It’s great to see this finally happen . . . For as long as I’ve known Jessica, she’s been working on her plan to open her own bookstore. She’s worked at a number of indie stores in New York, wrote extensive strategic plans (which even won her some cash), and thought this all through very, very carefully.

I have complete faith that Jessica will do everything right in terms of launching this store (like displaying a lot of Open Letter titles, right Jessica? Right?), and from what I’ve heard she nailed down the perfect location. Congrats to Jessica and be sure to check out the for further updates.

In stark contrast to Jessica’s wonderful news comes this statement from 3P favorite, Karl Pohrt:

On the advice of my accountant and my business manager, I am closing Shaman Drum Bookshop June 30. Despite a first rate staff, a fiercely loyal core of customers, a very decent landlord and my own commitment to the community of arts and letters in Ann Arbor, it is clear to me that the bookshop is not a sustainable business.

In spite of the downturn in the economy, Ann Arbor continues to be an excellent book town. There are wonderful independent stores here (Crazy Wisdom, Nicolas’s Books), fine specialty book stores (Vault of Midnight, Aunt Agatha’s) and great used bookshops (Dawn Treader, West Side Books, Motte & Bailey). They need your support.

Over a year ago we began a process to become a non-profit center for the literary arts. I am decoupling Shaman Drum Bookshop from the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, which should simplify and streamline our IRS application. I will pursue this new venture after we close the store.

Shaman Drum Bookshop has been here for 29 years. We had 28 good years. Thank you for your support. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be a bookseller in Ann Arbor.

-Karl Pohrt

We live in a world in which the community of Ann Arbor—Ann freaking Arbor, the home of one of the best universities in the country—can’t support an independent bookstore. As Karl wrote, it seems like a perfect storm of things went wrong to sink Shaman Drum, but still . . . If there’s one city in the Midwest that should have enough intelligent readers to support an indie store, it’s Ann Arbor. My faith has been shaken . . .

Karl’s a close friend, and I know that he’ll come out of this OK. Very interested to see what happens with the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, but from now on, I know that every trip through Ann Arbor will be incomplete. . .

Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age is the title of a symposium held today at the University of Michigan.

New Fate of Reading? Uh-oh . . .

The event announcement features an illustration of books rendered as if they are a flock of birds flying above the reach of a group of young people standing in an open field. The image is ambiguous. Are the books flying toward the people or away from them? Are people greeting the arrival of the books or are they ecstatically waving goodbye? In both instances I fear it’s the later. This might be due to my anxiety about the precarious economics of the culture of books these days. Or perhaps it’s just my bad attitude, something that surfaces now and then despite years spent practicing hardcore zazen.

The text accompanying the picture poses some key questions: What new literacies are generated in the digital era? What happens to the cultural practices associated with the traditional book? How are institutions responding to this new situation? Bookstores are specifically mentioned, along with libraries, publishers, and newspapers. And finally, moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive: How ought they _(to) respond?_ This is what I’m really interested in. What is to be done?

The symposium, sponsored by the Michigan Quarterly Review and the Rackham Graduate School, is held in Angell Hall on the U of M’s central campus, and is divided into two sessions. MQR editor Jonathan Freedman tells us the morning panel, New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age, is devoted to questions of theory and history. The afternoon sessions will examine new institutions.

The program kicks off with a talk entitled “T��� Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-first Century Literature.” Jessica Pressman, who teaches at Yale, informs us that the role of the book will change—has changed—from an essential format to one medium among many. She says the recent talk about the death of the book is a literary response to the perceived threats of the digital age. The theme of the death of the book has become a source of inspiration for writers, despite the fact that literature was never about information delivery. Book bound content is now associated with the literary.

She cites The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, as an example of a new literary form in which the novel itself exists as a character.

“_Shark Texts_ begins with the main character reading himself back to life from near death,” she says.

Pressman describes an aesthetic of bookishness in which books are viewed as a haven from the increasingly threatening digital age. This position is most certainly retro because “we now live in a world in which the text no longer exists just on the page.”

Within the bookish aesthetic, bookstores (“spaces for bound books”) are like sanctuaries or churches. They provide a safe location from which readers can network with each other and critique the digital culture. For bookish folk, bookstores are “shields against the shark.”

Frankly, I never thought of bookshops as lairs of a bound-book Ancien Regime, but I take her point.

“T��� book is a reading machine and data mutates across discourse networks,” she tells us, channeling William Gibson or William S. Burroughs.

Obviously the practice of reading and the bookish experience have changed in the digital age. Nostalgia for the world of print doesn’t cut it anymore in our multi-modal world.

