Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Letters: 'Ironic Disconnects'

2010-11-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

A Non-Writer's Life

2010-06-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

I feel a blog coming on. Maybe a few of them. I am embarrassed by my lack of writing but honestly, opening a second bookstore this year pretty much knocked the wind out of me. When I clean, well, anything these days--my desk, my closet, my car--the detritus I sift through carbon dates to early 2009 when it all kind of stopped while I adjusted to working twice as hard and being twice as exhausted. But I have always been someone who processed through writing, either through my journal (may she rest in pieces) or through essays/columns/diatribes. Often I don't really know what I think until I have written it out. So this last year has been really a mess intellectually and emotionally. Since I haven't been writing, I have only a sketchy idea of what I really think.
The satellite surveillance in our home's gas meter, had it been working properly (they just replaced it last week and that's how I found out it was in our basement) would have sent back to control central reports of me becoming deeply engaged in really embarrassing television programs this past year. Really embarrassing. Ok, not "Pimp My Ride" embarrassing, but definitely "Operation Repo" embarrassing. Basically, I have just been coming home and collapsing for a year or so, keeping my brain on life support by massaging it with video stimulation.
I can't promise that I will cease and desist the embarrassing television sessions, but I do know that I must pull it together intellectually or the two or three people who still respect me will stop talking to me.
I have delusions of great outbursts of verbiage. Thing is, when you are a writer, and I believe I am, just like alcholics, writing or not, you are still a writer in your skin. But unlike alcoholics, who must not drink if they want to survive, writers must write to survive. Writer's block, a much over-abused term, is nevertheless a real experience and it has many expressions. One expression is creating so many other work obligations that you delude yourself into thinking you have an excused abscence from writing. Not so, my imaginary friends! Yet while it could be said that there are no excused absences from doing the thing that you are called to do, it could also be said that the whole concept of obligation and avoidance is the wrong paradigm altogether and essentially mean-spirited.
In the interest of not being mean to myself, I will dip a finger back into the ink and start with the blog. I knew I was ready to make a fool of myself in virtual print again when I found myself scrubbing the copper bottoms of my cooking pots last Saturday. I mean I was really working at it with Bon Ami and a mildly abrasive scrubbie thingie. I did three pots before I forced myself to stop. Manic unnecessary cleaning is always a sign that I am resurfacing and about to walk into that big scarey place of the blank white screen and the patient, yet slightly smirking, cursor. I didn't set down a word that day but it didn't matter. I knew from the chafed red skin on my hands that it was but a matter of time.

New York for Booksellers

2009-07-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

I spent last week in Manhattan making the rounds of major publishers’ offices with LBB’s events coordinator extraordinaire, Danielle Borsch. It’s a good idea to check in face-to-face every so often to renew working relationships and introduce ourselves to the bevy of publicists who are new to their companies since the last time we visited. Since author appearances can account for up to a quarter of our monthly sales on good months, we are especially concerned that St. Louis is on the list when author tours are being booked. We came loaded down with copies of the presentation Danielle compiled, detailing our many and varied author event successes, the great St. Louis media coverage of those events, and all the wonderful organizations we partner with to make the events memorable.

The visits went well. We met with folks from Harper, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Houghton Mifflin, MPS (St. Martin’s, Picador, Holt) and Grove. I almost had coffee with Rachel from Feminist Press at the last minute to discuss their new, 40th anniversary “trade-friendly” list, but I couldn’t organize myself to add another task on the morning of our return to St. Louis. Everyone we did meet with was great: no one fell asleep during our 1-hour presentation, and some even feigned believable enthusiasm as we detailed KMOX’s demographics and described the menu at our Friend’s reception with Alton Brown. And no one seemed to miss the chocolate business cards from Bissinger’s that we gave out a couple of years ago when we last visited. In these leaner, greener times, it seemed universally acceptable to trim down the swag.

What was immediately obvious as we were led down long hallways of vacant cubicles to small conference rooms where our meetings took place, is that the economy is the driving force behind everything these days. Everyone is looking for ways to cut costs. Last I heard, an author tour can cost a publisher about $1500 per city visited, so publicists were looking for reasons to send authors to St. Louis.

We gave them plenty of reasons, but it was actually one of them that gave us the most impressive reason to send authors to St. Louis. Carl Lennertz, Vice President for Independent Retailing at Harper, a man who has a genius for grassroots marketing, a gigantic, career’s worth of love for independent bookstores, someone whom I’m proud to call a friend, introduced us to a roomful of publicists as a great bookstore in a city that ranks 15th nationwide in book sales. I always count on Carl to know these sorts of things. I’m never sure how he knows them, but I trust him implicitly. It’s his job, after all. I also learned at this visit that coffee, like wine, can come in a cardboard box. It was so cool! The ultimate in super-sized beverages. I definitely prefer boxed coffee to boxed wine. At any rate, reason # 1 to keep St. Louis on the author tour lists: we’re in the top 15 book markets. Give yourselves a pat on the back, reading St. Louis!

