Are Independent Bookstores Recession Proof?

In 2017, sales were up at independent bookstores. Again. More stores are opening than closing. More stores are finding new owners or new locations. Stores are thinking less about survival and more about succession. It's damn near impossible to leave Winter Institute, the annual educational, social, and celebratory conference for booksellers without feeling rejuvenated, without feeling that the best days are yet to come, without feeling as though this network of passionate, creative, thoughtful, intelligent, and empathetic people is invincible, without feeling as though books in general and the role booksellers play specifically, is saving the world. This isn't just the afterglow of a great party (though it certainly is some of that). The sales and growth numbers don't lie. And beyond the numbers, bookstores are taking active roles in their communities in new and important ways while working on improving the flaws and weaknesses (whitenesses) in their own industry. There are data; emotional, anecdotal, and numerical that suggest independent bookselling has never been as strong as it is today and is only going to get stronger for the foreseeable future.

But.

Furthermore, bookstores are uniquely positioned to combat the rise of American fascism. Everything about Trump and the Republican party; the disregard of science, the fundamental lack of curiosity, the fundamental lack of empathy, the pathological lying, the fear of the other, the use of rhetorical tricks to avoid actually defending their terrible fucking ideas, the fragmentation of society, and the deferral to authority is combated in some way by books and literature and reading and the people who connect those books to the readers in their community. Even beyond books, bookstores offer the safe community space, the ability to be quiet for a minute, the chance to know that humans have been through worse and survived because you can look at the books from that time, that can rejuvenate one's energy for the struggle. And that's before considering the active work that independent bookstores are doing in the community. With reading series, author events, book clubs, and displays, independent bookstores are both nodes of resistance against Trump in particular and loci for the general strengthening of our social and civic institutions. We now know what happens when we drift away from the type of community independent bookstores support. It's hard to imagine us going backwards any time soon.

But.

Furthermore, it isn't just Trump and this particular incarnation of fascism. Even before Trump the lies of late-capitalism like the promise of convenience at all costs, the seduction of low prices, the safety and primacy of the nuclear family unit, were starting to erode. People who had been raised on screens were turning to books to escape them. The ebook revolution that was supposed to be the end of bookstores didn't happen. The algorithms that were supposed to remove all the guesswork of buying books were shown to be woefully inadequate. Even as it seems like all shopping is moving online, more and more people are re-discovering the value of talking to a human being before spending their money. Or maybe not spending their money. Because that's the other thing about bookstores that is something of an antidote to the emotional grinder of late-capitalism: it's OK if you don't buy a book every time you browse, every time you meet for coffee, even every time you get recommendations or conversations from booksellers. Maybe it's part of why no one makes a lot of money in books, but in a bookstore you are a human being who might buy a book, not always and only a potential purchase that must be “off-ramped” or “funneled” and “captured.” Which is not to say we don't need to sell you books, but that there is always more to your interaction at a bookstore than the purchase. As the crimes of Amazon continue apace, as the country and young people in particular become more progressive politically and more critical of late-capitalism, and as we continue to rediscover the value of community beyond our nuclear family and beyond our circle of friends, independent bookstores are poised to capitalize on those changes in ways maybe no other industry (except for maybe craft brewing) can.

But.

Furthermore, something changed when Borders closed. Before that it was easy, despite all the other closures, to assume that there would always be bookstores. Sure, maybe indie bookstores wouldn't survive, but there would always be Barnes & Noble and Borders if we need a present on the way to the party. But then Borders wasn't. And then it was clear that if something wasn't done, bricks and mortar bookselling would die. Borders owed publishers millions of dollars when it finally went bankrupt and I've always wondered what the landscape of bookselling would look like if publishers had spread that credit around to the hundreds of independent bookstores that were struggling with the predatory pricing of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon, who were trying to change their model to adapt to online sales and who just needed to get to the next holiday season or the one after that to make those changes and be newly sustainable. I don't think I'm alone in asking that question. I think a lot of people with power at publishers asked that question. So the relationship between independent bookstores and publishers changed and publishers in general started to see independent bookstores not just as one, rather small, sales channel, but as partners in the grand project of books and literature. Independent bookstores drive discovery. Independent bookstores incubate writers. Independent bookstores support the small and independent publishers that often incubate writers and publishing professionals. Independent bookstores celebrate risk. Independent bookstores sustain the conversation around books. And independent bookstores create sales that end up at Amazon. When Borders revealed that a world without bookstores was possible, publishers changed their relationship in real and tangible ways, to treat independent bookstores like partners, making the entire industry more sustainable.

But.

Furthermore, we're really fucking good at selling books now. There might have been a time when all a bookstore needed to thrive was a halfway decent buyer and the right neighborhood. But that won't fly anymore. We need to offer our community and our customers more than what they can find online. And we do. All the time. Both in person and online. Sure not every store has had to make the same adaptations to our economic reality and no store is perfect, but I'm pretty confident that you could walk into damn near any independent bookstore in the country and walk out with a book you didn't know you needed. Taken together, just about everything points to an industry that has figured out how to thrive.

