A Bittersweet Moment For Black Bookstore Owners

A little under a year ago, Eso Won Books, a Black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, hosted Ibram X. Kendi for a signing. Eso Won sold about 40 copies of Kendi's newest book, How To Be An Antiracist, that night. In the months after, they sold very few.

But in these past few weeks? They've sold 500 copies — and counting.

In fact, Eso Won is the busiest it's been in three decades (and they've hosted the likes of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Muhammad Ali.) The store's owners, James Fugate and Tom Hamilton, along with a handful of other workers, are now filling hundreds of new orders each day — compared to the few dozen they normally had.

As protests and conversations and a renewed . Black-owned bookstores have found themselves in the middle of that zeitgeist. Local bookstores are being asked to keep up with national and even international demand. And businesses that were in danger of shutting down because of the coronavirus are suddenly selling more books than ever.