Throughout the week, I made note of an assortment of vastly unimportant publishing industry detritus:
All book people have piles and piles of books and book materials everywhere. Even the fanciest of offices in the tallest of buildings lack an organized means for absorbing their embarrassment of riches.
No one thinks this is even remotely a problem. Rather, it is comforting to know that should you suddenly collapse in the line of duty, anywhere you fall, books will catch you.
The Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Lincoln Center subway stop is not the only place on that corner that you can buy coffee. There is perfectly excellent café in Lincoln Center that opens early enough in the morning for any respectable coffee drinker.
Authors love that bookstores want them to come to their stores.
Not all of these authors have books that are still in print. Case in point: my friend, novelist Jenifer Levin, whose books need to be reprinted, was delighted by the idea that we had come to New York in search of authors. (Jenifer also knows where a quietly fabulous sushi restaurant is just off Columbus Circle.) Case in point #2, Chris Bohjalian, whose books are very much in print, has let me know via Facebook, that he very much intends to visit Left Bank Books with his next book. (Someone tell his publicist!)
By and large, publicists are not necessarily baseball fans even though they’ve handled any number of baseball greats’ memoirs. Therefore, they do not really know that they should, as de facto Mets fans, be put out by a visit from Cardinals country.
There is a great Italian restaurant (Clean your plate! Nana will be offended if you don’t) on the south side of the building that is home to Random House. No idea what it’s called, but I intend to visit again.
There is an amazing restaurant downstairs from Houghton Mifflin, too: Todd English’s Olives. I’m probably the only person who thinks it’s ironic that this genius celebrity chef and restaurateur’s cookbooks are published by Simon & Schuster, not Houghton Mifflin.
There is a tiny Russian bookstore across the street from the historic Flatiron Building, home of St. Martin’s press. The Russian bookstore is on the second floor and, aside from Tales of Beedle the Bard in Russian, it looks like they last received new inventory in about 1965.
Has anyone noticed my publishing notes revolve more around food than books?
I missed a reading at an NYC independent bookstore with one of my current favorites, Jim Lynch, author of the incredible novel, Border Songs, my hands-down summer fiction pick. I was too busy eating sushi with Jenifer Levin.

Cave Canem

2009-07-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

Lydie Hakizimana, owner of the 3 year old Rwandan bookstore, Librairie Drakkar, is "slightly" afraid of dogs. This in spite of having a nearly two year old dog herself, albeit one with a jumping up problem. But mainly the problem is that she is to spend time at my home in August, home of Bruno, the 93 pound American Bulldog (http://www.bruno.blogspot.com/, a blog in sorely in need of updating) and his canine sister, the lovely Greta, a 45 pound huntin' dawg. Not that these dogs are dangerous. But Bruno is, well, a presence. I have assured Lydie that if she has reservations about staying with us, I will arrange for a pet-free experience in the home of a friend. But I will regret the lost opportunities for all of the informal ways you get to know a person when you sleep under the same roof.

Lydie sent me a long wonderful get-to-know-you email yesterday and I replied with about a thousand questions of my own. As I expected, she reports that bookselling in Rwanda is a challenge. The country is quite poor and many are suspicious of reading in general. When business is bad, we retailers know it's good to have a plan B Or C. For Lydie, she has managed to become the sole Rwandan distributor for a line of publishers contained under the Pearson umbrella. This is really great! I can't even imagine what life for Left Bank Books would be like if we had sold distribution rights for a publishing "concern" the size of Pearson. But Rwanda is a land-locked speck on the African map, a speck of reluctant readers, so Lydie's plan C is selling electricity. I have no idea how this works but I intend to find out.

Another thing Lydie did while business was bad was have two children. Efficient! They are 2 and 1 years of age and I'm waiting to hear how she will manage being away from them for over a week in August when she comes to the state for the mentor-ship. Probably the best thing about the mentorship for Lydie will be the chance to sleep in. (As long as she isn't kept up at night worrying about a hopelessly simple and slightly neurotic bulldog.)

In the meantime, I am looking for a sponsor to underwrite my part of Lydie's visit to St. Louis. I need about $1500.00 to send me to Dallas for the summit conference that kicks off the Peace through Business program and also pay for Lydie's plane fare roundtrip Dallas-St. Louis. I'm exlporing some local options but if there is anyone out there reading this who knows of a good fit, let me know.

Please note:

It's a bit odd to write about Lydie knowing she is following this blog. Lydie, I'm counting on you to set me straight if I get my facts wrong or get too personal. Feel free to use the comment portion of my blog to let my two and a half readers (including Jarek who doesn't have a choice) what you think.

Amazon Takes Ball, Goes Home. Guess What? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Ball

2009-07-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

This week Rhode Island and North Carolina passed laws that, in effect, require Amazon to collect sales tax on sales made through its affiliates based in those states. New York passed a similar law last year estimating that it could bring in up to $100 million annually in previously uncollected sales tax. Amazon threw a big temper tantrum. It is suing New York. Refusing to play fair like the rest of us, this week, it dumped its affiliates in Rhode Island and North Carolina. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, in Rhode Island, which reportedly is facing a $590 million dollar budget deficit, an estimated 2,000 affiliates are affected. (Missouri’s 2009 budget deficit is $542 million. If we could collect even a fraction of what New York hopes to take in, wouldn't it be loverly?)

But even as 48 states face severe budget shortages, and as many of them balance their budgets by cutting services to children, the poor or elderly, and to education, the uniform reponse to Amazon's bullying from various Amazon apologists is how much money will be lost by "small busnesses." That doesn't even make sense.

I have one thing to say about this: anything they can do we can do better.

All Amazon does is take orders through its website and send people books. It’s not rocket science. It’s retail bookselling and it’s what bookstores do. We have websites. Websites you can affiliate with. We pay a higher percent than Amazon to the affiliate. If you or your organization affiliates with Amazon, try us, you’ll like us.

We know how to ring up sales and put books in boxes and ship them by whatever means necessary. We’ve actually delivered books on foot. We giftwrap. We make recommendations.

We also operate bookfairs for local nonprofits as fundraisers. We offer corporate and institutional discounts. We do author events.

We answer the phone. We also answer our emails. We, the booksellers, are not some auto-reply thingie that is the online version of press 1, press 2 press 3, go away. Of course, that means you might have to actually interact with a human being at some point. A human being you might run into at the grocery store who will remember your name. But if you don’t want to talk to us, we’ll stick with email.

Let me say this again.