*

Our second speaker’s subject is book fetishism. Harvard English Professor Leah Price
informs us that the “hand-wringing age-based subgroups” fretting over the two National Endowment for the Arts reports on the decline of reading in America are contributing to “a nostalgic narrative of loss.” Price says that books make up only around 14% of printed media, so we’re not factoring in newspapers, magazines, advertising circulars, legal document or screens. She refers to computer screens as “the ‘uncanny double’ of the book.”

“We feel like a beleaguered minority. There is a self-congratulatory aspect to this.”

She does concede that “books are precariously perched in the larger media cultural context.”

Price gives us examples of book fetishism (books as objects regarded with respect, devotion or awe), beginning with Bibles that were never read but functioned as decorative objects in religious households from the eighteenth century on.

She mentions alternative sentencing programs in which offenders are required to attend book discussion groups because it is assumed that reading creates empathy. And she tells us about Bibliotherapy, created by psychologists who believe fiction has a therapeutic value, a moral logic.

The latter two examples sound reasonable to me. Granted, these programs and therapies presume a more optimistic view of the human condition and the transformative power of fiction than may be warranted, but neuroscientists do talk seriously about the plasticity of the brain and speculate about the connection of mirror neurons to empathy. And regarding moral logic, I read an essay by the Israeli writer Amos Oz in which he argues that “imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred.” Aren’t novels powerful tools in assisting us to imagine others?

Price talks about reading as a substitutive behavior for different compulsions, mentioning various addiction metaphors we use to describe our reading experiences: “_I couldn’t put the book down . . . I was swept away . . . I’m hooked on books._”

She goes on to describe programs in which children are encouraged to read aloud to dogs. This keeps the animals relaxed and calm and the kids get to practice their literacy skills.

She mentions children who read aloud to horses, and says “a kind of species politics is emerging these days.” This gets a good laugh.

I briefly consider what I might read to my cat, who has a short attention span and is easily irritated. Maybe a book of snappy jokes about birds and squirrels?

Price informs us she doesn’t mean to trivialize the project of literacy. I’m grateful that she is clear about this.

Then she zeroes in for the kill:

“Literacy had been feminized by the time Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. Since then, men have been distanced from reading.”

“Reading used to be associated with mobility, but now reading—along with the rise of other sedentary enjoyments—has become a refuge for those trapped in enclosed spaces.”

“Reading for pleasure is done most often by women, children and the old—three segments of the population associated with the social loss of power. What does it mean that reading is associated with socially disempowered groups?”

“B�Ǵǰ�� change lives for the young,” she says. “B�Ǵǰ�� fill time for old people. Americans read when they are about to die.”

_Smackdown! _

Recently retired psychotherapist Jim Kern, who is sitting next to me, whispers, “Well said . . . for a young person.”

*

Our final speaker this morning is Alan Liu, chair of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He tells us he has changed the title of his talk from “Marginalizing the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing” to “T��� End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins and Social Computing.” Is this good news? Has the paradigm shifted back again? Will the book business as we know it rebound? Will I live to see a return to the good old days?

I don’t think so, especially after Professor Liu tells us “it doesn’t make much sense to focus on bookishness in an age when books have already gone away.” I get the drift.

That said, the talk is a fine introduction to cutting edge electronic research environments, what he calls Knowledge Ecology Studies, the culture of information. A number of Powerpoint images of interesting websites, graphs, and various formula (Accessibility + Tractability=Operability, On-line use=operability specific to the level of data structure) flash across the screen next to him. I’m able to follow most of this until he starts talking about String Theory and the “Hermeneutics of Reduced Dimensions.” I don’t understand the twelve dimensions slide, but the visual pattern is beautiful and the colors are restful tones of blue. It’s kind of a 60s psychedelic thing.

He speaks of “data structure hierarchy” and “post-industrial flexibility,” and tells us that “the digital subordinates big forms (like books, music, and films) into documents. Documents signify the de-formation of forms.”

I wonder if this is a step forward. Sounds somewhat reductive, but he reminds us that breaking up big forms into small pieces is not new. He cites the way monks read the Bible in the Medieval West. In monastic liturgical traditions the Bible was read “discontinuously in daily modules.”

“T��� Bible is a very flexible & plastical codex,” Liu says, citing the Book of Revelation as the proto hypertext.

One of the potential consequences of what he calls “the de-formation of forms” is the end of narrative. This could be a problem.

Anyway, bookishness has gone marginal; and there is an analogous move to the marginal in academia. Liu lays out the sequential movement in contemporary scholarship: From Deconstruction to Cultural Theory to Media Theory and finally to the History of the Book, the materiality of the book.

