Andrew Laties is a champion of bookstores and booksellers. He's the author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities. He'll be part of a panel discussion with Village Books owner, Chuck Robinson, Book Fare Cafe owner, Charles Claassen, and Derek Long, Executive Director of Sustainable Connections, on Friday, September 16, 7:00pm.
This month marks the 26th anniversary of the opening of The Children’s Bookstore, the first of my five bookselling enterprises. I passed the “one million sold” mark years ago. Why do I sell books? I grew up surrounded by them. My father, now 85, is an obsessive lover of bookstores. My two sisters and I took for granted frequent bookstore visits, and our consequent houseful of books.
In 1970, at age 10, I helped my older sister Nancy organize my parents’ collection. We put Poetry at the top of the stairs, History at the bottom, Fine Arts in the bathroom, Literature in the basement. We counted 3,000 books. Browsing my parents’ books over the course of my childhood was a mysteriously immersive activity that provided an unsupervised introduction to world culture, science and the arts.
On weekends and holidays, outings to bookstores topped the agenda. My father’s rule was that if you entered a bookstore and stayed for 15 minutes, you were obliged to support that store by buying a book, so at every bookstore, we kids were encouraged to choose books for ourselves. I came to specialize in mythology, archaeology, European literature, and modern poetry. My bedroom filled up with books I had chosen. At age 15, on a solo bus-ride, I reviewed my childhood visits to bookstores and was able to visualize 500 stores.
No wonder I married a bookstore manager, and thought it would be easy for us to open our own bookstore.
Our children had an even more book-obsessed upbringing than my own, since for them, frequent visits to bookstores went along with growing up inside a family business. Our home came to overflow with books. During our 2002 move to Amherst, Massachusetts, after 17 years running bookstores in Chicago, I took stock of our personal collection. We had over 10,000 books. Handling each book as I packed for our move reminded me of the place of its purchase and its place in my history.
I have watched the recent national collapse in bookstore numbers with dismay. There used to be over 10,000 bookstores; now there are so many fewer. I know lots of kids grow up in homes without books.
I am making an effort to help reverse these trends. I want all children and parents to have access to the joy, solace, and sharing of values that a houseful of books has represented in my own life.
Rebel Bookseller is the principal tool in my effort. I hope the book helps convince literature lovers, community activists and budding entrepreneurs to support and launch independent bookstores, helping families fill homes and lives with those most life affirming of cultural artifacts, books.
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