Indie Bookstore of the Month: Guide to Kulchur

Have you noticed that the lovers, makers, and sellers of print culture refuse to give up on print and its continued relevance? In 2010 it was Atomic Books and Quimby's call for The Revenge of Print. In recent months, it's been the thriving indie bookstores of Bushwick, Brooklyn; the used booksellers of Khartoum, Sudan working to revive reading and restore the city to its former literary glory; The Taksim Square Book Club; and reports from Mexico City's Under the Volcano Books that the paperback fiction business is booming, as their Mexican readers hunger for stories and become increasingly disenchanted with "Face" (their nickname for Facebook). Add to this list Guide to Kulchur, a Cleveland new and used bookstore that arrived on the scene in June 2013. A combination curated bookshop, zine-making co-op, meeting and reading space, small-press friendly store, and zine archive, Guide to Kulchur was invented by Riot Grrrl historian Lyz Bly and her husband, poet/DIY entrepreneur RA Washington, who want to put the means of production into the hands of one west-side rustbelt neighborhood while showcasing both the local and national zine and small press scenes. Here's what they told me:

Karen the Small Press Librarian: In addition to selling books and zines, your shop (which opened in 2013) is aggressively promoting print culture, offering the means of production for zines and chapbooks. What do you have to say to the naysayers who tell us the e-book is the future, and print is dead?

RA: There will always be folks that want to read in the physical, the issue is whether we can get these printed materials into their hands, into their field of vision. I think that the e-book has seen its rebuttal, for more and more people are printing, looking for ways to print, to fine print. If you can make it something that new writers and readers covet, then we can have a communal success. Small press have advantage over the big ones, but only if folks like you build alternative media outlets to help them get the word out.

Karen: You and Lyz want to create a zine archive that will amass evidence of "resistance" in rust-belt Cleveland, and start a dialogue with other dire-straits cities whose zinesters have left a record of similar resistance. While some point to social media phenomena like "The Twitter Revolution" as proof that we've "moved on," what part do you think print culture still plays or can play in grassroots movements and politics of the people? Do you think Twitter and zines address people at different levels in the business of consciousness-raising?

Lyz: I would put a zine in their hands and then ask them to look at one online. It’s a completely different experience. Through my research for my dissertation and soon to be book (Gender and Generation X: Riot Grrrls, Slackers, Sex, and Feminism), I studied thousands of zines at the Sallie Bingham Collection at Duke, the Sophia Smith Archives at Smith College, and the Riot Grrrl Zine Collection at Fales/NYU Library. There is nothing quite like picking up a zine and having a bit of glitter land on your lap, or noticing coffee stains or yellowing paper from a particularly loved and read zine. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been organizing the zine collection we’ve amassed thus far at Guide to Kulchur. The tactile experience of holding something that someone created out of love or desperation—whether it’s haphazardly stapled together or meticulously ordered—is not something that you can match digitally.

RA: I do think that print that is designed well, written well will always be a tool of dissent. Twitter can be too, but its a sound bite tool. I think the speed [at which] it moves can be off-putting to folks. Progressive people just have to step our game up with trying to counteract these huge media selling tools. We just have to have better content and not be afraid to say it is better.

Karen: When you began inventing Guide to Kulchur, what made you want to open an indie bookstore in 2013? What audience did you imagine would embrace your shop? Or are you looking to create an audience that wasn't yet there?

RA: We wanted to create a curated reading culture, for us this meant making sure that the books were essential, that there was diversity in the offering and a strong small press presence. We also wanted to provide the public with a store that had a real good eye and was fairly priced. We give a bulk of the sales to all independent bookmakers, small presses and authors. We were making a statement with this obviously, but we wanted A. for people to value the work of the independent /D.I.Y. makers, and B. to say to other bookstores that there are business models that can be created where we do not have to take a huge cut out of the small pie. So we chose to stay away from the large distro vehicles. We chose to not have a credit account with the huge media sellers, mainly because folks can get those books cheaper on Amazon than we can sell them. This allows us to exist without having a debt relationship with the companies that won’t even consider distributing small presses because those presses don't print in higher quantities.

