In the early 1950s you could walk around almost any small town and, if you kept your eyes above shop window level, you would have no difficulty in finding a bookseller. Lower your eyes and you would most probably discover that he was selling not books, but stationery or toys or tobacco or fancy goods. No doubt he had started out with good intentions in his heart; but over the years the “other goods” had…
In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called "Unpacking My Library." As the title suggests, it’s a meditation on books, but it’s not about books as works of literature or as pieces of writing. Instead it's about books as material objects, physical things with intricate histories based on where they’ve been, histories which, so he argues, are intertwined with personal narratives, narratives of lives lived in search of volumes of volumes. In the essay…
There are thirteen feminist bookstores left in the US and Canada, Paste Magazine says. Thirteen! I just spent thirty seconds on Google and found more than thirteen brick-and-mortar clown supply stores. Selling oversized novelty pants to aspiring child molesters is a more viable business model than selling feminist literature.
