Yesterday, we had lunch in the cafe of the Edinburgh John Lewis department store. The food is decent enough, the views are spectacular, and it’s close to a bookstore and an Italian deli where we like to shop. But for me at least, the cafe’s biggest draw is the collection of books that for reasons I’ll never comprehend are shelved (but not for sale) in the corner nook where we always sit. The selection is really good!
The books don't really have a uniform look—they're basically hardbacks with the dust covers removed—and while there’s no overarching theme, most fall under the general category, “Books That Appeal to June Thomas.” Many’s the time (yes, more than once) I’ve ordered a book after flipping through it while eating lunch.
I like books, and I like any eating establishment that provides books for customers to peruse while they’re dining, but my feelings for these places aren’t like the absolutely PASSION I felt for the feminist bookstores I write about in A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE. There was something “extra” about those stores—perhaps related to all the other stuff that was crammed onto their rickety shelves: the women’s music albums, the magazines, the T-shirts, the labrys pendants, and other etceteras.
Still, I did have my moments in other specialist bookstores. When I lived in Madrid, I haunted the Turner English Bookshop, a bit of a sterile warren that had none of the community features the feminist bookstores offered. It did, however, have the English-language novels I craved, albeit hidden behind stacks of language-learning textbooks.
While the Turner had no particular magnetism as a place to linger, the same cannot be said for Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company on Paris’ Rue Dupuytren. Perhaps because it combined a lesbian proprietor and the thirst-quenching appeal of hard-to-find English-language literature, Shakespeare and Company was a social haven as well as a source of reading material. Beach’s own friendly nature was surely responsible for the store’s genial atmosphere, but like feminist bookstore owners a half-century later, she made a conscious decision to reject the cold, intimidating mood that booksellers had traditionally favored.
Soon after it opened in 1919, Shakespeare and Company was established as a warm and welcoming destination for travelers. “The news of my bookshop, to my surprise, soon spread all over the United States,” Beach wrote in her 1956 memoir, “and it was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris.”
Beach had described receiving an unusually cordial reception from Adrienne Monnier when she first visited La Maison des Amis des Livres, her future partner's bookstore on the Rue de l’Odéon. “At a table sat a young woman. A. Monnier herself, no doubt. As I hesitated at the door, she got up quickly and opened it, and, drawing me into the shop, greeted me with much warmth. This was surprising in France, where people are as a rule reserved with strangers, but I learned that it was characteristic of Adrienne Monnier.”
While the economics of bookselling have always been challenging, in the early years of Beach’s store, an unfavorable exchange rate—the franc was weak against the dollar at the time, one of the reasons so many American artists were drawn to Paris—led her to circulate many of her books via a lending library. Beach reported that some members regularly ignored the rules. Instead of limiting himself to the permitted one or two volumes that could be held for up to two weeks, the always oblivious James Joyce “took out dozens, and sometimes kept them for years.”
Unlike modern bookstore proprietors, Beach at least didn’t have to contend with prices printed on the books. A 1924 article about the store in Publishers Weekly noted the psychological advantage this provided, “When someone wishes to buy a book, Miss Beach figures out the price from the American or English price on the basis of current rates of exchange. If the price were already marked in the book, the purchaser might feel that it was rather high without realizing that it was the home price translated into francs,” wrote Morrill Cody.
Beach also pioneered another program that feminist bookstores experimented with in the 1980s and ’90s. When debt and the Great Depression put Shakespeare and Company in danger of closing in the 1930s, Beach launched a membership scheme to raise funds. For an annual subscription of 200 francs, members of the Friends of Shakespeare and Company were permitted to attend author readings at the store.
Shakespeare and Company survived Joyce, but it couldn’t withstand a world war. The store—by that point relocated to the Rue de l’Odéon—closed in 1941.
In the first half of the 20th century, radical bookshops also had a moment on Main Street. At the end of the 1930s there were about 50 Communist bookstores around the United States, and like women’s and queer bookstores, they were targets of official scrutiny and interference. The raids on New York’s People’s House bookshop by state police in 1919, in which books and papers were taken without compensation—and other similar actions over the decades—are on a continuum with the seizure of lesbian and gay books by Canadian and U.K. Customs authorities in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, when arbitrary confiscations by customs services regularly targeted bookstores like Little Sisters in Vancouver, British Columbia, or Gay’s the Word in London, putting them in additional financial peril, since suppliers still needed to be paid even though the stores couldn’t sell books they didn’t have on hand. (Needless to say, these unpaid bills also damaged the precarious finances of the independent feminist and gay publishers and small-press distributors who still had to pay printers to produce the books and shipping services to transport them.)
EVENTS: I’m glad to say that I have some book events on the calendar. I really will make a page to keep track of them, but for the moment, here are the dates and places:
Friday, April 12: Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Noon.
Monday, June 3: Washington, DC. Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue, 7 p.m., in conversation with Christina Cauterucci.
Wednesday, June 5: New York City. P&T Knitwear, Lower East Side, 7 p.m. Exciting news about my conversation partner coming soon!
Friday, June 14: Edinburgh, Topping & Company, 7 p.m., with Alison Bechdel.
Monday, Aug. 19: Minneapolis, Magers & Quinn, 7 p.m.
Wednesday, Aug. 21: Chicago, Women & Children First, 7 p.m.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Almost by chance, I came across a 2022 BBC Radio 3 “essay,” by the great Diana Souhami, about Radclyffe Hall’s final resting place in Highgate Cemetery. Even if I tell you there is dyke drama a-plenty, I guarantee there is 10 times more than you can possibly imagine. Listen for the most entertaining 14 minutes of your week!
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I loved talking with Anna Shechtman about the complicated business of compiling crossword puzzles. (Her new book, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle is great.) On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I discussed the do’s and don’ts of asking successful people in your chosen creative field for advice.