Independent Bookstore Day 2023

This takes place this Saturday, 29 April, today. Out there and buy a book!

LitHub marks the occasion with a little piece entitled 10 of the Best Indie Bookstores in the World. Warning: visiting them all will require quite a bit of travel, but what better now that Spring beckons? Oops; I guess Australia’s tending towards winter though.

What makes a bookstore a “best bookstore”? Going there a lot is probably, for me, the primary requirement, which kind of rules out trips to Oz or Ireland. Bowes & Bowes* in Cambridge probably heads my list — as a student I was in and out all the time. One of their best features was that they were willing to open accounts for undergraduates — and the bill would be settled by my parents at the end of the term (I guess). In the same genre I remember fondly the shop in Sedbergh, Titus Wilson’s, where we used to go to get our schoolbooks, on the same financial basis. I don’t think it really was a bookstore: they just got in the books we’d have to buy and we bought them — not a bad business model! Another favorite was the bookshop in Galashiels, called I think, Dawson’s (but I’d be prepared to be told I was wrong). It disappeared so long ago that I find it difficult to identify even where it was — it just doesn’t look like a shop was ever there!

Actually, I suspect that the key feature in making a place your favorite is the opening of an account. If you can walk out with a book without having to bother about any sort of payment, I suspect you’re likely to return more often and to buy more books. Our local liquor store gets my business on this basis — though in their case it’s “Charge to the card on file?”: that does the trick, and it means you don’t even need to pack a wallet to come out merry! Bookstores: consider the opening of customer accounts as a way of keeping customers loyal. Of course deadbeats do need to be identified up front.

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* For those who care there’s a nice recent history of Bowes & Bowes in the comments at the post Oldest bookstore.

Wilder at 125

What will the bookstore of the future look like?

This is the question asked by an article by Arvyn Cerézo from BookRiot. Let’s hope it doesn’t look like the photo at the head of the article where you’d have to risk life and limb to be able to take a book off a shelf.

Given the depressingly negative opening — “The state of bookstores feels shaky: plenty of them have shuttered, failing to adapt to changing times” — I guess we should be happy they foresee any future at all. This first sentence is so much the opposite of what I would have assumed — lots of new bookstores opening, Barnes & Noble going great guns, Bookshop.com going from strength to strength, publishers seeing record sales — that I had to check that we were looking at a current article, not one reprinted from five years back.

What’s in store, we are told, is:

• future bookstores will feel like a shopping center
• future bookstores will feel like a community center
• future bookstores will probably go niche
• future bookstores will feel like a stationery store or hybrid store
• future bookstores will use advanced technology.

Who can disagree? That and a whole lot of other things of course, all as mutually contradictory as this lot. (Funny how the word “hybrid” has become so sexy of recent years.)

We are treated to the usual saws: “Technology rapidly evolves, and industries scramble to catch up. Though publishing is generally a slow-moving industry, bookstores need to up their ante to compete with other industries.” I really don’t think there’s any real evidence that “industries struggle to catch up” with technology — in fact the exact opposite contention might be just as true. Publishing is only a slow-moving industry in the sense that it takes about a year to turn an author’s manuscript into a salable book.* Technological changes which have been adopted by the book business have come at the rate of one major change every four or five years since I began making and getting rid of books. It always makes composition of an article more straightforward if you start off trashing the industry, and then disclose your own brilliant plan of salvation. The fact that thousands got there before you will with luck never be noticed by your readers.

While one can see the old-fashioned, usually second-hand, bookstore surviving without any internet connection, even the used book market works better with online help. I think there’s no question that bookshops selling new books will be more technologically linked in than ever. It’s obviously maladaptive to tell a customer you don’t have the book they want, and then just say goodbye. Any bookstore can get any book mailed to any customer anywhere without too much planning, and without much of a wait.

Until such time as we collectively decide that we all want to get our reading materials, whether entertainment, educational, informational or whatever, via AI-facilitated e-readers or whatever, bookshops will be a necessary part of the distribution system for books. As in the past, they will doubtless come in a wide variety of formats.

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* which isn’t because publishers are lazy or incompetent; it’s because authors are used to (and demand) a bit of help in editing their texts, plus to some extent because there are times of the year when it’s not as easy to sell lots of books as at others, so you wait for the right time. Remember how quickly an “instant book” can come out: within weeks.

Mid-Atlantic books

We just visited Bermuda — a small, crowded archipelago “island” a couple of hours by air from the eastern USA. All the houses have to have white roofs, and rain water is collected in cisterns because there is no room on the tiny islands for rivers and lakes.

Bermuda was originally just an uninhabited place where sailors would get shipwrecked. Although on the map it looks like a long S, it is in fact the southern half of an atoll representing the caldera of an ancient volcano, and has to its north a similar long curved “island” — this one however submerged below the surface of the se. These submerged reefs are there to surprise incautious mariners and wreck their vessels. The ones who ended up staying were the survivors of the Sea Venture a supply ship headed for Jamestown which went down in a hurricane in 1609. From the wreckage they built a couple of boats and went on to Jamestown: the Virginia Company took on the administration of this new place. Bermuda is now the oldest and most populous British colony.

