Bookselling in the End Times…Again

PRINT IS DEAD

In his late-fifteenth-century woodcut of a danse macabre, Matthias Huss depicts Death striding into a printer’s shop to remind a bookseller and his colleagues of their mortality. When I look at this image now, five centuries later, I find it hard to avoid making a joke that even at the dawn of print, print was dead.

During the COVID-19 crisis, a more serious reading of the woodcut is unavoidable: that reopening a bookstore—or any place people gather—could be fatal. Death comes in looking for a buzzy debut novel, or the latest brief against encroaching fascism, or a collection of poems, and takes a bookseller with him.

DEATH ENERGY

In Rebel Bookseller, his memoir and how-to, Andrew Laties tells the prospective bookseller that “you can focus on the fact that your independent bookstore is doomed and then let this reality prevent you from launching the thing. Or you can focus on your doom and use this foreknowledge to help you plan for finessing your business’s reincarnation.”

He refers to this feeling as “death energy,” taken from a Buddhist concept of the greater truth beyond the ephemeral nature of all human endeavor. I think of this concept often these days at my store, in Point Reyes, California, trying to harness this energy in the midst of a crisis to receive and sort books, to pack and weigh and ship parcels, to wheel the handcart to the post office and return to start the process over again. There is something mind-numbing in the tedium of these tasks, a lack of variation that’s so unlike bookselling in so-called normal times, when conversation and connection spark insights or lead to sudden, unexpected relationships. Selling books is not the same as bookselling.

One afternoon during the second month of our store’s closure, I set up my iPhone on a table facing the counter and recorded a time-lapse video as I packed books. I shared it over social media, never expecting that, as of this writing, it would be viewed nearly seven hundred thousand times. Many people saw the act as heroic (and others, to my dismay, as archaic).

It was neither of those things: it was a necessity. It was a bookseller harnessing death energy to keep a bookstore going, doomed...