Left Bank Books, along with all the other 1500-plus Indiebound.org member bookstores takes orders through our website and sends people books.

Left Bank Books, along with all the other 1500-plus Indiebound.org member bookstores also allows anyone to affiliate through our website to sell their own books or earn money on the sales of other books for their organization.

We pay a higher percent of the sales to the affiliate than Amazon does.

We pay state and local sales tax so that our communities can maintain basic infrastructure and services. We do not threaten to stop doing business with you. We are good citizens.

But the public discourse right now is focused on how horrible it is to be dumped by Amazon. How much money everyone will lose. Hello! Is anybody out there paying attention? You have about 1,500 other immediate “job” openings. What if those 2,000 Amazon-exes in Rhode Island affiliated with one or more of the eleven Indiebound bookstores in Rhode Island? That’s a win-win-win: you sell your books, you make more money off the sales, you support the local economy and your state’s operating budget. It doesn't get any better than this.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a street full of little shops to walk down on a sunny day, a street maintained by your local government, a street you feel safe on because local law enforcement is at full staff, a street leading to a nice park bench in a public park where you can sit down, enjoy the publicly supported landscaping and have a read?

This won’t happen if you send 100% of the price of a purchase to Amazon.com. None of it. Economic impact studies have repeatedly shown that for every $100 spent with a locally-owned business, about $68 is reinvested in the community. If it is spent with nationally-owned chain, only about $43 stays in the community. Send it to Amazon and none of it gets reinvested locally.

Given the economy and the giant deficits state and local governments are facing, it seems like a no-brainer to me that collecting sales tax from Amazon would not only level the playing field for the rest of us who do pay taxes, which would in turn keep more dollars in the community, it would generate desperately needed revenue and create and retain jobs.

What most who shop on or affiliate with Amazon.com don’t realize is that as the Wal-Mart of the internet, they have bullied publishers into giving them deals not offered to any other booksellers. As they increasingly monopolize retail bookselling, they increasingly control publishing. That little computer “misstep” last month when they “accidentally” removed all titles perceived to be gay or lesbian from their sales-rankings gave authors and the public alike a glimmering of what’s in store for us down the Amazon road.

I say, don’t go there. Take another road. A real road. The one that leads to a real bookstore in a real town. Your town.

The Importance of Telling Stories

2009-06-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight I have begun reading Philip Gourevitch's incredible book, We with to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. I did not read it when it came out some ten years ago even though it was a bestseller in our store. I felt I could not. The news accounts of the genocide in Rwanda I had read in the papers and magazines had been more than enough for me. I have a vivid imagination and am more than a little empathic. Describe your headache to me and I'll develop a sympathy headache in response. I was heartbroken at the senseless, unspeakable cruelty of it. I was enraged by our government's anemic response. What could I do? My heart went out to the suffering and the dead. Yet I knew I was not relief mission material. I would continue to do my part by selling copies of Philip's book and speaking out against racial and ethnic prejudice when I encountered it in closer quarters.
Now I find myself needing to understand a country whose history had been reduced in my mind to only one terrible moment of barely 100 days, days in which, Philip writes, between eight hundred thousand and a million people were slaughtered at a rate three times that of the Jewish holocaust, a rate matched by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How can I be an effective mentor to a Rwandan bookseller if I can only see her through this horrific prism? I want to try to know something of Rwanda that does not reduce it to its darkest hour. I want to see Lydie as more than a victim or survivor. I want to know what Rwandans and their country are like when they aren't killing one another. When they are working, or playing, going to movies or taking a drive. This is not something you get from news accounts, which are reductive and focused on the fearful awful.
Thankfully, there are books. I have not been able to travel the world as I have always imagined I would, but I have been grateful for armchair travel. When I learned I would be hosting Lydie, my first thought was I have to read up. It seems, ironically, that at least in the United States, when you want to read up on Rwanda, what you get is primarily, accounts of the genocide. Fine. I'll start there. It's at the center of my mind anyway.
But I won't talk about what little I've learned so far from Philip's book about the genocide specifically. What I want to consider for a moment is this passage in his book:

"But there is no reliable record of the precolonial state. Rwandans had no alphabet; their tradition was oral, therefore malleable; and because their society is fiercely hierarchical the stories they tell of their past tend to be dictated by those who hold power, either through the state or in opposition to it. Of course, at the core of Rwanda's historical debates lie competeing ideas about the relationship between Hutus and Tutsis, so it is a frustration that the precolonial roots of the relationship are largely unknowable. As the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani has observed: ' That much of what passed as historical fact in academic circles has to be considered as tentative--if not outright fictional--is becoming clear as post-genocidal sobriety compels a growing number of historians to take seriously the political uses to which their writing have been put, and their readers to question the certainty with which many a claim has been advanced."

Wow.
There is so much in that paragraph. What first comes to my mind are the implications for a bookseller. There is no alphabet for the indigenous language. The traditions are oral and the stories are told by the ruling classes. Academic historical accounts of the place are suspect. I think of our store, of Left Bank Books, of the novels--stories we tell about ourselves--of the history and politics, how relatively easy it is to take for granted that we will always have those stories, fictional or not, these accounts that tells us who we are, make us real. I wonder how Lydie and her Librairie Drakkar can be keepers of her country's culture. I am reminded of how even in a culture that has been as extensively documented as ours has, so many stories are still to be told. How many have historically been repressed or left untold. Stories of American women's lives that only began to surface with the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s. Stories of African Americans. It wasn't until the financial success of Terry Macmillan's book Waiting to Exhale that mainstream American publishing took seriously the stories black women tell. I am filled with questions about what, besides scientific texts and the literature of other countries, one will find on the shelves of a Rwandan bookstore.

