How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling

By Danny Caine

Can bookstores save the world? As bastions of culture, anchors of local retail districts, community gathering places, and sources of new ideas, inspiration, and delight, maybe they can. But only if we protect them and the critical roles they fill in our communities.Danny Caine, author of the bestselling sensation How to Resist Amazon and Why and co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, makes a compelling case for the power of small, local businesses in this thoughtful examination of the dynamic world of bookstores. At once an urgent call to action and a celebration of everything bookstores can do, Caine's new book features case-study profiles of a dozen of the most interesting, creative, and progressive bookstores of today, from Minneapolis to Paris. Through a well-informed analysis of these case studies, Caine offers actionable strategies to promote a sustainable future for bookselling, including policy suggestions, ideas for community-based action, and tips on what consumers can do to help. A captivating read for any lover of books, patron of bookstores, or champion of the survival of these vital institutions, How to Protect Bookstores and Why makes the strongest possible case for the importance of a resilient, inclusive, and progressive bookstore landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781648412431

Danny Caine

Danny Caine is the author of the book How to Resist Amazon and Why, as well as the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy’s, and Flavortown. One of the owners of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, he was named Midwest Bookseller of the Year in 2019. More at dannycaine.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Layers of Community

Birchbark Books & Native Arts, Minneapolis, MN

In many ways, the roots of this book were planted in March 2020. Broadly, the coronavirus pandemic reshaped the work of bookstores so significantly that it’s impossible to write about contemporary bookselling without considering it. Narrowly, that’s when I met Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and bookstore owner Louise Erdrich, when she came to Lawrence for an event hosted by my bookstore, the Raven. That evening with Louise was my first exposure to the way she values bookstores and the inspiring way she fosters literary community. My learning about Louise’s work happened right as the seriousness of the pandemic was setting in; her event was on March 11, 2020. Both events reshaped how I think about bookselling—an awakening that’s still ongoing. Because of all that, she was the first person I interviewed for this book. So to start things off, I’d like to revisit an account of Louise’s visit to Lawrence, which I first drafted in the chaotic weeks afterwards and revised for this book.

• • •

At 4:30 p.m. on March 10, I get a text from Chris. Chris is the inventory manager at the Raven, the bookstore where I work in Lawrence, Kansas. Chris texted, simply, Louise Erdrich is here. That’s not the kind of text you ignore.

Of course I knew Louise Erdrich would be in Lawrence, but I didn’t know she’d be here a day early. I’m in the middle of a diaper change when I get the text. Then, in a whirl, I’m in the car, buckling the car seat, flying across the bridge in two minutes. Thank goodness there’s a parking spot. I burst into the store and Louise is still there. We introduce ourselves, I introduce her to my son, she talks to him about the digger on his shirt. Later, my wife would ask my son about meeting Louise, and he’d point to his shirt and say, digger, nodding. Louise says kind things about Lawrence. She says kind things about the store. If you’ve been spellbound by Louise’s voice on one of her audiobooks, know that her voice is just like that in real life.

She says she’d love to grab dinner if anyone’s interested.

At this point I’m trying not to be too effusive. I try to keep my cool around authors, something I’ve had to teach myself how to do. It’s awkward to be fawned over. But Louise Erdrich is really, truly one of my favorite novelists. Not only that, she’d been in the number one spot on my author event wish list for years. The same was true for our partners on the event, Lawrence Public Library and Haskell Indian Nations University. Countless times I had answered maybe someday to someone asking when the Raven could bring Louise Erdrich to town. Now someday is tomorrow and Louise wants to get dinner tonight.

Oh, okay, cool, I can send some texts. This is turning out to be a perfectly normal day. I duck into the other room to make a few calls. I call all the booksellers who requested to work the event. Kelly, Kami, and Nancy are free. I call Kristin, the events coordinator at Lawrence Public Library. She asks if she could bring Kathleen, director of development. Sure. I call Carrie, the librarian at Haskell, where the event will be held. Carrie says she can make it. A plan is hatched to meet in the lobby of the Eldridge Hotel at six and then head to 715, Lawrence’s nicest restaurant. The plan works for Louise. It’s 5:15. I head home to drop off the kid and catch my breath.

Dinner is an absolute joy, and that’s not only because it’s my last time sitting in a restaurant with a large, boisterous group until years later.

The next day’s author event is set to take place at Haskell Indian Nations University, a campus in southern Lawrence with roughly 1,000 students from 140 federally recognized tribes. Twelve of its buildings, including the auditorium where Louise will speak, are National Historic Landmarks. Yet, to much of Lawrence’s population, the smaller of Lawrence’s two universities is a mystery, a blank spot. Except for during the immensely popular art fair in September, many Lawrencians never set foot on Haskell’s campus.