He tells us scholars are concentrating on book euphemera these days. Current cutting edge research involves looking at website sidebars, which he thinks are “bookish metaphors.”

“This is where the Shark lives,” he tells us. We must “boldly go where no bookshelf has gone before.” The Star Trek reference is a crowd pleaser.

Professor Liu concludes his talk on an up note. “B�Ǵǰ�� can be a new media,” he says.

I raise my hand in a Vulcan salute. “_Live long and prosper!_”

During the Q & A, a librarian who obviously still embraces “old school” values says he doesn’t believe people will cozy up with electronic readers.

Prof Liu says he owns a Kindle and suggests the librarian read an essay by Jeffrey Nunberg about reading as a private activity, which traces the history of the image of curling up with a book.

Tom Fitzgerald, who writes on social policy, talks about the closing of our local newspaper and asks Liu if he thinks the loss of newspapers is a problem in a democratic society that depends on an informed electorate.

Liu says he’s heard that argument before and doesn’t think it’s true.

“When I go into Starbucks I see people all around me reading the news on their laptops,” he says.

I ask him about people who don’t have laptops or access to Starbucks

He tells me he doesn’t think this is a problem because computers have come down in price to around $400.

I think about inviting him to visit Flint, my hometown, where about a third of the population now lives in poverty. We could take a poll or do a visual census of computer use among folks in downtown Flint coffee shops. But I hold my tongue.

*

At noon I leave the building for lunch. I thought the talks by the panelists were interesting and provocative, but disconnected from my reality—which at the present moment is filled with anxiety.

This morning Pressman and Price, like a pair of professional tag team wrestlers, skillfully tossed the bookishness aesthetic to the mat. They were followed by Alan Liu, who stepped over the body and escorted us into the world of . . . book ephemera?

I’m being unfair. I’m taking this way too personally. Maybe that’s because I suffer from book fetishism, a pathological condition I used to think was relatively harmless.

Various authority figures in my past told me that books were a kind of charm or talisman against the chaos of the world. Was this true? My elementary school librarian said it was while she taught us to fold bright yellow oil cloth jackets around our books to protect them from damage. She told us we were making book rain coats.

And this doesn’t even begin to get at the radioactive half-life of messages still in my head from my Presbyterian Sunday School teachers, who told me that the Bible was the ultimate powerful mojo.

My teachers were speaking metaphorically, but children live in a literal universe. So maybe I was set up for this fall by well-meaning youth literacy advocates. And I never got over it. I kept the faith.

What a chump.

*

At 2 pm we reconvene for the afternoon forum. I find the topic — New Institutions for the Digital Age — vaguely depressing, but after this morning’s sessions it’s difficult to feel upbeat and peppy. I’m afraid I’m still mourning the decline of the Old Institutions. And it’s 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. Maybe my sugar is a bit low.

Our first panelist, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, is a public economist. He tells us he approaches information technology as a person concerned principally with public institutions and public policy. Profit is not the bottom line.

“T���re are a number of flavors of value and not many of them are monetized,” he says.

Paul Courant is optimistic about the future and he doesn’t think it helps to be wistful and Luddite, to turn the clock back.

I understand, and I try to buck up, but some days this is easier said than done.

Paul asks about the consequences of the revolution in information technology. Are there things we have lost?

He says the number of households that can produce their own music in America has declined over the years. The production of music is lost to an increasingly large sector of the population. However, people now have available a vast catalog of music that they can listen to on their iPods or mp3 players. The point is there are gains as well as losses.

How do we minimize those losses?

What has changed?

Competition is less important these days, he says. Inexpensive searching and indexing changes everything. We are moving from libraries filled with books to libraries of electronic records. A library will cease to have a competitive advantage over another one because electronic records will be so cheap.

“Now we can share and we should share,” he says.

I admire the generosity of this position.

He returns to the subject of the new technologies.

“I own a Kindle,” he tells us. “Not only can I read in bed at 2:30 in the morning without waking my wife, but I can also buy a book on my Kindle at the same time.”

This is bad news for booksellers in bricks and mortar stores. I’ve just been disintermediated.

“T��� world of search and the world of browse are finally merging,” Paul concludes. “Software designers are creating an analog to browsing. Soon we’ll be able to see a computer image of titles on either side of the book we’re reading. Of course, we’ll still need librarians to help people search the database.”

“What we need are charismatic human kiosks in the library,” he says.

This is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure I’d like the outfits. I imagine a version of the Gumby costume Eddie Murphy wore on SNL, except that it would be more conical & cement gray—not green.