This Just In

2009-06-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

While I was spending the day feeling sorry for myself--too tired to do anything, too cash-strapped to go anywhere, the world of technology conspiring to put Left Bank under--I got an unexpected email from a customer and sister business owner, Lisa Hollenbeck, co-owner of The Alpine Shop. The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) had put out a call for women in business to act as mentors for businesswomen in Afghanistan and Rwanda and were desperate to fill a couple of slots, most notably, they were in need of a bookstore.

This seemed significant and I responded to the contact in the email. It is now barely 24 hours from my first timid note offering my services and it looks like Left Bank Books will be hosting Lydie, a bookseller in Rwanda the week of August 19-24!!

In fact, Jarek and I will be hosting Lydie in our home (if she's not averse to dogs). It will be a bit of a Left Bank immersion experience for her.

I know very little more at this point--only that she is looking to work to establish libraries for schools and hospitals, that the program we are to be a part of is called Peace Through Business, is in its second year, was created by the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women and also has something to do with Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas. They build democracy by enabling women to contributed to the GNP of their countries. Hmmm...will have much to learn this summer!

I am pinching myself. I keep expecting them to write and tell me they've changed their minds. But I've got Lydie's email address and we will spend the summer getting to know each other.
(And I will spend the summer cleaning my house!)

Seriously, this is an amazing chance to make a difference in someone's life halfway across the world. And the circumstances under which Lydie has to do business will no doubt thrust my own pathetic whining into stark relief!

I will continue to post as the story unfolds.

#amazonfail: An Impactful Story

2009-04-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

High-tech bibliophiles were aTwitter recently when news surfaced that Amazon.com had “de-ranked” what, according to a company spokesman, amounted to over 57,000 titles--primarily, but not exclusively, books with gay, lesbian and transgender content. By de-ranking these titles, which takes them out of the best-selling tabulations on Amazon, they also dropped from Amazon’s coveted search features. Seemingly overnight, the Wal Mart of the internet had rendered queer publishing nearly invisible.

The problem came to light when Mark Probst, author of a gay-themed novel, The Filly, noticed that two other gay male romances, Transgressions by Erastes and False Colors by Alex Beecroft, had lost their sales rankings. The next day Probst saw the ranking disappear from his book.

According to his blog, Probst wrote to Amazon and received this response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

Within moments, “#amazonfail” was the number one topic on Twitter. According to LA Times’ book blogger Carolyn Kellogg, de-ranked books included Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, Fun Home by Allison Bechdel, and Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. These are all best-selling, award-winning authors, who, not coincidentally, have given readings at Left Bank Books. Other affected titles included Becoming a Man by Paul Monette, which won a National Book Award, and Orlando by shameless pornographer Virginia Woolf.

Patricia Smith, director of Amazon’s corporate communications, replied to Kellog’s blog seemingly within minutes, stating the whole mess "was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."

Within less time than it will take to write this article, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener updated Smith’s comments with this statement: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles. In fact, it impacted (sic.) 57,310 books in a number of broad categories… This problem impacted (sic.) books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.”

Setting aside the fact that the word “impacted” is actually an adjective, not a verb, what Amazon initially reported as a policy for handling adult material quickly morphed into a computer glitch and was now being called a ham-fisted error. Within moments after that, Amazon further attributed the public relations mess to a programmer’s error in France. Left Bank Books also believes in blaming the French for everything—in fact, we actually named ourselves after a Parisian neighborhood.

But before one could even complete a Twitter in response to Amazon’s response to its previous response, a hacker took credit for the policy/glitch/ham-fisted error/French meestaque. Whatever you believe happened, it seems fairly clear that Amazon only corrected the situation after an uproar by authors and glbt activists called attention to it.

I can’t even believe I’m giving them this much digital time.

Their hegemonic control of intellectual property in this country would never have been legal prior to Reagan’s presidency. Anti-trust, fair trade and anti-monopoly laws would have regulated their unchecked growth into every area of book publishing. They would possibly have even been required to pay sales tax to the municipalities they drain of revenue. In these troubled times that would amount to tens of millions of dollars for Missouri.

Some, including Chris Rice (who has also read at Left Bank Books), author and board president of the “gay-themed” Lambda Literary Foundation, praised Amazon for its quick correction of the glitch and for being “welcoming home to LGBT writers”.

I was a Lammy judge for twelve years. My anthology, This is What Lesbian Looks Like, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000. My publisher went out of business shortly after I received my award. Many of the women’s and gay bookstores who truly supported glbt authors, who contributed financially and socially to their communities and served as watchdogs and spokespersons for gay visibility are gone now too. The disappearance of these precious assets can be attributed in large part to the appearance of chain stores and Amazon. As too many glbt readers (really, too many readers period) became bedazzled by the shimmering appearance of these bookstore-like imitations of the real thing, they forgot their roots long enough for those roots to all but disappear. We are left with the illusion of gay-friendly e- and re-tailers.

What Amazon does for “its” lgbt authors is gladly make money off their books. When was the last time you attended a reading by your favorite author hosted by Amazon? When was the last time an Amazon spokesperson addressed high school students about being glbt, gave door prizes to grass roots gay organizations, co-founded local youth organizations or anti-violence projects? When was the last time they hired a gay person in your town or paid sales tax to your government? When was the last sunny day you could walk down the street and window shop on Amazon? When was the last time you recognized your Amazon shop-keeper in the grocery store and he or she greeted you by name? I’m sorry, but just because they virtually control the means of production, I do not believe they deserve praise for their paternalistic “benevolence” towards the gay community. Or any other community of disenfranchised people for that matter. Now that they have cornered the market, of course they plan on continuing to corner it.

