I hesitate to make such a grand statement (well, not really), but this is what an indie store should be. This store shelves French translations of classics from all over the world, all shelved by region. Just from looking around, you can tell that this is a store that values its editorial selections. There are titles there that probably only sell one copy a year, but that totally impress perceptive customers. The displays are beautiful, the store is very neat and clean, the staff is very well read . . . and this is the place where I found the first novel (I think) to be written about my home town: by Catherine Mavrikakis. So I guess there are three reasons to feature this store . . .

Since May is a bit more subdued than recent months, I’m hoping to have a few features on Quebec literature and publishing, and hopefully an interview with one of the employees of Gallimard Montreal.

Karl Pohrt and I are good friends (he’s actually on the advisory committee for Open Letter as well), and worked together to help launch the Reading the World program.

Although Karl and his store have been mentioned on Three Percent dozens of times, I really wanted to specially feature Shaman Drum this month to bring attention to a few different things, both good and frightening.

First off, as you may have heard, Shaman Drum has run into a bit of trouble. Back in February, Karl wrote a letter to the Ann Arbor Chronicle detailing the plight of the store and the fact that textbook sales were down $510,000 from the previous year and that the store might not survive.

After a trip to Nicaragua, he saying that he would do all he could to keep the bookstore going.

During that trip he met Ernesto Cardenal, whose came out earlier this year from New Directions. Cardenal is going to be in Ann Arbor later this month, and we’re planning on running info and interviews from that event here on Three Percent.

Also in terms of good news, not everyone knows about this yet, but it looks like instead of a traditional Reading the World program this year, we’ll instead be having a RTW party at Idlewild Books in NYC on Thursday, May 28th in honor of Karl. Soo Jin and Declan from New Directions have been working on this, and I’ll make a special post with all the details in the near future. We’re hoping to have someone interview Karl about his life in bookselling, and we’re also planning on having a raffle to benefit Shaman Drum, RTW, and Idlewild.

In addition to linking all book titles to Shaman Drum’s online catalog, we’re hoping to post more information about the store, its history, employees, etc. Since this is one of “those stores” that people remember fondly for years and years, if any of you have any stories about S.D. that you’d like to share, please e-mail them to chad.post at rochester dot edu, or simply post them in the comments below.