I sneak a quick look around the room to see if the librarians in the audience are flinching, but it’s a joke.

I need to get a grip.

*

Phil Pochoda, Director of the University of Michigan Press, is up next. He describes the difficulties of serving authors and readers who are from the relatively small community of scholars, and he tells us university presses are extremely fragile right now because of the uncertain business model for electronic media and the economic collapse. They could fail.

Phil’s talk is grounded in a reality I understand. This is a perspective that was missing from the theoretical papers this morning

After describing the professional tensions and economic risks facing university presses, he asks what university presses in the future might look like. If they survive, will they be the digital analog to what university presses are today? Authors and readers will be able to interact with each other much more quickly and easily when all the texts are digital.

During the Q & A session, Alan Liu wonders who in the future is going to fund scholarly books and journals if university presses collapse.

Good question.

*

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, is our last speaker. He begins by talking about the paradox of transformation. As information becomes more universally accessible, a single identity evaporates. He worries that the social conditions are no longer there to nurture the next Whitman, Melville, Bellow or Updike.

He feels that the romance of technology overwhelms content right now, and he asks writers in the audience if what they do feels different as a result of the new technologies.

Then he turns to the crisis in the newspaper business. Economic market forces have always existed in a jumbled up relationship with the creative, but conditions are now dire. All newspaper profit comes from advertising, and on-line ads cost one tenth of what print advertisers pay.

How do you solve this? Do you make up for the loss in advertising revenues by charging readers for access?

“We have lots of solutions,” Tanenhaus says, “but that means there isn’t one good one.”

At its peak the NY Times Book Review published over 50 book reviews in every issue. Now they average around 14 reviews per issue.

This decline in review space is a terrible problem for the book industry. How will we inform a broad sector of the public about books? Will publishers be able to effectively advertise new books on social networking sites, blogs and cellphones? How will people discover important new writers? Will publishers be profitable enough to risk investing in new writers who haven’t yet been tested in the marketplace?

During the Q & A, Eileen Pollack, Director of the UM MFA Program in Creative Writers, speaks about mid-career writers she knows who can’t get agents or publishers to look at their work. She worries they will just stop writing.

And then there is the attention span problem. Tanenhaus mentions being on a TV talk show with columnist Arianna Huffington, who was critical of a recent article in the Times on the stress tests for banks. She complained that she had to read down eleven paragraphs before the article got to the point.

Sam asks, “Since when has reading eleven paragraphs become outrageous?”

The symposium wraps up a few minutes past four, and I leave quickly. Hopefully these problems will all work themselves out, but then again maybe they won’t. Given what I’ve heard today, I think there will be a great deal of collateral damage. I don’t know how to fix this.

I’ve got to get home to help my wife Dianne prepare for a small dinner tonight. Rev. Bayardo Lopez, who we met in Nicaragua this January, is in town. Bayardo, a veteran of the Sandinista literacy campaign during the Contra War, used to travel by horseback across rural areas occupied by Contra paramilitary soldiers in the early 1980s, risking his life to teach peasants to read.

But that’s another story, about a different world, another life.

-Karl Pohrt

The collection—which came out from New Directions earlier this year—covers Cardenal’s entire career, and Vincent has nothing but positive things to say about the book:

Readers of English, thank your gods: the breadth of Ernesto Cardenal’s amazing poetic career is now available for your consumption thanks to New Directions and the recently published Pluriverse. Spanning fifty-six years, the book presents Cardenal in all his guises: revolutionary, spiritualist, chronicler of man’s inhumanity to man, chilling visionary, and cosmic quasi-historian. The poems in this collection are often long, deceptively assessable, and quite dazzling.

      They told me you were in love with another man
      and then I went off to my room
      and I wrote that article against the government
      that landed me in jail.

You can read the entire review by clicking here.

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.

In response to two open letters from bookseller Karl Pohrt to the Ann Arbor community, a loose coalition of booklovers is coming together to save Shaman Drum bookstore from closing its doors. In a letter sent out to Shaman Drum’s e-mail list Friday and discussed on the front page of the Ann Arbor News the next day, University of Michigan English professor Julie Ellison warns that the 29-year-old booktore is “dying.” Ellison and the letter’s co-signers, who include former poet laureates Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, bookseller Richard Howorth of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., plus 40 Ann Arbor residents, propose solutions meant to turn the bookstore into what she calls a “humanities commons.”

