James Hynes

Here's another succinct summary of the Crisis in Publishing, this one from the London Review of Books, by Colin Robinson, a Brit who lost his job at New York publisher in last December's Black Wednesday. Some of it is particular to the publishing world in Britain, but there's a lot about American publishing, including a very lucid explanation of the medieval system of returns, by which publishers have agreed since the 1930s to take back unsold copies from booksellers at full price. Also some prescriptions about What Should Be Done, about which I will have more to say later, when I have the time.

Just this morning, driving down the Drag in Austin, I saw that Intellectual Property, the one remaining general interest bookstore within walking distance of the University of Texas, is closing. Turns out their last day is March 15, and right now they're selling off their complete stock at 50% off. It's not quite an independent—it's owned by Follett's, the textbook store chain—and it's not quite the loss that the closing of Shaman Drum would be, but it's another sign of doom for the old way of selling books.

When I first moved to Austin in the mid-90s, there were at least two general interest bookshops with a scholarly bent across the street from UT. One was called Europa and I was only in it once before it went out of business, and the other was the trade book department of the University Co-op, which was, as I recall, really first rate. Somewhere along the way the the Co-op decided not to sell trade books anymore, which was a real shame, and they sold or leased half of their space to Barnes and Noble, which ran a store there for a few years before it, too, went out of business. A number of professors and other folks at UT lobbied the university to help underwrite a bookstore along the Drag, and Intellectual Property was the result of a deal between UT and Follett's.

It was a pretty good store, if not a great one. For one thing, their shelving was ambitious but idiosyncratic: they had, for example, a classical studies section and a section, clear across the store, for Greek and Roman history, so that if you were looking for, say, a translation of Livy, you had to be sure to check both places. For another thing (he said shamelessly), they never stocked any of my books, despite my asking them to, twice.

But even so, it's a shame to see it go. Perhaps the Co-op will go back into the trade book business, but I doubt it. They seem perfectly content to sell Longhorn paraphernalia, electronics, and textbooks.

An Addendum, 3/1/09: In today's Austin American-Statesman, the paper's excellent books editor, Jeff Salamon, has a comprehensive history of Intellectual Property and a very shrewd and knowledgeable take on why it failed. Check it out.

It seems like most of my recent posts have had to do with yet another cataclysmic, epoch-ending moment in the world of books and literature—books themselves evanescing into pixels, John Updike evanescing into who-knows-what?—so maybe I should write about something else—another post about Bigfoot and UFOs, perhaps? King Zor, anyone?

But instead I thought I'd note yet another crisis in the book business, one that might seem rather localized and particular to one community, but which clearly speaks volumes about everything that's changing in the literary world. I've been lucky to live in three cities with a robust literary culture (i.e., places with lots of writers and writer wannabees in them) and lots of great bookstores. One is the place I live now, Austin, Texas; another is Iowa City, Iowa, where I went to the Writers' Workshop, and where you can't throw a stick down Iowa Avenue without hitting a novelist, a short story writer, or a poet. But the main one, the one closest to my heart, the place I still think of as my hometown, even though I wasn't born there, didn't get there until I was 18, and haven't lived there for nearly 15 years, is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I won't go into my long history with books and bookshops in Ann Arbor—that would take a book in itself, and who reads books anymore, let alone books about books and bookselling?—but suffice it to say, I've a long, rather intimate history with two Ann Arbor literary institutions. One is Borders Books, which I first knew as a funky independent bookshop with creaking wooden floors during my freshman year at the University of Michigan, and where I went to work, the day after I graduated from college in 1977, back when the store was still a great independent. Lots more to say about my life at Borders, what it has turned into since, and what might become of it, but some other time.

The other great institution was, and still is, for now, Shaman Drum Bookstore on State Street, one of the great literary and scholarly bookshops in North America, founded and run by one of the great American booksellers, Karl Pohrt. There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when I had come back to Ann Arbor after my time in Iowa to teach at Michigan, that I used to drop into the store nearly every day. One of my best friends in the world, the poet Keith Taylor, used to be the manager there. When the store expanded during the 90s, the new space was designed by another good friend, the Ann Arbor architect Margaret Wong. And the store was, and, for now, still is, one of the most author-friendly places to give a reading that I know of; the best readings I've ever had were before a Shaman Drum audience.

Anyway, right now, the store is on the ropes, and is not likely to survive. Rather than explain the situation myself, I'll direct you to this eloquent and heartbreaking open letter from Karl Pohrt himself.

I don't quite know what to say about all this, or even what to think. As I said in a couple of posts ago, the new world of the book and of literature is actually kind of thrilling, and there's a lot I find appealing about, say, the utopian project of making the entire corpus of human knowledge available, free, to everybody, everywhere. But, as Karl points out in his letter, in every major cultural and economic shift, there is collateral damage, and for every cool new thing you can do online with or for or about books, it seems that the price is the death of another great local, indepedent, idiosyncratic bookshop like Shaman Drum. It also seems beside the point to wonder if what we're gaining is worth what we're losing, because it seems like the New Way of Doing Things is an unstoppable juggernaut, and what does it matter what grizzled old guys like Karl and Keith and me think?