Lyz: The audience on the near west side in the Gordon Square Arts District needs to be cultivated. There are young people who were drawn to the up-and-coming neighborhood for its proximity to downtown and emerging restaurants, bars, and shops. And artists and thinkers are always early colonizers of neighborhoods that will become eventual bastions of hip (I remember when my friend, artist Terry Durst, moved from Kent State University to Tremont in the mid-1980s—most people had no idea where the neighborhood was or that it even existed). Yes, you need bars and restaurants, but you also need art and ideas in these emergent communities. Otherwise it’s just empty capitalism packaged as “cool.” We want something authentic. You don’t get to wear the Beauvoir or Baldwin t-shirt unless you’ve read their work.

Karen: There are some impressive indie bookstores in Cleveland: Visible Voice, Mac's Backs, Loganberry Books. How do you fit in with the Cleveland scene, and how do you differentiate yourself from the others? Is yours a neighborhood bookstore or a destination shop, or both?

RA: There are some awesome bookstores in Cleveland, and I think we work well together to service a very well-read city. We wanted to be a destination and a neighborhood store, because where we are located is situated west of Visible Voice and we carry stuff that is not in competition with them. So you could go to both in afternoon and have two totally different experiences. Also we do not take a cut of small press publications. We also service manual typewriters, have an extensive zine/chapbook library, and a co-op where you can make a zine, go get it printed and spend your money on printing as opposed to the tools you need to make the master product. Glue sticks, rotary presses, Sharpies, typewriters, collage materials and paper all cost money--so our thinking was if there was a place where we could share those costs, it would be easier to produce more zines. Eventually we will have letterpress machines, old etching presses and the like so you could try new methods to print.

Karen: Do you imagine Guide to Kulchur becoming a player in the national bookstore scene, like Quimby's or Atomic Books? Do you have favorite bookstores in other cities, or bookstores or cultural centers that influenced your concept for Guide to Kulchur?

RA: Yes, we already are starting that journey, but it’s not a goal. It’s happening because some of the best writers in the world are finding out about it through other writers, and getting plugged in. And I was not kidding when I say world--we want to make a place that has a worldview, that offers respect to our backyard by displaying all of the work together. We do not have a “local section,” we have an independent book makers section, and that distinction will go very far in terms of goodwill, and building a critical mass.

Lyz: In August we took a delayed honeymoon in Europe. We spent a full week in Paris and we felt most at home at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. We were enamored with the ethos of the place and with the design and the physical space, of course. But we were also so excited to read how the owner has written about books and feeling the physicality of the paper in one’s hands—the ways in which the characters in fiction texts are as real to him (and now his daughter who runs the Paris shop) as a person standing in front of him. We are not Shakespeare and Company by any means, but we embrace the same vision and—without knowing it—we used the same kind of language when writing about our goals for Guide to Kulchur.

Karen: Is Guide to Kulchur a non-profit, a side project, a literal co-op, or a business that pays employees (or owner/s) enough to live on? Do you think the kind of bookstore that employs several full-timers is a thing of the past? Are bookstores important enough for us to create and support them even if they aren't money-makers?

RA: Guide To Kulchur is not a 501(c)(3), it’s not a side project, it is not a cost share co-op in the traditional sense. The store exists strictly from the sales of the used/new books we find and sell. We have employees and we pay a living wage, but it is not enough to live on of course. How could it be? Lyz and I know that you have to hold down multiple jobs to do this work, so we do. It’s obvious to me that bookstores are important, and they should have our support as long as the business model allows for the bookstore to pay for itself. It is not a profit type of thing. you are not going to put together a huge savings, but if you follow a creative capitalist approach--if you keep in mind that the deck is stacked against all of us that are not extremely wealthy--then you can make a difference, and stay relevant and open for a long time.