Ellison’s proposals include the University of Michigan changing its current textbook policy to include a statement on the benefits of buying textbooks from local booksellers; individuals buying shares in the bookstore’s nonprofit arm, the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center; the University of Michigan Humanities Center making space available for arts center classes; the university using the bookstore as a site for teaching students about consumer behavior in the digital age; and students and faculty in the university’s Nonprofit and public Management Center and the School of Information assisting the bookstore in developing a new business model and writing grants to support it.

We really hope some good comes out of all of this, and that they find a way to keep Shaman Drum alive.

Well, although there haven’t been a ton of reviews (yet), we’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers and booksellers about this book.

Karl Pohrt from Shaman Drum called me a while back to tell me how impressed he was with this novel. And since then, I’ve heard that wrote a staff pick about how The Conqueror forced him to rewrite his “desert island” list. And just today we received a postcard from about how The Conqueror was a “amazing and wonderful reading experience.”

Back a couple months ago, we gave away a few galleys of this book. And earlier this week I heard from about how effing good this book is . . .

It is the second part of a trilogy—the first part is which came out from Overlook a couple years ago—but the books really do stand alone. If you’d like to know more about the first volume, Michael Orthofer has a really comprehensive at Complete Review.

I’m mentioning all this now, because we’re in the process of preparing Jan’s U.S. tour. He will be in New York for PEN World Voices, and in Rochester (with Mark Binelli, author of ), and possibly a few other places as well. I’ll post all the details as soon as they’re finalized.

In the meantime, PEN America has an available online as part of their page, which is worth checking out in its own right.

What Happened?

This fall and winter Shaman Drum Bookshop went into a steep financial decline. Text book sales declined 510K from last year. We managed to cut our payroll and other operating expenses by 80K, but that didn’t begin to cover our losses.

There was some good news. Our trade (general interest) book sales on the first floor were actually up in December from last year by 10%, which is extraordinary given what many other retailers were reporting. And trades sales in January were up 15%. Still, this hardly compensates for our losses in textbook sales.

The evaporation of our position has been astonishingly swift. We had been holding relatively even financially until September. Suddenly we’ve moved into the red.

I sort of saw this coming.

In July, 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published Reading At Risk, a report detailing the decline of literary reading in America. This was followed by a second report in November, 2007, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, chronicling “recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.”

Around the same time the NEA reports came out, I audited a UM course on the History of the Book in which I learned that every 500 years a major technological shift occurs. Five centuries ago Gutenberg invented (or perfected) moveable type. Now, with the digitization of print, we find ourselves in the middle of another sea change. I recall wondering what the new business model for bookstores would look like, and I worried that our industry would suffer from the same chaos roiling the music world.

And a few years ago the University Library held a conference on Digitization. I was invited to be a panelist and I defended the traditional book as still the most efficient technology for delivering information. I also said I was worried about collateral damage during our forward march into the joyous digitized future. I’m no Luddite, but everyone there seemed to me to be hypnotized by the new technology. Of course, it is dazzling.

In my own retail neighborhood I’ve watched the collapse of Schoolkids Records, an awesome independent record store, due largely to the impact of digitization, and it looks like I’ve got a front row seat on another sad decline. Borders Bookshop, which I think at one time was the best general interest book chain in the English speaking world, is a shadow of its former self and seems headed for oblivion.

Early this fall I told a group of booksellers that our industry (including the publishing sector) had a business model that didn’t work very well for any of us. A few of the booksellers said they didn’t think this was true, the others were silent.

Two weeks ago I met again with booksellers and publishers from around the country at the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute. Now everyone seems to agree that the book business is in trouble. The disintermediation resulting from customers migrating to the internet coupled with the frightening economic crisis makes it terribly difficult for us to see a way forward.

The crisis at Shaman Drum Bookshop is due to our loss of textbook sales. This fall the university introduced a program which allows professors to list their textbooks online, which effectively drives a significant number of students to the internet. It is impossible for local textbook stores to compete under these circumstances. I don’t think there are any villains here (well, maybe some greedy textbook publishers), but this is one of the consequences of the university’s policy.

The efficiencies of Amazon—even given the clever algorithms that bring us if you like this, you’ll like that—are no substitute for browsing in a bookshop.

In 1942 the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter said, “Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .” This is our system and Schumpeter is undoubtedly correct, but there is a countervailing fact that is equally true: Stability is essential for a civilized society. The second truth is what I’ve learned selling books in this community for forty years, being married for thirty-seven years and raising two children.

It also seems to me that if we are witnessing the collapse of Big Capitalism, the way to revitalize the economy is through supporting locally owned businesses. If you agree, please lend your good energy to Think Local First, the movement supporting locally-owned independent businesses in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.

What Is To Be Done?