In some ways, having Louise’s event at Haskell made sense. It was Carrie the Haskell librarian’s idea. Louise is a hero to many people, of course, but especially to the Indigenous writers and readers and teachers at Haskell. But it also posed a challenge—not many townies make it out there. The auditorium doesn’t really have an address, per se. Three times I asked Carrie what the auditorium’s capacity was, and I got five answers. There’s not really any parking. This all seemed like it could hurt our numbers, and for an author like Louise Erdrich, numbers are how you convince the publishers to send more authors. But Carrie, with her contagious enthusiasm, convinced us. It made the whole thing more exciting, but more unpredictable at the same time. Even at 6 p.m. on March 10, a mere 24 hours before Louise’s talk, I still had no idea what was going to happen. And that’s before I even thought about the looming pandemic.

Before the Raven’s author events I’m always afraid that nobody will show up (it’s happened before). But today I’m also afraid that people will show up. What if nobody comes and we have to report bad numbers to HarperCollins for one of our highest-profile author events in years? Or, what if the auditorium, loaded with old and immunocompromised people, becomes a coronavirus hot spot? I had been scrutinizing state, local, and national guidance for large events. At that point, nobody suggested cancelling events under 500 people, and that’s all we could physically fit in there. But still, could I trust the folks issuing guidelines? If it all goes south, I think, at least last night’s dinner was fun. At least a few Haskell students got to meet Louise. At least she fell in love a bit with Lawrence.

Earlier that week, I’d actually scored eight 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer. The Raven’s office supplies distributor still had some. Three came with us to Haskell, stationed at each front door. The library also brought their freestanding tower with the laser-activated touch-free dispenser. Kristin says she’s seen people filling their own dispensers from it before the library closed. By now I’ve grown used to the feeling of hand sanitizer burning into cracked knuckle skin, but it was still new to me back then.

I go to the hotel to fetch Louise and we head south to Haskell. All day on Twitter I’ve watched people publicly announce their decisions to not attend tonight’s event, their abundances of caution, their regrets. They stopped short of blaming us for doing something dangerous, but I still feel unsure.

Much later, I still won’t be sure it was the best idea to carry on with it. But we do. In the end, 450 people show up. They give Louise a standing ovation before she says a single word. Maybe, like me, they feel like this could be the grand finale for anything we can safely call normal.

Louise speaks beautifully. Many of the anecdotes she shared at last night’s dinner—her family’s history at Haskell, her daughter’s pet crows—weave themselves into her stories, and the stories about the book, and beautiful passages she reads aloud. It’s like a poetry reading. Nobody in the audience stirs. Nobody in the audience crinkles any wrappers. Nobody in the audience coughs, thank goodness. We sell so many books. We touch so many credit cards.

Finally, finally, the signing line dies down. The last of the books is inscribed. Louise and I say bye to Carrie and thank her with big hugs. We walk up the aisle and out of the auditorium into the crisp night of the Haskell quad. There is a small fire burning with a lone silhouette kneeling close. Louise says, The students lit that sacred fire to bless this event. Let’s go thank the fire’s caretaker.

As we walk over to the fire, the caretaker stands, unfolding his lanky frame. He nods at us. Louise crouches and pulls some sage out of her bag. She crumbles off a few pieces and tosses them into the fire. They miss, landing on a cool spot away from the flame. She reaches her hand right in there and grabs the sage, placing it directly on top of the embers. She doesn’t flinch.

Standing, she says, Thank you for tending this fire. What’s your name?

Junior, the caretaker says. Yours?

I’m Louise, and this is Danny.

Junior reaches across the fire to shake our hands. It is my last handshake.

• • •

Our event at Haskell was Louise’s last big author event, and the Raven’s. It was the night Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid and the NBA cancelled all its games. It was the night Tom Hanks announced he had caught it. It was the night that the whole thing began to feel very real, at least for me and the Raven’s booksellers. It was the night Louise answered her daughters’ pleas to come home: as she told me in the car on the way to Haskell, I’m cancelling the rest of the tour. I’m headed home tomorrow. My daughter doesn’t want me going to Chicago. When I wrote about the people in the crowd thinking the event was the grand finale for anything we can safely call ‘normal,’ I had no idea how right I was.

Looking back on March 2020, the main thing I remember is how the Raven had to adapt, and quickly. We shut down for browsing and tried a pizza counter model for a few weeks, and then went fully remote. In a period of weeks, we reinvented our business. That’s true of all bookstores. The process of how bookstores did this is widely documented—I was even quoted in a New York Times article on the subject.¹⁸ Article after article appeared, helping customers follow their bookstores into strange and difficult new