Karen: Guide to Kulchur, besides being the title of an Ezra Pound collection of essays, was a project you started a few years ago where people in different cities could print out each other's books and distribute them locally. How did this work, logistically—the book printing, the distro, or finding willing authors in other cities? And how did this work, as in how did it succeed? About how many writers or other people got involved, and how many books were distributed this way?

RA: Wow, how did you know about that? It's something we still want to do, and it worked on a small scale. I think most writers have this notion that some press is going to swoop down and offer them the Bukowski deal, and its not going to happen. The way you make it as a writer is you write, and you read, and you print, and you meet, and you collaborate and you distribute. It's work, and it's very rare that someone will do all of that for you, so you have to do it for yourself. If a press publishes you, you have to get out and help them sell the book. So many times you have writers who are not willing to hit the road, beat the pavement and get out and sell their work. It doesn't happen magically, but if you do that for long enough, if you honor your commitments, you can build a readership and you will die published. That's the only way. there is no shortcut. I don’t even know if I answered your question!

Karen: Tell us how many cities participated in Guide to Kulchur, the publishing/distro experiment.

RA: We had sixteen cities across the world participate, and we were able to distro some limited edition broadsides and even did some group translation work where a poem in, say, French would be in Spanish, Russian, and English. Some really interesting new writers across the globe, so many that I'm trying to bring the program back. The counties involved outside the US included France, Belgium, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, and Ireland. We lost money, all of us did, but for me it was an awesome project.

Karen: What's the significance of the Ezra Pound book or title for you?

RA: I love that book, I found a copy at Mac's Backs when I was 17, thinking I was a writer. It opened me up to so many aspects of literary thought/critical and how zany Pound is. The myth is he said that the book was a blueprint for writers looking to avoid the corporate college and that if you read it, you would have all you needed for a life in letters. I think it's true.

Karen: Are zines important to literature, to publishing, to information dissemination, or to culture at large? Does literature get created on a Trickle Up basis, but is perceived to work as Trickle Down? Or is that using someone else's terms to describe something more complex?

RA: I don’t know about the terms, but it makes sense, and it’s a good question.

Lyz: In a democracy, all voices are important. There are some zines that may seem silly now—documenting your thrift store finds (as in the writers of the well-known zine Thrift Score once did) may seem superficial and about reifying consumption, but as a historian I can tell you that there’s something to glean about culture from any zine you pick up. And the U.S. has a history of self-publishing Alice Paul and Lucy Burns of the National Woman’s Party published a radical (for its time) newspaper on women’s rights while they were fighting for suffrage and even the Declaration of Independence was initially published as a Dunlap broadside and read widely before it became the document we know today.

*****

Visit Guide to Kulchur on "Face":
https://www.facebook.com/GuideToKulchurCleveland

Under the Volcano Books Opens October 15th, Mexico City

Grant Cogswell hanging shelves at Under the Volcano Books, July 2011.

The last time I saw Grant Cogswell, he was making me laugh hysterically in Austin, Texas. Seventeen years and a few cities later, this filmwriter/ activist/ longtime Seattle resident is gearing up to open an expat English-language bookstore and gathering place in the Roma District of Mexico City (D.F.). The store will be named Under the Volcano Books after the Mexico-set novel by expat writer Malcolm Lowry. The grand opening is set for Saturday October 15th, 2011.

Yesterday Grant was kind enough to answer some interview questions in between constructing a bookstore interior at Cerrada Chiapas 40-C, Colonia Roma Norte.

What led you to want to open a bookstore? Was this a life-long dream, or did it have more to do with timing and opportunity?

Not a lifelong dream. I'd worked in bookstores stateside, and it never really occurred to me until I came to D.F. and saw there wasn't really anything for readers of English - and began to imagine what was also missing, which was the kind of semi-public community that might grow around such an institution. After I decided to move here in 2006, my imagination of what kind of life I wanted here just kind of grew the store within itself, like a pearl, becoming the center of the impulse. By the time I was here full-time in late 2009 it was what I was doing.