Shaman Drum Bookshop is around one hundred steps from the central campus of the University of Michigan, one of the top ten public universities in the world. I believe the university community and Ann Arbor citizens who love literature need a first rate browsing store for books in the humanities in the university neighborhood. This is what we aspire to be.

However, as I mentioned earlier, it has been clear to me for a while now that the current model doesn’t work. In March 2008 I announced my wish to give the bookshop to the community. I hired Bob Hart, a recently retired Episcopal priest, to research the feasibility of forming a nonprofit bookshop. We wrote up a careful business plan, met with a good lawyer, filled out the IRS forms and submitted our papers in July. In November the IRS notified us that our application was still under consideration. The review is taking longer because a for-profit business is a component of the project.

The new entity is called the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, whose mission is “to develop excellence in the literary arts by nurturing creative writing, providing quality literature and fostering a literate public.” We’re already hosting two classes in the store. If we do not survive this downturn, I hope the Great Lakes Literary Art Center will continue under other auspices. It is a good idea.

Last week I consulted a lawyer and a financial advisor. They both felt the store could manage the debt load with some temporary help from our friends and a bit of luck. My landlord, who is a decent man, will allow us to keep our first floor space, vacating only the second floor of the building.

The issue now is this: After we scale back the store, do we still have a viable business? I asked my business manager to crunch the numbers based on our projected sales for the next two years. He reported back that we do not have a sustainable business model. Given our current sales projections, we will continue to lose money.

This means very simply that we would need additional revenue sources/streams to make the store viable.

For many booksellers-certainly including me-this is our darkest hour. I know this sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it feels to me in the middle of the night when I’m trying to figure out how I can possibly make this work.

If I can’t figure this out, the most realistic and responsible thing I can do is shut the store down and move on.

The question then becomes: What is the next version of a bookstore? This is something worth thinking about carefully. Like you, I want to live in a community that has many good bookshops. But then I’ve been spoiled living in Ann Arbor.

Whatever happens, I am filled with a sense of gratitude for having been able to sell books in this town for the past 29 years. It’s been absolutely wonderful.

—Shaman Drum Owner, Karl Pohrt.

For those who are interested, a pdf of the is available online. And Karl can be reached at pohrt at shamandrum dot com.

First up is Karl Pohrt, Owner of co-founder of Reading the World, and creative force behind (where this interview will also appear).

Chad W. Post: How did you get into bookselling?

Karl Pohrt: I recently came across a sentence by Orhan Pamuk from Other Colors: “To carry a book in your pocket or in your bag, particularly in times of sadness, is to be in possession of another world, a world that can bring you happiness.” The book, in this formulation, is an emblem or icon of solace. That’s always been true for me.

In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf argues that it’s important to read to children because they will grow up associating being loved with reading. Both my parents read to me and my brothers when we were young.

For years I believed that one day I’d open a book that would explain everything. I trace this directly to my early religious education (Presbyterian), but I bet many of us share this fantasy. Jews, Muslims and Christians are, after all, People of the Book.

When I was in elementary school I frequented the neighborhood branch of the Flint Public Library. I also purchased comic books at the local drug store (Uncle Scrooge, Classics Illustrated) with my weekly allowance. Books, comic books, and later bookshops (along with movie theaters), were portals to a wider world.

I was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam War, and I worked in a hospital for two years in lieu of military service. One of my daily tasks was to transport cancer patients to the Radiology Department for cobalt radiation treatments. This was rewarding but oftentimes depressing work. The patients I worked with didn’t get better. After my shift, I hung out in the bookshops because these places made me feel good.

In 1972, when I finished my stint at the hospital, I started working in a bookshop. After a few years I went to graduate school and I taught English for three years. In 1980 I returned to the book business and started Shaman Drum Bookshop.

CWP: What has it been like running an independent store literally down the road from the Borders headquarters? I have to say, it used to be a running joke with the Borders people I met with that they all shopped at Shaman Drum.

KP: It’s relatively easy to sell books in Ann Arbor. This is a good book town. The flagship Borders store, which is right around the corner from Shaman Drum, is a general interest store. We specialize in literary and scholarly titles. Of course there is some overlap, but the customer base is different.

CWP: What role in book culture do you think Shaman Drum (and/or all independents) plays?

KP: I think independent bookshops are essential for a healthy book culture. Variety is the key to a robust and vital intellectual life.

A climax community ecosystem seems to me to be a good metaphor for the ideal book culture. It’s a system that contains a maximum diversity of life forms. If a disease or predator moves through the community and wipes out a few species, the system will probably recover fairly quickly.