Today, the issues of glbt publishing and bookselling are complex contradictions as glbt publishers go out of business, mainstream publishers “forget” to publish glbt writing, and the technology of print-on-demand and pay-to-publish become more accessible to anyone with an email account. Digital publishing is yet another wrinkle. As a proponent of free speech and an open marketplace of ideas, I welcome the promise of this diversity. But let the reader beware: put all your books in one virtual shopping cart long enough and one day you could discover that much more than your reading choices have been “impacted”.

viva http://www.left-bank.com/

The State of Bookselling: Hell No, We Won't Go. Gently. Into That Good Night.

2009-03-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

In these profoundly uneasy times, no one is left untouched by the economic meltdown that is occurring, including bookstores and publishers. Job elimination is almost a knee-jerk reflex among publishers these days. Publisher’s Weekly gave up keeping up with departing editors, publicists and sales reps. and has instead instituted a regular feature optimistically called “Comings and Goings”. Here, the suddenly jobless can list their new email addresses in the highly unlikely event that some other publisher or box-store will have an opening.

HarperCollins, the publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, recently eliminated the Collins in its name along with more than a dozen in its national sales force. Houghton Mifflin announced a freeze on new manuscripts. Borders closed its flagship Chicago store along with several others and is announcing more job cuts as I write this. Hell in a handcart is where everyone is going on their stay-cations this year.

Ironically, independent bookstores have been more or less holding our own. True, some of the greats have become lates, notably: Olsson’s Books and Records in Washington DC, Cody’s and Stacey’s in San Francisco, the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee. Others, like the incomparable Tattered Cover in Colorado, have down-sized. But the American Booksellers Association has seen an uptick in new store openings, a nearly unexplainable phenomenon in this economy. In 2008 the ABA reported the opening of 69 new bookstores-- including two born out of the ashes of Harry W. Schwartz and Puddn’head Books in Webster Groves; and 4 branch stores--including Left Bank Books downtown—in 2008. In fact, we opened our downtown store in the absolute financial nadir of 2008.

You may wonder, are we out of our minds?!?!? Well, yes. But you have to be a little bit crazy to do something wonderful. Independent booksellers are driven almost exclusively by an ill-advised passion for books and an overwhelming desire to keep literary culture alive against all rational odds. To this end, we make financial sacrifices that no other retail business person would tolerate. In fact, I was once told by another book industry professional that I should lead a workshop on tolerating debt, because we at Left Bank Books were especially adept at it. As this economic crisis has deepened, I’ve had a number of conversations with other booksellers and we all agree that the financial freak-out the country is experiencing is, ironically business as usual for us.

But we booksellers are also driven by our passion for the First Amendment and, like librarians, we do not like being told we can’t do something. We have a sense of mission in keeping a literary marketplace alive and thriving and that mission often sees us through when all else tells us to back quickly away. We know in our bones that the health of the arts, of our communities, and even of democracy itself are at risk when there are only a few sources for published material.

To be sure, times are very hard in publishing and bookselling and many of us are hanging by the same fragile threads of hope and determination that you are. But we know that people need more than downloadable digital text in times like these, they need community. More than ever, they need places to go other than the spiritually void halls of the mall. They need interaction that has actual meaning, meaning that lies somewhere between how-much-money-did-I-save and how many Hail Marys should I say this week. Bookstores can play an important role in serving that need.

But bookstores sustained by more than the handful of crazy, under-paid booksellers who keep them open and the customers who love them. Bear with me for a little “comings and goings” of my own.

Writers are the reason we are here at all and Left Bank lost two of them recently whom we considered family: Poet Donald Finkel passed away last November. He was a regular at Left Bank and gave one of his last readings at our store. His books (when in print, grr!) have been a favorite on our shelves. We were always happy to see him and are honored to have been part of his community.
We are also deeply saddened by the loss this year of Jean Hutchison who co-authored a lesbian mysteries series set in St. Louis with her partner Marcy Jacobs under the pen name Jean Marcy. Jean was a dear friend and wonderful writer. She always elevated a conversation and made you feel smarter for having listened. She, along with Jean, always supported Left Bank as their own. We will miss Jean’s intellect, wit, and love.

St. Louis lost another bookseller and culture warrior this month—Marcus Watson—who owned Ujamaa Maktaba, the Afro-centric book and gift shop on Manchester and Newstead. Marcus and I shared state-of-the-industry conversations when we could. His little shop on the corner is one of St. Louis’s virtually unknown treasures. He will be missed.

I will also miss terribly my day-long buying and kvetching sessions with Robin Smith, who was down-sized out of a job by the former HarperCollins last month. Robin has been a mainstay of the local book-pedaling scene for a couple of decades. He’s one of those backroom types not many see but who is essential to the running of the machine. He’s also got a wicked good sense of British humor and we truly hope it will see him and his family through this lean time.

Finally, we say goodbye this month to our beloved and fantastic store manager, Erin Quick, who leaves to say hello to that baby she’s been growing all winter. We are very excited for her and we have no idea how we will manage without her. Please be patient with us while we get up to speed. A new baby in the bookstore family reminds us that out of these worst of times we can always find a best of times to give us hope.