I understand that you have a particular vision for this English-language bookstore in a world-class city, in a neighborhood with a long history of artists and expats. Knowing you, it will be much more than just a store. Tell us what you hope for the bookstore to be, and what steps you will take to see that vision through?

Well, I think it will be a place of a very particular kind. I'm very insistent that there won't be wi-fi available, even when we have coffee and tables and who knows maybe even some kind of food. There's a kind of psychic silence that to me is very much associated with reading - I think a lot of people go camping to find it, or hell, I don't know, have sex with strangers-- so that's the first thing: analog. I'll often be playing Coltrane, or The Band, or KEXP (ironically) online - there's also an amazing station here at 105.7 that has its finger on the pulse of whateveryouwanttocallit Indie rock from the US just as firmly as anything on the internet. Our location is at the end of an alley in a hundred-year-old working neighborhood, but we have this lovely little tiled back garden. I'd like it to be a place that a large assemblage of travellers and residents and even people in the English-speaking world who'll never go to Mexico recognize as an outpost of, I don't know, the examined life? That sounds so hard. The life of books, thought, self-education, art. Once my Spanish is good enough to read at a decent enough speed for literature (I can get through the newspaper fairly quick, but am constantly resorting to a dictionary) I just have to make sure I don't end up spending my off hours hanging out at El Pendulo or Conejo Blanco. I love those places. We could do a lot worse than just be an English version of them. There will at some point be a literary journal based in the store called Mexico Review focusing on translations from contemporary Mexican writers and Americans writing about Mexico, in the very most expansive sense. We'll be open every day, because a 24-hour-layover on a NY-Buenos Aires flight happens at its own convenience, and I am counting on those people coming to the store.

What kind of books will you feature?

Used contemporary and classic fiction and poetry, translations from the Spanish, politics, history, philosophy, urban planning and architecture, lit crit, interesting nonfiction, art books, punk culture, comics, travel books, language aids, 'expat lit'.

Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio recently read in the space that will be Under the Volcano Books. Do you plan to hold readings frequently? What types of writers will you court? From how far away?

I'll have visiting writers, obviously drawing for reasons of airfare and my personal connections far heavier from the West Coast of the US than the East. But a lot of people come through here. Not too often - I want to maintain the sense of them as an event, and the bar will be high, nobody without a published book at the very least. I can't see flying anyone over from Australia, but otherwise the sky's the limit.

What has been the most challenging aspect of opening the bookstore so far? What has been the most unexpected challenge?

Finding a space; finding a space. By custom here you need to have a property-owner guarantee your lease when you rent, and that goes for residential as well as commercial property. Arriving here as an immigrant without particularly deep local roots this was looking almost impossible - years off. Then my good friend and roommate bought a house in Roma Norte for his recording business and it was kind of the Hand of God.

You’re opening a brick and mortar bookstore in 2011. You’ve been blogging about the store, keeping far-flung friends updated on Facebook, and you’ve created a catalog of your store’s inventory on LibraryThing. How do you see the relationship between your bookstore and the digital world? Are you interested in selling books online, or just getting people into your space?

I'm going to do what I enjoy: I think going outside of that would be to the detriment of my pleasure in the store and thereby bring it down. There are people who want to see this become an emporium for the materials they use in their English classes here: that's not going to happen, nor am I going to become an online dealer. My skills are choosing the inventory very carefully based on a knowledge of the literature of the English language and contemporary culture, and curating a place for people to come to in a splendidly comfortable and affordable neighborhood. I will also make coffee.

One plan you had was to sell books on the street while waiting to find the right space for the store. Have you done much of that? How have sales been? Have you liked the feeling of selling literature on the streets of Mexico City?

I haven't sold anything on the streets. I soon found out those street markets are a web of old relationships and there's a reason you don't see foreigners working in them. I was about to get a permit from the Delegacion to sell in Coyoacan when Sylvain bought the house where the store will go and it just wasn't worth doing at that point.

I’ve been noticing a new business model among bookstores being opened by working artists and writers: The kind of bookstore that is not required to sustain itself. The owners’ income/s from art and writing jobs help to supplement the bookstore, which they choose to open because they passionately want a bookstore in their city. Will Under the Volcano Books be required to sustain itself?

