The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century

by Josh Cook

Does this mean the store won’t have a single “store voice” in its content? Yes, that’s the point. People don’t talk to stores, they talk to people.

So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “No. get out.” . . . I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “You didn’t see his vest but it was all Nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them . . . you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”

The Open Society and Its Enemies,

Whether we’re talking about dive bars, bookstores, or the halls of government, if we allow Nazis into our spaces, our spaces become Nazi spaces.

Your space cannot be welcoming to both the oppressed and the oppressor.

I believe the size of the contemporary conservative movement is greatly overblown because of the disproportionate representation it has in our elected governments, because of how our political journalism presents our current landscape, because super-rich conservatives use their wealth to influence society, and because the conservative movement is so fucking loud and whiny.

I love books. I love the way reading makes me feel. I love what happens in my brain when weird shit in a book totally fucks me up.

Through this openness without appropriation, Bourdain was able to show, more than any other person I’ve encountered, just how fucking big the world is and just how incredible it is to live in it.

The baseline convenience we enjoy today, the speed and ease of procuring goods and services, would look like a torrent of fucking miracles to people not just centuries ago, but in, like, the 1950s.

I don’t know if empathy and responsibility are inherently connected, but, in this case, they sure as fuck are.

The problem comes from mistaking sympathy for empathy, from believing you have connected with a different person when you have only found another way to connect with yourself.

To booksellers, genre answers the question: Where the fuck do I put this book?

What is the value of having ideas from Republicans in your stores if the authors of those ideas aren’t actually looking to convince anyone their ideas are correct?

Once again, we find ourselves unable to debate ideas because the ideas do not follow the rules that create debate. You can’t debate ideas that aren’t interested in being true.

if one expression is a house and the other expression is burning down the house, if the second expression is allowed to stand then there is no more house.

Trump being president does not make his ideas worth your shelf space.

If you’re reading a challenging book and you are confused, there is a chance, especially if the work is overtly experimental, that you’re not missing something. You are confused because the author is trying to make you feel confusion, in the exact same way that thriller writers intend to make you feel thrilled, horror writers intend to make you feel scared, and erotica writers intend to make you feel horny.

Or, to put this another way, white dudes need to read books that make them feel excluded so they can feel the fact of other valid human perspectives.

I think about books all the time. What I’m reading, what I’m going to read next, what I just read, what I might not finish, and how I would describe all of them to potential readers.

Being seen describes both recognition and understanding.

Books help us be together.

“Write what you know,” like so many dollops of writing advice, is both correct and incorrect. I’ve never understood that advice as a restriction of content but as an invitation to education. You start where you are and you write at your own ignorance. I write to organize. I write to understand.

The phrase “at time of writing,” has taken on a new significance over the last few years.

While booksellers around the country were spending money they probably didn’t have supporting each other in a kind of ad hoc mutual aid society by way of Bonfire, the wealthiest people in the world—many becoming richer every single second of the pandemic—were, at best, doing jack fucking shit to help anybody and, at worst, lobbying for premature reopening, getting their workers classified as “essential,” exploiting the Paycheck Protection Program, and, in general, continuing to use their wealth and its attendant powers to make sure everyone else suffered.

On the one hand, I don’t want to end so many sections of this essay on the mass grave dug by American capitalism and all those in political power who support it, but on the other hand, when you see a mass grave, it’s hard to land anywhere else.