyone living at his time had accepted slavery as right and customary, he would have had no reason to mount a defense of it, so obviously there were other opinions. And then the argument, which I will not go over here, but which rests on an analogy that is discarded almost as quickly as it is brought in. As I say, it is a particularly bad argument, and Aristotle was the inventor of Western logic.]

Back to my tirade of the day: Whenever anyone advances a strange argument, it is worth asking why that person thought argument was necessary. Does it help to understand that the writer’s last two jobs have been running bookstores in conjunction with nonprofit museums? He is a salary-man now, not an independent. Moreover, he has developed and sells bookstore management services and would like to see them sold to more FOL (Friends of Library) bookstores. But no, I’m still puzzled. Obviously I'm not seeing the whole picture.

In analyzing argument, I go for structure first, then fill in details

A “bookstore” within a library does not have to pay rent, and it benefits from an endless stream of books donated to the library and from countless hours put in by dedicated volunteers. No one wants to see libraries put out of business, and no one wants to see library sales stop (least of all those of us who are the biggest spenders at those sales, buying stock for the stores we maintain at great expense and labor). Established library bookstores obviously have a place in today’s world also, although there my feelings are more mixed: whenever tax-supported institutions go into competition with small business, the playing field is far from level. But arguing against the opening of used bookstores in neighborhoods because they would drive up property values? Am I alone in finding this one of the strangest arguments put forth in our admittedly eccentric business?

What point or points does Laties most want to make? He wants to see bookshops open in libraries, and he doesn’t want bookstores to drive up rents in cheap neighborhoods, but the ‘why’ of these two elements and how they go together continues to elude me. Something else he says is that FOL groups should not be relying on professional booksellers to come in on a volunteer basis to price books for stores in libraries. He thinks it would be better to have experts on as paid staff.

Would I give up my independence for a salary and benefits? (Make me an offer, and I’ll think it over!) Is this what Laties has up his sleeve—a continued livelihood for us poor, struggling booksellers? One thing is certain: change is upon us. The world is changing for writers, for publishers, for booksellers, and for librarians. Andrew Laties has always had a lot of ideas. Maybe the ideas would be better off without some of the arguments. Or maybe the arguments would work better if it were clearer why he wants us to share his conclusions.