Yes, but there are lots of ways we can make that happen if things get tight. I see the store over time becoming a magnet for people who want to practice their English. If there's a store full of people four nights a week at 50 pesos a head chatting away because that's what's needed to keep us afloat, that's perfectly fine with me. I think our overhead is a fraction of what it would be in the US. You see a lot of places here you wonder, how the hell does that store stay open? Things are just a lot cheaper in general here is how, and I am counting on them staying that way. I can't imagine the brass it would take to do this in the States, and don't want to.

On a Youtube video that seems to have vanished since I saw it, you made a very provocative statement that you hoped the bookstore would introduce both Mexicans and Americans the better sides of themselves to each other. That [currently] Mexicans know too much American scorn and Americans hear too much about Mexican crime. Tell us more about your hope and how literature sheds light on our better angels.

Well, most Americans simply have hardly the faintest idea about this country: what it contains, what its 'normal setting' is, the daily life of the majority of people. Now that the drug killings have reached around 50,000, people throw around the statistic that the narco wars have killed as many people as Americans died in Vietnam, so people think there is a war going on here. (There is in some places near the US border, specifically Ciudad Juarez, and in some of rural Tamaulipas where it could be classified at that level.) Well, that's true. But two million Vietnamese died in that war. Nothing like the same scale. Don't get me wrong, the situation is an enormous and terrible tragedy and I think most people here believe we have further to go with it than we have come yet, and who knows what it will lead to. But this is a nation of 100 million people most of whom have no connection with or direct experience of any of that world. And their lives go on, day to day. Americans sense not the least texture of that reality for the most part, or the nature of life here in DF, which is now one of the safest places in the country and a magnet again for that reason. Nor the particular and complex past and the nature of the national identity it produced, which I think may be a healthier approach to being of the New World than I have seen come to fruition in the U.S.

On the other side, American mass-culture floods the airwaves and the video stalls here, and it is usually the movies and music with the most money behind them, which are not always the worst, but very often. I've run into smart, worldly people here who were totally unaware the US has a culture of art cinema, for example. Mexicans in general are not big readers - which is okay for me, because Mexicans in general are not my target audience. But I'd like to at least get the very privileged cultural class here to be aware of Whitman, of Keats, or Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. I think there's room to create that awareness, and a hunger for it, because contact with American culture is seen from the very least on an economic plane as sophistication, as self-development. And I'm sitting here with the literary aspect being almost entirely absent from that conversation wanting to lean over and say "There's something pretty wide here you missed..."

Visit the Under the Volcano Books website here.

WORD UP Community Bookshop to Grace Upper Manhattan for One Month

Two titles from Fractious Press as spotted on the shelves at Fleeting Pages bookstore (Pittsburgh, May 2011).

Fleeting Pages pop-up bookstore closed its Pittsburgh doors at 9:00pm on June 4th. But close on its heels, small press publisher Veronica Liu, pairing up with the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA) and Vantage Properties, will be opening a Manhattan pop-up on June 14th. The new bookstore will be called Word Up, in reference to its uptown location of Washington Heights. Much like Fleeting Pages, Word Up will pop up for one month, and will be dedicated to the output (and reading/writing events) of the small press, the micro press, and self publishers of zines. The store will aim also to showcase a multi-lingual selection of books, to reflect the residents of this diverse neighborhood especially known for its large Dominican population. Inventory and events will focus largely, but not exclusively, on metro New York presses and writers.

Liu, who is managing editor of Seven Stories Press by day, and moonlights as publisher of Fractious Press by night, has been active in the micro press scene for several years. After attending zine fests and other small press fairs with a table full of Fractious wares, and hosting readings to promote the press' subversive and engaging authors, a pop-up bookstore may seem like a logical extension of such events.