But.

But books are not rent. They are not healthcare. They are not student loans that are immune to bankruptcy. They are not car payments or gas money. As vital as they are to many of us, they are still not as vital as food. I've seen others try to inject a note of caution in all this optimism around growing sales, because, maybe those sales are only growing because the economy is. Though, for all the reasons stated above, I don't think it's just general economic growth behind the growth of independent bookstores, when the economy collapses next, who will have enough money after dealing with the necessities to buy books? Who will cut down on their coffee? Their beer? Who will drop Netflix? Who will find ways to trim their phone bill, their gas bill, their electricity bill? Some will. Many will. Enough to continue the growth we've seen over the last few years? Enough to sustain the level we've reached through this growth? Enough to sustain a viable industry through to the recovery? Are independent bookstores recession proof?

I don't have an answer to this question. The recessions of 2001 and 2008 took their toll, but bookstores were able to survive. And we're stronger now than we were then, but every recession is different and, maybe I'm just being cynical, I think the next one is likely to be catastrophic. (I mean what happens when almost an entire generation gets slammed with double-digit unemployment AND cannot disburse a bunch of their debt through bankruptcy? How does an economy recover from that?) Could we survive that?

I like to offer answers in these posts, not as some kind of final say on the topic, but as a starting point for further conversation, with the assumption that by discussing said offered answer we can find our way to a better one. But, perhaps it's best to conclude this with a different question, one that contains the optimism I think we all rightly feel with a rational concern for what we could face. So...

How do we make independent bookstores recession proof?

Reading is Resistance: Translation as Transhumance

Translation as Transhumance. That second word in the title. “Transhumance.” It seduced me from the moment I saw a picture of the cover on Twitter. I tried to deduce what “transhumance” meant from its component parts but I was wrong and only more invested in the book. I eventually reviewed it for the Los Angeles Review of Books, but found Gansell's memoir of her vocation as a translator had a much bigger impact on me than could be communicated in a review. It gave me new language for describing my relationship with works in translation. It gave me a new perspective on American English and an insight into its potential power. And, of course, because we read with our daily lives, it illuminated the political power of translation in the face of our growing fascism.

At some point in my bookselling career, I read one of those articles that talks about how little work in translation Americans read, how many Americans can go through their entire education and almost entire lives without reading a book written in another language. As a bookseller, I saw this as an opportunity to do some good in the world, to use my place in the community to move the needle a bit, and to help, in my own very small way, broaden the spectrum of reading for the American public. So, I committed to reading more translation, reading translation with more intention, and recommending more books in translation both through staff picks and in conversations.

In doing so, I learned of the joy of being baffled. It is a strange joy, one that you rarely encounter in your daily life, but one that is important nonetheless. Perhaps it is a joy unique to art, unique to moments we enter with intention. It happens in moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the book, absolutely no idea how to interpret an idea or image or sentence, when I am thrown off the train of my own thoughts. Most of the time we read to understand, but there is real power in reading when you can't. Because when you encounter something another person made that is unfathomable to you, you also encounter the fact that you, as a person, are capable of creating the unfathomable. You are shifted and in the parallax between your new perspective and your standard perspective an entire world opens up. Gansel approaches this unsettling opening of perspective in a number of different ways over the course of her book, but saying a work “...allows us to see the familiar in the foreign, the foreign in the familiar, and thus to create a sanctuary where you are no longer foreign but someone who is learning.” is the best articulation I've read of reading works in translation. By baffling us, we are reminded that we spend our lives as students of the world.

In some ways, it can be easy to understand that sense of being baffled, that sense of being unsettled, that encounter with the unfathomable as an abstract, intellectual experience, one more relevant to the mechanisms of understanding, than understanding itself. Because it is an experience of intellectual difficulty, we're tempted to put it in the same mental space as the papers we wrote in college and distant from the political and emotional experiences of out daily lives. But that is to miss one point of being baffled and being unsettled. Or, as Gansel puts it: “I remember clearly how, one morning as the snows were melting, as I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand from the other. That was probably my most essential lesson in translation.” Empathy, that building block of community and society, is rooted in the ability to displace your self, to de-center your self, to know at a fundamental level, that, from a different perspective, you are the other. Reading works in translation, especially those that are unfathomable to you, might be the easiest way to create that displacement and confront your own otherness.

And once you start seeing the otherness in yourself, once you begin to imagine how you might look to those who are not conditioned by their culture to understand you, it becomes easier to see the complexity and humanity that drive your decisions, in the decisions of other people. When you internalize how you can be misunderstood, your relationship to what and who you don't understand changes. By displacing your self, you create a new space or new perspective in which it is easier to see the humanity, see the universality in the actions of other people, even if you don't understand them. Through interaction with, even celebration of, that which makes us different, that which does not cross cultures or languages, we strengthen our understanding of what does.