Yes We Can

2009-03-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

The people have spoken. We campaigned hard and fast during October, marching through perhaps the worst international economic collapse ever. We asked our Friends for money; we promised to be the best we can be, to serve the people, to assemble a visiting “team” of remarkable thinkers and writers who will challenge, inspire and entertain, to expand our services to a downtown location. We sent out emails asking you to become Friends of Left Bank Books. We invited old Friends to re-up more generously. A couple of weeks after the stock market collapsed, we held a fundraiser with the generous help of our landlord Peter Rothschild and our friends at Duff’s. The results? Nearly one hundred of you responded. We raised almost $14,000!
This vote of confidence was much more than a “bailout”--although it certainly secured our immediate future—it was a huge boost to our battle-sore spirits. Not only did folks join the Friends at generous levels, other folks did what they could by actually spending some portion of their book budgets at Left Bank Books. You have no idea how important that small act is.
Earlier this year we wondered if we could or should keep going. Thanks to your amazing response we don’t wonder if we can. Now we say, “yes we can!” This feels historical. We’re looking to the future, daring to hope for something better. These numbers shatter the “Borders” effect. We see a bright time in literary St. Louis, a St. Louis that not only sees the value in an independent bookstore, it deserves an independent bookstore. It demands an independent bookstore. You demand an independent bookstore! You shall have one.
To be sure, it didn’t look likely. Retail sales in October were the worst in 39 years, according to the ICSC-Goldman-Sachs index. Major retailers reported declines of 10 percent or more. The giant sucking sound in the economy has people preparing for or already in the middle of the worst. What’s odd about this is that while October certainly wasn’t our best month ever, it wasn’t our worst month, either. In fact, thanks to you, our gross income was slightly above last October! If you adjust for the Friends memberships, our book sales were actually down about 11%, echoing the national figures. But since we are booksellers, we consider this business as usual. We’re used to tough times. We know how to hold our breath.
We have no way of knowing what the future brings. We prepare to open our downtown store in cooperation with developer Craig Heller. We continue to make upgrades to our Central West End location so that we can serve 21st century customers in 21st century ways. We will not, as the auto makers have, ask the president-elect to save us from our profligate ways, mostly because our ways have never been profligate, but also because, as independent booksellers, as operators of a small business on Main Street America, that’s simply not what we do. The vertebrae of this country’s economic stability are its small businesses. We don’t normally going around picking your pocket with one hand and asking for a handout with the other.
But even though we don’t know what the future brings, we are willing to take the risk. You’ve asked us to. Thank you, readers, book buyers, and cultural citizens of St. Louis, for voting for Left Bank Books. We don’t take your vote lightly. This next year will not be easy and it will take all of us. We know that cash is short, that times are uncertain. We also know that there are some dozen chain bookstores in the metro area, and a sizeable number of boxes with the A-word on them being delivered to St. Louis doorsteps. They’re opening their doors and selling millions of dollars of books to St. Louisans. Then they’re taking the profits out of town. All we ask is that the next time you do have a few dollars to spend on books, you come to us, or any other locally-owned bookstore for that matter, when you spend them. That’s all. Even a fraction of a percent of the sales going to those chain stores and that online usurper of local economies would make a huge difference. A sustainable difference. But you already knew that.
A final note of hope: the 44th president of the United States is not only a voracious reader, he’s a member of the 57th Street Books/Seminary Coop bookstore in Chicago. He supports his local bookstore and see where it got him? Yes we can, St Louis!

An Open Letter to Booklovers

2008-09-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

The rumors are true. Left Bank Books is opening a bookstore downtown. It will be a second location, which is backed in full by downtown developer Craig Heller. Without his backing, a downtown Left Bank Books would not have happened. It’s a 3-year agreement and if things go well, we will purchase the store from Craig. We will continue to operate our main store in the Central West End. Both stores will carry similar inventories and offer author events. We are busily at work making arrangements for the downtown store, which we hope to open by the end of November.

The downtown store is part of a long-term strategy to re-invigorate Left Bank Books, which has suffered not only the downturn in the economy that affects everyone, but has had to battle the unequal playing field created by Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com. (How that playing field is unequal is an article in itself.) If even a tiny percent of St. Louisans who buy books anywhere else would buy them through Left Bank Books instead, the future of our store would be secured. It’s not about shelling out more, it’s about changing existing spending habits.

As it now stands, we are anything but secure. We struggle constantly with a cash flow that depends largely on smoke and mirrors. As the cost of doing business rises and sales do not, Left Bank workers—and here I must ask you to picture your favorite Left Banker—live on an unworkably low wage. Owners do as well. Burnout is a constant danger. It becomes harder and harder to stock the store as we envision it, and harder, therefore, to serve the community we love.

But we are also absolutely committed to keeping Left Bank Books open and thriving. To that end, we are unfolding our bold plan to build a sustainable future for Left Bank Books. The downtown store is only a part of our plan. A sustainable Left Bank Books begins in the Central West End. As we enter our 40th year and contemplate the un-viability of doing business as usual, the first phase of our bold new plan involved you. We are sending out a plea to our friends, neighbors and customers to support our store. Here are seven things you can do that won’t cost you anything. (And one that will.)
1. Buy books from Left Bank Books
We are not asking you to buy more books than you already do. We are asking you to buy them from Left Bank Books.
2. St. Louis out of Amazon.com
Click through to http://www.left-bank.com/ instead of Amazon. Not only would you be supporting Left Bank Books, you’d be supporting your local tax base as well. No dollar spent on Amazon ever gets recycled into your police, schools, roads, local government, public services, etc. And when is the last time you attended an author event sponsored by Amazon?
3. Friends don’t let friends shop at chain stores.
The next time you hear someone say they’re headed to Barnes & Noble, or they’ll “get it on Amazon”, why not suggest Left Bank instead? Dare to be influential. It works! Remind them that the next time they want to see Chuck Palahniuk or Anne Lamott or even Hillary Clinton, they might not want to drive to Chicago to do so.
4. Give Left Bank gift certificates as gifts
Actually they are Booksense gift certificates, soon to be Indiebound gift certificates, and they’re redeemable at over a thousand independent bookstores nationwide. They are also redeemable on our website. www.left-bank.com
5. Give your corporate and institutional book business to Left Bank Books
We have very competitive discounts, offer free delivery, and personal service. Plus your organization can feel good about supporting a locally-owned store. kris@left-bank.com
6. Link your website to ours and make money!
Affiliate your website with ours and earn money on every purchase made via click-throughs from your site to ours. Schools and not-for-profits don’t have to send your purchases out of state. You’ll earn a higher percent than you will from that other place, too. http://www.left-bank.com/, click on the affiliate link.
7. Join or renew your membership in the Friends of Left Bank Books
Ok, this might cost you $35 (more if you can) up front, but if you spend $140 at either of our two Friends-only 25% off sales a year, you will break even. http://www.left-bank.com/ Click on the Friends link, or stop by and sign up.
8. Got more to invest in a sustainable future for Left Bank Books?
Left Bank Books is planning a major fundraiser in October to generate much needed capital which will enable us to retire old debt from publishers, upgrade our badly out of date inventory control system and re-work our store to serve you better. We invite anyone with more resources and a commitment to a sustainable, world-class literary center in St. Louis, should contact us immediately. kris@left-bank.com, 314.367.6731