But two projects through Seven Stories led equally to the idea of placing a bookstore in Washington Heights. Liu has been working with the Seven Stories Institute (affiliated with the Press, although a separate entity), which acts as a democratic disseminator of Seven Stories books and ideas. Recognizing that their radical, critical nonfiction was being distributed more widely in academic circles than in the communities such books were written to serve, Seven Stories Institute was founded in 2004 to devise ways to reach those underserved populations--whether by offering the books in Spanish, making the books available at a deep discount, or organizing community discussions. (Read more here.) In addition, Liu has been editing a forthcoming book, REBEL BOOKSELLER: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want To Fight for, from Free Speech To Buying Local To Building Communities (written by veteran bookseller Andrew Laties). Due out from Seven Stories in its second edition in July, the book (originally published by Vox Pop in 2005) has been considered a must-read among certain circles of radical and community-minded booksellers.

NoMAA and Vantage Properties have been enthusiastic partners with Liu in making the Word Up project a reality. The assisting realtor from Vantage has been excited at the prospect of both filling an unused space and seeing a bookstore come to Washington Heights. Liu says that the realtor grew up in the neighborhood and can't recall a single bookstore in the immediate area, although nearby Inwood and Harlem/Sugar Hill have had bookstores. Details for the final location of Word Up are still being worked out, but Liu has one back up location "ready to go" should her first-choice storefront fall through. The exact location will be announced later this week. [See UPDATE below.] Though utilities such as electricity and internet will create costs, the overall overhead of the project is expected to be low.

The bookstore will open during NoMAA's Uptown Arts Stroll (aka Paseo de las Artes), an annual festival featuring a month of artist exhibits, dance performances, readings, and other creative events. At this writing, Word Up store hours are set for weekdays 4:00pm-9:00pm, and weekends Noon-4:00pm, with some added hours for events. Currently, Liu is collecting the shop's inventory, which will be sold on consignment. Interested small press publishers and authors should contact her at info@fractiouspress.com to receive a consignment form and shipping address, or to propose a small press reading, workshop, or event.

Find a Facebook event page for Word Up here:
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=217256871630959

See the Fractious Press events page for an update on the location: http://www.fractiouspress.com/events

Find the new Word Up website here:
http://wordupbooks.wordpress.com/

...or stay tuned to this blog for additional info.

UPDATE: Veronica Liu has confirmed the bookstore address as 4157 Broadway @ W. 175 Street (a former pharmacy).

SECOND UPDATE: This article has been edited for accuracy since its original version.

Interview with a Pop-Up Bookseller

This morning I sat down at a Pittsburgh café with Jodi Morrison, the energetic woman who is spearheading the Fleeting Pages pop-up bookstore project, due to open in Pittsburgh--for one month--on April 30th.

When asked how she came to the idea of setting a small-press indie bookstore inside the space of a former chain bookstore, Morrison traces the following arc: She recalls fondly the abundance of independent bookstores that once existed in Pittsburgh's most educated neighborhood, Squirrel Hill. A Barnes & Noble which landed there in the late '90s wiped out smaller favorites like the Squirrel Hill Bookstore and Three Penny Books. But when the Barnes & Noble itself closed in late 2009, Morrison wanted to take it back for the independents. She claims, "I immediately thought, 'Let's fill that space up with something different.' " She couldn't get the thought of inhabiting the space and reversing the cycle out of her mind: "And I just assumed that everyone else was thinking the same thing!" A variety of circumstances prevented her from sealing the deal on that real estate at that time, but when she heard about Borders going bankrupt, her mental wheels started turning again. She called up former Soft Skull Press editor, Richard Nash (for whom she had once worked), and he loved the idea of Fleeting Pages. "To have Richard be so positive and excited about the idea was incredibly empowering."

