James Hynes

Very sad news from Ann Arbor today: Shaman Drum Bookshop, one of the great bookstores in North America, is shutting down for good on June 30. I've written earlier about Shaman Drum's troubles, which are the result of the usual suspects—the Internet, the chains, the economy, you name it—but even though I knew this was possibility, it's still very sad. You can read the message from owner Karl Pohrt about the store's closing here, and there's an article from the Ann Arbor News (which is also shutting down) here.

Rather than rehash the store's recent difficulties, I'll only say that it was my favorite place to give a reading, and not only because Ann Arbor is more or less my home town and the readings were attended by my friends. The store was one of the best venues in the nation for all sorts of great writers, which made it one the most prized destinations on any book tour. You'd always get a great introduction and an attentive and engaged audience. Each reading took over one half of the shop, and it was a wonderfully relaxed and intimate setting in which to read (beautifully designed, I have to add, by my friend, the architect Margaret Wong).

The Drum has been, for almost the last 30 years, one of the vital centers of literary culture in the Midwest, and not only because it went out of its way to carry small press and scholarly titles. The staff were like the Jesuits or the Marine Corps of booksellers, passionate about books and just that much better than other booksellers. My friend, the poet Keith Taylor, was manager there for many years, and, back when he was still smoking, he came to be known as the Mayor of State Street for the little literary/gossip/networking confabs that would happen out in front of the store—Keith knows everybody in the Midwest who ever put pen to paper—whenever he stepped outside for a cigarette and one writer or another would stop to talk with him. I was standing with him one sunny day in the early 90s when the writer Charles Baxter came steaming angrily up to us and said, without a word of greeting, "Borders just got sold to fucking K-Mart." Keith, I think, already knew (he always knows everything first), but it was the first I'd heard of it, and looking back on that moment now, all three of us should probably have felt the chill of the zeitgeist stepping on Shaman Drum's grave.

I was looking forward to reading from Next there next year, especially since so much of my new novel takes place in Ann Arbor. Now that's not going to happen. It's sad, sad, sad. I don't know what else to say.

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