We talked with the local bookseller, who allowed as how they felt neither one nor the other when it came to territorial rights — USA or UK and Commonwealth, but were currently favoring the UK with more orders because the exchange rate was so good. Every now and then a publisher may wake up to the issue, and regretfully say they can no longer supply this or that book into what is obviously a British Commonwealth market. Little market tests are constantly going on as the booksellers can observe this book selling better in its UK cover or that one selling out in its American edition. They pointed to a number of local self-published titles, and reported that one of the more successful among those authors was actually a Bermuda printer himself, and so was making his books locally as well as selling them thus.

The first printer in Bermuda was Joseph Stockdale who arrived in Bermuda in 1783 with the impressive title of King’s Printer. He had, obviously, to bring all his type, machinery, and paper with him, and on 17 January 1784 published the first issue of the Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. He edited, published and printed this newspaper for twenty years, aided by his three daughters. He also organized a postal service for the island, making deliveries once a week. After his death the newspaper was carried on by his daughters, and the spouse of one (he was eventually exiled for excessively critical editorials). The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser eventually petered out around 1831 in the face of competition from new arrivals.

It looks likely that in The Tempest Shakespeare is describing an island based on Bermuda. In Act 1 Ariel tells how Prospero called on him “to fetch dew / From the still-vex’d Bermoothes”. Timing might be considered a bit tight though: the play was first publicly performed on 1 November 1611 (no doubt privately before that), but William Strachey’s letter describing the place was written in 1610 and didn’t reach London till September of that year. Strachey, a native of Saffron Walden, was on the Sea Venture when she was wrecked on Bermuda, and wrote an eyewitness account, A true reportory of the wracke and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; vpon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas: his comming to Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie then, and after, vnder the gouernment of the Lord La Warre, Iuly 15. 1610, which was eventually published in 1625 in Purchas His Pilgrimes (incidentally, one of the sources for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn).

Plumbing repairs?

Brian O’Leary of the Book Industry Study Group suggests at Publishers Weekly that the book industry’s supply chain needs updating. (Link via New Publishing Standard.) No doubt everything eventually needs updating, but suggesting that the book industry’s infrastructure has remained static for too long is too much. Not very much remains of what the business looked like when I started in it in 1965. Back then it was a pretty small-scale personal business. There were no big chain bookstores — W. H. Smith did it’s true sell books throughout the country, but they sold books rather than being booksellers — and until the pandemic boosted book sales and thus provoked radical change, independent bookselling had remained a fairly stable if gently declining business, for the previous half century.

We’ve already lived through the phenomenon of the bookstore chain, which arrived in the eighties and pretty much left us in the oughts. The big survivor, Barnes & Noble, seems to be doing rather well now, so the sector survives. Obviously Amazon hit big when it started in 1995, and altered the way books were sold. No going back from that, but forward is where we are of course actually going, with such phenomena as Bookshop.com. Twenty years ago we all knew that there was no point in trying to compete with Amazon: they had a perfect system, and trying to duplicate it was a hopeless task; and besides publishers were constrained by the Robinson-Patman Act and thus couldn’t do anything about it in any case. Now almost every publisher will sell you a book online, and independent bookstores are able to benefit from the Bookshop.com system. It’s early days of course, but it does look as if the fact that publishers are able to sell direct to customer has not delivered any serious blow to the independent bookstore business. The existence of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and even more significantly Ingram’s distribution services enables anyone to be a publisher and to supply physical books to customers

One thing that looks like it’s changing is the prices of books. Is it a little disingenuous in the head of a large publishing company to suggest that book prices really need to go up because the poor booksellers are having to exist on the fixed margins they are granted as discounts, so their income can’t go up unless prices go up? We all know prices are going to be going up because paper, printing, shipping, overhead, wage costs and everything else is going up. Is this how it goes historically — a huge price jump followed by years of quiescence? Not in the well-run establishment: we used to review prices every year, raising them as needed to maintain a fairly constant margin given the day’s costs — but of course academic books are less price sensitive than trade ones.

Buy a new bathroom if the one you’ve got breaks down: don’t rip out your plumbing just because the neighbors have installed these automatic wiping toilets. Remember the old ways still work. Still, if you are in the change business, you have to keep advocating for change. It happens anyway, but never fast enough for you.

Hopeless attention deficit

Publishers Weekly shouts “London Book Fair 2023: Talk of AI and Other Tech Fills the Halls. ChatGPT and AI are perhaps the hottest topics at this year’s fair, with panelists and other attendees debating the pluses and minuses of the new technologies.” (Paywall protected.)