It's been less than two weeks since the Fleeting Pages website went live, and the response from interested small press and self-publishers has already been enormous; the project has gotten national press, and Morrison's inbox is flooded. She cites such publishers as Future Tense, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Weave Magazine as early responders, with Nash's latest publishing ventures, Cursor and Red Lemonade, as official supporters. She's even gotten some potential interest from some of the big publishers, but they want to know some hard-line statistics before they leap: "I've been getting a lot of 'Why Pittsburgh?' from certain publishers. They say, 'Let us know if you plan to do this in New York, Portland, or Seattle.' They are skeptical that there's a market for it here." But as I recently reported in Pop City, Pittsburgh's emerging arts are booming, its cultural audience is enthusiastic, and its small press scene supports far more independent publishers and reading series than a city of its size would suggest. In the past two years, the city has started two annual small press fairs: SPF, featuring literary and poetry presses, and PIX, for small press comics.

Morrison says she was reared on Pittsburgh's tight-knit indie community, and it taught her what to look for when she left. Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 90s, Morrison says, "There were great things happening on a smaller scale in the indie arts in Pittsburgh—in music, zines, and books. I learned a lot from that community, like how to treat other people and how to respect the work. But I left [in 1996] because the support for indie culture wasn't being reflected in the city in a larger way at that time." She has since enjoyed such subcultures in Boston, Chicago, and Brooklyn, before returning to an evolving Pittsburgh area in 2008.

As for the small press books that will stock Fleeting Pages' shelves, Morrison is adamant about an open-door policy ("as long as it's not illegal"), and is impartial as to whether the items are coming from literary presses, Christian imprints, self-published historians, or precocious 14-year olds. She states, "The culture of the book is changing so much. You no longer have to have an agent and a contract to publish a book. I'm interested in exploring who is creating books now, and also in questioning who determines our access…. Borders and Barnes and Noble aren't interested in stocking a title that would sell only one copy per store. But to a small or self-publisher, selling 600 or 700 books would be a huge deal." On the other hand, as a book lover with a wide range of reading tastes, she has great sympathy for the publishers who will be hurt by the chain stores' downsizing.

Fleeting Pages plans to have an online store, in part to accommodate the large response from people who want to support the project but can't travel to Pittsburgh in May. The company Bibliopolis will assist in setting up the online component. Bibliopolis (based in Berkeley and now also in Pittsburgh) specializes in creating websites for used and rare bookstores, with clients such as Argosy Book Store in New York and Caliban Books in Pittsburgh. But Morrison does stress the important role that brick and mortar stores have played in her life. One favorite bookseller in late '90s Boston used to greet her when she walked in the door with, "Jodi, I've got some titles I think you'd like." If she expressed interest in learning more on a certain subject, he would research more books on that topic for the next time she came in. "There was a librarian aspect to what he did," Morrison says. She remembers the vibrant conversations and information exchanges she enjoyed with other customers at the store, too—whether finding out about neighborhood news or upcoming music events.

"Bookstores have been a valuable cultural space," Morrison states. To that end, Fleeting Pages will be used not only for bookselling, but in a variety of ways—depending in part on how the indie community responds. Morrison insists that she doesn't want to over-determine what should transpire, but seeks input and ideas from other interested parties. Some requests that have already come across her desk include a communal typewriter for customers to use, tables available for writers around the store, and a resource library for writers to browse. Fleeting Pages will host events such as literary readings and writing workshops, film showings (including the Soft Skull movie, "Horns and Halos"), and a book arts exhibition.

Though the admitted insomniac is working hard between now and April 30th, Morrison is happy for Fleeting Pages to be a project in progress, and will allow its uses to evolve throughout the month it is open. She's also quick to point out that even though her name is the main one associated with the bookstore project, "One hundred and forty-seven other individuals have also pitched in, so far. It's not just me." As just one example, Morrison will have help from friends both near and far in staffing the store.

Jodi Morrison knows that "some people will walk into [Fleeting Pages] and see it as a success, and some will see it as a failure, like, 'This or that could have been done better.' But I hope that both camps take what they see and go build on it. This is just a start."

Photos depict three Pittsburgh bookstores:

Top: Awesome Books

Middle: Caliban Books

Bottom: Copacetic Comics

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Read more about submitting your books to Fleeting Pages:

http://www.fleetingpages.com/category/submit-work/

Find Fleeting Pages on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fleetingpages