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, Clarence shows George what his community would have been like had he never existed. If Left Bank Books had never existed, St. Louis would have missed out on thousands of visits by authors ranging from first-time novelists and obscure poets to judges, princesses, nobel laureates, and presidents. It would have missed out on a store committed to Women’s Gay, and African American studies sections since the 1970s. St. Louisans would have had few places to turn for given publishing advice, coming out advice, and reading advice. Ailing neighbors would have gone without hand-delivered books. There are at least a couple of school libraries that would have had no help in creating and stocking their shelves. Local causes would have missed out on hundreds of book donations. Dozens more would have lacked author event programming and a portion of our proceeds on those booksales. The careers of some major artists may have turned out differently without starter shows in our gallery. What would Euclid and McPherson be without a Left Bank Books for its Duff’s? But most important, without Left Bank Books, St. Louis would have a huge hole in its cultural fabric. The public conversation, the availability of texts, whether poetical or polemical, the relationship of reader to writer to bookseller, all those indefinable but essential qualities of a life lived in the company of books, would be vapor, pure concept, had we never existed.
To the choir out there, thank you for bearing with me. And to the rest of you, I ask you to imagine a future with Left Bank Books and help us make it a reality.

A Man Walks Into a Bookstore

2008-07-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

Larry McMurtry started collecting books in 1942 at age 6, when a cousin who was going off to war gave him his library of 19 boys’ adventure stories. McMurtry, who lived on a book-free ranch in Texas, was stunned to learn that there could be made up stories. He re-read his library numerous times, and by the time he was a senior in high school, his passion for books was a full-blown disorder. Today, most know McMurtry as the author of nearly 40 novels and numerous screenplays including Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and Lonesome Dove, and the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. But his pride and joy is his used and antiquarian bookstore, Booked Up, which contains over 400,000 volumes housed in a several buildings in downtown Archer City, Texas. Perhaps if his cousin had given him only one book instead of a library, he would have kept his bookstore to a one-building operation, but I doubt it.

McMurtry details his lifelong obsession in Books: A Memoir, published this July. The tiny chapters read more like the kind of short, frequently interrupted conversations one has say, behind the counter of a bookstore. They are nearly blog-like, which would seem an anathema to McMurtry. To this day, he has refrained from putting any part of his vast collection online. He remains a thoroughly old-world collector and bookseller. Because of that, his memories of books and book people are richly anecdotal stories about the highly eccentric substrata of people for whom particular words on particular pieces of paper are imbued with an almost spiritual power, not unlike relics in the Church.

McMurtry’s milieu includes gum-shoe book scouts who think nothing of spending hours sifting through yard-sale detritus for pristine copies of vintage American pulp fiction or rare first editions. They could be collectors enhancing their own libraries, or they could be dealers, turning their finds into profit. It also includes the likes of Dorman David, the son of a wealthy Texas rancher who, in the sixties, used his inheritance to design a mouth-watering bookshop complete with humidor and set about acquiring books from major dealers in Texana and Americana. It seems he bought more like a collector and less like a dealer, leaving very little room for profit and soon “flamed out”, leaving his mother and sister, who were ill-equipped for the task, to dispose of his treasures. McMurtry lent them a hand and remains friends with the mother, now in her nineties.

One of my favorites in McMurtry’s rich pantheon of book people is the scout known for his habit of scooting along the floor of a bookstore on his bottom to study the lower shelves. This man never left a bookstore with a clean behind, but he also discovered a number of treasures overlooked by scouts with a more upright posture. One could say he stooped to conquer. My favorite bookstore of the hundreds McMurtry has scouted, worked in, partially or wholly-owned, or simply bought out, was housed behind the San Francisco Chronicle where the floor-to-ceiling shelves were so high customers were given binoculars to browse.

Another of those hundreds of bookstores McMurtry walked into over his 50 year career as a bookman was Left Bank Books where, in 1994, he and his co-author Diana Ossana read from their novel, Pretty Boy Floyd. There were a polite number of people in attendance and they bought a polite number of books. The surprise of the evening came when the reading was over and McMurtry and Ossana fell upon our poetry section with a fervency I had never experienced in a customer before. Seven hundred dollars later, they left, only to return the next morning and do it again. It occurred to me then, that we might actually be running a world class bookstore. We have kept an infrequent contact with McMurtry since then, trading in the odd first edition here and there.

I hadn’t expected to find our store mentioned in his memories, but was surprised to find another St. Louis store mentioned, Lost Generation Books. I was surprised mostly because there has never been a Lost Generation Books in St. Louis. On a hunch, I called Book Up in Archer City to ask about this. Khristal, who took the call, promised to ask him and get back to me. Two days later, she did. “Larry says yes, he was thinking of Left Bank Books when he wrote that, but he got the name mixed up with a bookstore in McLean [Virginia] where he also used to shop.”