Doesn’t it begin to seem that publishing people are congenitally incapable of focussing on business? Getting books out and offered for sale is so straightforward that it seems it can only occupy part of the mind! We have to keep looking for things to keep our minds busy and the current plaything is AI. Recently we agonized about ebooks and audiobooks — anything with a sharp increase in sales is calculated to distract the attention of a publisher — it’s like a burning light and a moth. “Wow look at that! Thirty percent increase; look out — books are dead”. If you have sales of $1,000, an increase of another $1,000 reprints a 100% increase. If you have a $1,000 increase on sales of $1,000,000 that represents an increase of 0.00001% — but it’s much more fun to spend cocktail hour panicking about the death of the printed book than it is to do the simple math which shows that you’re looking at something which isn’t there at all. I can’t remember all the stupid things that we worried about during the years of my career in publishing, but there was always something to agonize about rather than thinking about what we were paid to do, or even just talking about the books themselves. (Though we did do a lot of that too.) Diversity’s another current distraction. Whether a monkey should be allowed to own copyright is yet another — and in the meantime we fail to devote much thought to wondering what the proper term of copyright might be.

By the way it does seem that this year’s London Book Fair managed some sort of return to the old normal. Here’s Publishing Perspectives telling us that 30,000 visitors turned up and lots of business was done.

First American novel

The 21st of January this year marked the 234th anniversary of the publication in 1789 of what is alleged to be the first American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature. LitHub has an account. If, after reading their pretty unfavorable review, you still want to check it out, the book is available at Project Gutenberg.

The book was published in two volumes by Isaiah Thomas and Company of Boston, and “Sold at their Bookstore, No.45, Newbury Street, and at said Thomas’s Bookstore in Worcester”.

The relatively late start in the world of fiction reflects of course the rather serious outlook on life of the Puritans, who tended to favor sermons, polemics, and improving poetry. Plus, be it noted, colonizing a new land left little spare time for reading for entertainment. By the late eighteenth century American printer/publishers had figured out that it was in any case more profitable to reprint pirated editions of British novels rather than to pay royalties to an author! The first successful local products included Charlotte Temple by Susanna Haswell Rowson (1791) and Hannah Foster’s Coquette (1797). Charles Brockton Brown nailed things down with his marriage of European gothic and American local color in novels such as Wieland (1798) and Arthur Mervyn (1800).

Jane Austen covers

Jessica Bull sends a tweet thread showing us all these covers which she characterizes as “the worst Jane Austen covers”.

Maybe. But if you’re a mass market publisher, what are you meant to do? I’ve added two more at the end, sent by Devoney Looser.

Can that one in the middle of the bottom row be real?

Sibylline Books

The BBC’s Culture blog reveals, in a post about banning books, “The legend of the Sibylline Books tells us that in an ancient city, a woman offered to sell its citizens 12 books containing all the knowledge and wisdom in the world, for a high price. They refused, thought her request ridiculous, so she burned half of the books right then and there, and then offered to sell the remaining six for double the price. The citizens laughed at her, a little uneasily this time. She burned three, offering the remainder, but doubling the price again. Somewhat reluctantly — times were hard, their troubles seemed to be multiplying — they dismissed her once more. Finally, when there was only one book left, the citizens paid the extraordinary price the woman now asked, and she left them alone, to manage as best they could with one-twelfth of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world.”

Of course, like so much of our “knowledge” this story exists in various forms. The canonical (?) version concerns the seventh and last king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who ruled from 534 to 509 BC, and died in 495 BC. Apparently an old woman, perhaps the Cumaean Sibyl offered him nine books of prophecies, and when he refused her price, burned three of them, this bargaining went through a second round when the King finally gave in and bought the three remaining volumes for the price of the nine. Apparently the Senate used to consult these books from time to time. The books were kept in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and were lost when the temple burned in 83 BC. Of course as prophecies the content of these books might not be exactly describable as “knowledge”, but autre temps, autre moeurs. No doubt the antidote for the fall of the Roman Empire was contained in one of the volumes the proud Tarquin allowed to be destroyed.

Now comes the news, via Shelf Awareness of 1 December of the establishment of Sibylline Press. “Four women with extensive book world experience have launched Sibylline Press, which will focus on publishing ‘the brilliant works of women authors over the age of 50’,” “Sibylline Press takes its name from the ancient Sibyls, older women whose oracular utterances contained wisdom captured in scrolls that Roman leaders often consulted.”

Sibyls listed in Wikipedia are

The Cimmerian Sibyl
The Cumaean Sibyl
The Delphic Sibyl 
The Erythraean Sibyl
The Hellespontian Sibyl
The Libyan Sibyl 
The Persian Sibyl
The Phrygian Sibyl
The Samian Sibyl
The Tiburtine Sibyl

Sibyls are often depicted as numbering twelve, and seem to have moved around from time to time.

I see this all as a rider to my recent post Nothing’s known/Everything’s known.

Paleography

Response of James Tabor, public notary, July 10, 1604, in Henry Cotton vs. William Windle. Cambridge University Archives. See Cambridge book theft.

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I give up. Actually I’d given up before I ever started. I just know I’m happy to let the enthusiasts do the deciphering of all these old handwritten communications. However for those who actually feel compelled to rise to the challenge here is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Alphabet Book complied by Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts.

Samples of letters in Secretary hand from the Alphabet Book.

William Davis recounts the development of his own paleographic skills, while introducing us to the themes in a collection of sixteenth century letters held at the Museum.