But, at an almost more practical level, translation is an exchange of ideas across cultures. It opens up the possibilities for how you might solve a problem or describe an experience by showing you how others solve that problem and describe that experience, often in ways and in terms you never would have imagined. It is a constant conversation about all of the options we have for being human beings on this planet; which means, it is also a constant conversation about how some systems of power, some forces in society, and some people want to limit the options you have for being a human being. Even if the different options for living that you're reading about don't feel political, are concerned more with topics that don't seem to have direct applications, it introduces you to the idea of imagining a problem from a totally different perspective. It gives you the option of at least trying to consider a problem without all of your cultural baggage lashed to your answers. Asking how someone from China or Nigeria or Iran or Mexico might solve a problem, inherently creates the idea that the American way isn't the only way and (gasp!) might not even be the best way.

Fascism, in whatever form it takes, including the one Republicans in power are working directly towards, is rooted in homogeneity, in an erasing of difference and a reduction of the scope of human life to a small set of beliefs, actions, and thoughts. Even when it is practiced at a relatively tepid level, it is based in the idea that everyone should think and believe the same things and limit themselves to essentially the same behaviors, even if it is impractical to force them to. Ultimately, contemporary Republicans (or at least those in power) think everyone should be Republican, not even in an ideological sense, but in an identity sense, in a daily lived what they wear what they eat what music they listen to way, and, barring that, they will do everything they can to ensure that only Republicans are in power. To put this a slightly different way: the primary goal of the Republican party is to ensure that only Republican solutions are adopted.

Reading in translation is, essentially, an inoculation against this virus-like homogeneity, against the idea that there is one right way to be human, against the idea that you and those like you have a monopoly on ideal humanity. With our eyes open, looking at the world, watching people do different things, solve problems in different ways, think different thoughts, and take different joys, it is obvious that homogeneity is a fraud, that fascism is a lie, and that all those who fight for it, in whatever incarnation they fight for, do so out of fear that whatever their identity is, isn't as right as they claim. But that fear is still powerful. That illusion of safety and security that homogeneity promises is still compelling. The false equivalency of sameness with community is still alluring.

Finally, as we all know from Orwell, how we think is guided, in large part, by the language we use to think with. This is why so much effort, both in good and bad faith, is put into the terms we surround political ideas with. Often, controlling how we label something, like “pro-life” for example or “fiscal conservative,” or even more recently “chain-migration” goes a long way in advancing or hindering an agenda regardless of that agenda's merit. Language and rhetoric can be used to further or hinder a cause without actually making a point about what that cause is or what that cause would do. Furthermore, history adheres to language, allowing words to carry significance and implication that have nothing to do with the idea under consideration, but can greatly impact how we react to and understand an idea or a person. There is a reason why it was effective to refer to Hilary Clinton as “shrill.” The act of translation is a direct interaction, perhaps even confrontation with that limiting force of language. By pulling meaning from one language with one set of assumptions and one set of limits on thought into another language with a different set of assumptions and a different set of limits on thought, the translator makes us aware of these mechanisms, introduces us to the limits of our own thought, and deepens our own relationship with how language functions and how we use language to converse, argue, dictate, and think. And by developing that awareness, by building the particular skills needed to make sense of words from another culture, you also develop the skills to see through propaganda and to understand the mechanism behind an act of bad faith rhetoric and to counter it.

Ultimately, fascism has a grammar. It has a system of speaking that emphasizes fear and division and curtails curiosity and exploration. It displaces the context of the discussion so somehow, instead of arguing about the merits of an idea, you're arguing about your own patriotism or how much you value your heritage. The hyper-awareness of the mechanisms of language that comes from immersing yourself in a work whose ideas came from a different grammar also gives you the tools to see and dissect the grammar of fascism. To borrow another classic image from literature, fascism is the man behind the curtain. Reading works in translation isn't going to suddenly empower you to tear down the systems of power threatening our society, but it will give you the ability to see the curtain protecting those systems from scrutiny. And seeing the curtain is the first step in tearing it down.

Translation as Transhumance is one of those books that gets bigger the more I think about it. Even for this piece, as the core ideas have expanded as I've worked on them, I've had to discard my thoughts about the potential power of our international American English, the relationship between a language and a nation, the power translation has to dissolve political borders, and Gansel's own direct use of translation as a political act. (That last part I at least discussed in the review linked above.) Every time I took a step, the distance I could travel increased. Every time I got to the top of a mountain, I saw a higher mountain ahead of me. Every opened door revealed another room filled with more doors to open. For me, literature is an act of potential. It is an ongoing testament to humanity's potential to grow, to change, and to improve and to the joy of improvement, change, and growth. Translation as Transhumance is a change to celebrate all of it, both in the type of reading it pushes us towards and the beauty it contains within itself.

Buy Translation as Transhumance from IndieBound or your local independent bookstore.