To deliberately reduce life forms by, say, draining a wetlands or clear cutting an old growth forest and then replanting it with just one or two crops makes an ecosystem much more vulnerable. If a disease moves through this community, it’s probably finished.

Category management might work in a supermarket, but it’s not appropriate for the life of the mind. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

This is the big picture. On a more specific level, the independent bookseller retail channel launches books and acts as an early warning system for publishers.

CWP: That’s an interesting metaphor—one that I think is applicable to independent publishers as well. Seems to me that indie bookstores and indie publishers share a certain outlook (and business practices)—do you see a natural alliance between these two groups?

KP: Yes, absolutely. As you well know, many independent booksellers and indie publishers are pals, but we need to create more explicit partnerships and alliances. Maybe the new ABA IndieBound program would be a good vehicle for these projects.

CWP: What are the biggest challenges for Shaman Drum? For independents?

KP: The decline of reading, the shrinking of public space and the lack of leisure time are all terribly difficult problems. You could add to this list an economy in freefall, the rising price of oil and incompetent political leadership (which hopefully will change soon). I fall back to a theological vocabulary in the face of all this. I would describe these as spiritual issues because spiritual is the most inclusive word I can think of.

And the business model for bookstores isn’t very good. We need to think carefully about new business models. We need to figure out how to pay ourselves and our employees adult salaries. Otherwise, we’re asking everyone to commit to lives of voluntary poverty. Of course, this would be just fine if you think of bookselling as a religious vocation, but I find fewer young people out there these days who believe.

CWP: The “war” on the middle class hasn’t made this any easier. And the problem seems to be exacerbated at the chain stores, where there’s a clear financial division between management (enough to survive) and booksellers (not even close). I can imagine that it’s getting harder and harder to find young people interested in staying in bookselling for the long haul. Do you see a younger generation of booksellers coming along that will own and run all the great indie 10-20 years from now?

KP: In the past twelve months Harvard Bookshop’s Frank Kramer passed the torch to Carole Horne and Vromans’ owner Joel Sheldon appointed Allison Hill Chief Operating Officer for his store.

And it is important to note that a number of young booksellers who work in ABA member stores have organized an Emerging Leaders group. Megan Sullivan (Harvard Book Store), Jessica Stockton (McNally Jackson) and Jenn Northington (King’s English) are among the talented young people who are involved in this organization.

CWP: Several of the people I’m hoping to interview as part of this series . . . Going back to your comment on needing a new business model, I know Shaman Drum is becoming a nonprofit (the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center). What is this going to entail for Shaman Drum?

KP: You can read the current version of our plan . The plan will probably change, so stay tuned.

CWP: This is an incredibly ambitious plan (really—everyone should take a look), and one that would do a world of good for Michigan’s book culture. One of the things that I find interesting is how the store is being incorporated into something larger, and that rather than selling the store, you’re converting it into a nonprofit, and essentially giving it away to a board of directors to use in order to grow the GLLAC. What led you to this decision? And on a broader scale, do you think the nonprofit route is something other indie bookstores should explore?

KP: I’m sixty years old. I love what I do, but it would be irresponsible not to plan for future contingencies. I would prefer to see the bookshop live beyond my tenure here, and I was very impressed when I visited the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis a few years ago. I thought my bookshop might function as a node around which people could organize a center that celebrated the culture of the book. This culture is endangered, so the nonprofit route seemed the way to go.

Booksellers talk about being indispensable to the communities they serve, but is this really true? I thought I’d test it out by giving my store to the community. We’ll see what happens.

CWP: What do you think the future holds for Independent bookselling, 5-10 years down the line?

Given the rapidity of change these days, it is very difficult to speak with any authority about the future beyond a three year horizon. I admire Peter Osnos’ Caravan Project and I’m interested in how that develops. I also believe that what we think of when we use the noun book will be around for a long time because it is still such an efficient technology.

In Los Angeles, one of that city’s landmark independents, Dutton’s Brentwood Books, will close on April 30. The news comes a little more than one year after Dutton’s closed its Beverly Hills store. Owner Doug Dutton said that he had been trying to save the Brentwood location for months, but had been unable to find a way to keep the business afloat. He added that any chance to reopen at a new location would depend on a real offer. Dutton’s was founded by Dutton’s parents in 1961. (via )

This, on the other hand, is quite interesting:

An Ann Arbor literary institution, Shaman Drum does not have a clear successor to owner Pohrt. He thought about selling the store – but instead, he’s decided to give it away.

For the past several months, Pohrt and Bob Hart of Shaman Drum have been working on a plan to transform the 27-year-old bookselling business into a nonprofit enterprise. The change could happen later this year.