Nowadays, when he feels a scouting urge come on, McMurtry heads out to the lower 40 of his own warehouse and is delighted to find, say a woefully under-priced edition of an early Anthony Powell novel which he re-prices from $7.50 and resells immediately for $350. While his rancher relatives may have stocked a pond with bass, McMurtry has a fully stocked library to troll.

Larry McMurtry is a rare breed, clearly a case of nature over nurture. His habitat is secondhand bookstores and private libraries. I consider myself privileged to have grazed near him. In these days of internet shopping, people brag of finding a specific title or edition of something they’re after with a few clicks, but those are empty calories, as if they pushed away a five star meal for drive-through, forgetting, almost, why one reads in the first place. They will never know what they might have missed in this surgical operation, what embarrassment of riches—in sights, sounds, relationships and yes, books—that could have been theirs had they spent a few moments more, and walked into a bookstore.
______________________________________________________________________
In Memorium. I am saddened to say goodbye to another passionate book person. Larry Sather, who taught English at St. Louis Community College, Florissant Valley for 39 years, passed away June 27. I loved his dry wit and withering commentary on current affairs, and especially the long conversations we used to have in the basement office of the bookstore where he’d plunk himself down for a chat whenever he stopped by, which was frequently. He was a great supporter of the store, and a dear bookstore friend. He will be missed.

2008-06-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
(with thanks to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich)

I have been inspired by Phyllis Schlafly to write this article. Most of you will realize how unlikely this source of inspiration is: Phyllis Schlafly is the 83-year-old über-right wing founder of the Eagle Forum. She dedicated her early years of activism to furthering Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, but she really hit her stride in the 70s when she discovered that preventing equal rights for women was a more timeless cause. Political systems come and go, but there will always be women to oppress. So why in the world would a co-owner of St. Louis’s progressive bookstore be inspired to invoke Ann Coulter’s fairy god-mother?

We have a lot in common, actually. For one thing, Schlafly is a graduate of Washington University, as are most of Left Bank Books’ co-founders, my mother, and me. All of us are activists, having co-founded or directed various projects, including this bookstore, where the “women’s” section is not for books on diet, fashion and relationship. While Schlafly led the charge to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 70s, my mother was working in Washington, D.C. as the president of Northern Virginia N.O.W. to secure its passage. Too bad Schlafly won.

Phyllis Schlafly was busy in the late 70s. She was in law school at Wash. U., graduating in 1979, the same weekend I received my bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies. Our names are in the same commencement materials. I thought it was very inspiring at the time that she could be vociferously arguing for women to stay in the home while she pursed a professional career. Rumor around campus back then was that she was so busy on her anti-ERA campaign, that she had hired help to get through all her law school homework. I’m not saying she actually cheated, I’m just saying. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t doing her own housework.

The reason she inspires me today is that our alma mater has seen fit to issue her an honorary degree. Washington University has always been forward-thinking on the issue of women’s rights. Its law school was one of the first in the country to admit women. Even Harvard University, where Schlafly earned a masters degree in 1945, refused to admit women to its law school until 1950. Phoebe Wilson Couzins was Wash. U.’s first female graduate in 1870 and, like Schlafly, Couzins had women’s rights in mind. She co-founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Coincidentally, I’m pretty sure I was one of the first people to graduate from Washington University with a degree in Women’s Studies, about a hundred short years after Couzins co-founded the NWSA. (Ok, you couldn’t major in women’s studies, but it could be your second major, kind of like working full-time, caring for the kids, and going to school.)
The point is, here’s Phyllis Schlafly, getting another degree from Washington University (her first was a bachelor’s in 1944, one year before her master’s from Harvard), one she didn’t even have to pay for, while powerful women’s rights advocates like my mother (who, incidentally, also wrote implementation guidelines for Title IX and authored a landmark government study on families of military personnel), have gone to their graves without so much as a nod. The anti-war activism of Left Bank co-founders has made law book history, and their collective effort to provide a progressive voice in the founding of Left Bank Books still stands today, albeit beaten about the kneecaps with the lead pipes of late-capitalism. The surviving founders all do amazing community work and activism in their respective communities. One of them, Anita Diamant, even wrote a bestselling novel. [http://leftbank.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780312195519]

But do any of us get an honorary degree? No! Instead, we get repeated requests for donations from a school with one of the healthiest endowments in the country. Personally, I would happily settle for a tenured position on the faculty. Come to think of it, not only did Washington University officials overlook my mother and the co-founders of Left Bank Books when they thumbed through their rolodex of prominent graduates, years ago they actually eliminated the very department that spawned all this activism to begin with: the Sociology Department. And, were it not for a generous and carefully worded matching grant from local philanthropist and Women’s Studies “major” Susan Stiritz, there would probably not even be a women’s studies “area” to second- major in any more.

And yet. In a published statement, Chancellor Mark Wrighton apologized for the “anguish” his university’s decision has caused and admitted he doesn’t even hold with most of Schlafly’s positions. He says that the degree is intended to recognize “an alumna of the University whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life,” whether or not you agree with the effect of that impact. I guess that’s why Trustee Emerita Margaret Bush Wilson, another very powerful woman, volunteered to read the citation to award the degree to Phyllis Schlafly. Ms. Wilson is the first woman of color to serve as the national chair of the NAACP, the second woman of color admitted to practice law in Missouri, a prominent St. Louis civil rights attorney for more than 40 years, and—small world--was a colleague and close friend of my mother’s, close enough to speak at her memorial service five years ago.

I am a great admirer of Margaret Bush Wilson. Her life’s work broke ground, sometimes in spite of Phyllis Schlafly’s life’s work. She inspired my mother and she inspires me. I would much rather she get the honorary degree than give it. More than being moved by Schlafly’s impact on America, I guess you could say Ms. Wilson is moved by the First Amendment. I am too. It can be a powerful tool in the right woman’s hands.