“I like to think in terms of metaphors, that this is a vehicle, and you are stepping from one vehicle into another,” said Pohrt, who is being honored for his contributions to the literary community during a conference March 6-7 at the University of Michigan.

“I don’t think the book business in this country, as a business model, has worked for anybody.” (via )

Karl’s back in the States now, but has a couple of thoughts about the trip that are definitely worth sharing.

Postscript to China Report #2: Deep Literacy

for Paul Yamazaki, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & City Lights Bookstore

I ended my presentation in Beijing with this appeal to our bookseller comrades:

The social, political and ecological issues we all face are absolutely daunting, and we need a literate citizenry with attention spans long enough to honor the complexity and subtlety of these problems. I first heard the phrase deep literacy from my friend Paul Yamazaki, and I believe this is where we begin to solve our problems—with a commitment to deep literacy.

The first question someone asked me following the talk was: “What do you mean by ‘deep literacy’? How can we do that?” I mumbled something to the effect that this wasn’t meant to be programmatic, that the phrase “deep literacy” is richly suggestive.

It was clear to me that my answer wasn’t going to get me a pass with this audience, so I briefly talked about the medieval monastic tradition of Lectio Divina, of reading as a kind of prayer or meditation, but given the baffled looks I was getting, I don’t think this was a satisfactory explanation. Either that or what I was saying wasn’t getting translated into anything that made sense in Chinese.

So I wanted to offer some reflections on the topic of deep literacy in the hopes that maybe we could get a conversation going about this. Maybe we could figure out how to reverse the direction we seem to be headed in, buck the historical trend. Maybe we could start something.

Some synonyms for Deep are complex, focused, discerning, resonant. The opposite of Deep is shallow, trivial, diluted, light.

When we think about Literacy, I believe we tend to think in terms of two stages: Illiterate (stage 1) until we become literate when we learn to read at age 6 (stage 2). This is an impoverished view of a lifelong process.

Here are some books and an essay I’ve come across that I think are particularly interesting:

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf (HarperCollins). Ms. Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts, has synthesized a vast amount of information in this wonderful book about the complex processes that make up literacy. She never loses sight of the miraculous gift of reading.

In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon, Ivan Illich (University of Chicago Press). In 1128 Hugh of St. Victor wrote a guide to the art of reading, which he saw as a moral activity that would result in enlightening the heart and mind. Illich argues that Hugh inaugurated the culture of bookishness from which we have now exited for a new social reality—the culture of the screen. This is a learned, clear and brilliant book.

Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina, Michael Casey (Liguori/Triumph). Casey, a Cistercian monk firmly grounded in Benedictine monasticism, has written “a book of instruction” for the practice of sacred reading. Written for a lay religious audience, it is particularly helpful in discussing the difficulties practitioners may encounter in this meditative tradition.

Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, Eugene H. Peterson (Eerdmans). Peterson writes personally and his tone is pastoral. The title comes from a strange and interesting metaphor in Revelations (10:9-10):

I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.” And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.

A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, Alan Jacobs (Westview). Jacobs, an English professor and Auden scholar, has written a smart book about what it means to read charitably. He is very well read—from Aristotle and Augustine to Bakhtin and Ricoeur—and his book is a joy to read.

The Seventy Faces of Torah: The Jewish Way of Reading the Sacred Scriptures, Stephen M. Wylen (Paulist Press). Despite Wylen’s linkage of Jewish critical methods of reading Torah with contemporary Deconstruction theory, this is largely a historical description of traditional Jewish interpretive readings of the scriptures. It is a clearly written explication of a complicated subject.

Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God, Simone Weil, Waiting for God (HarperCollins). In this nine page essay Weil argues that the point of reading (in fact, all school studies) is to develop our powers of concentration for prayer. She moves beyond the efficaciousness of religious texts to an over-the-top inclusiveness—all reading…”thought of in this way is like a sacrament.”

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I’m interested in what you’ve read that you would recommend.

You have undoubtedly noticed that most of these books articulate religious ideas about reading. Judaism and Christianity are both scriptural religions after all, and—speaking personally—it is clear to me that my childhood religious education profoundly shaped my ideas about books. I attended a small Presbyterian church when I was young, and I grew up believing there was a book—the Bible—that explained the mysteries of the world. I fell away from the church, but I continued to believe that there was a book out there somewhere that broke the world open for lucky readers.

The books and essay I mention that use religious understandings of reading are all essential, but maybe the God talk unnecessarily complicates what are some fairly simple propositions:

Reading is an experience—a process really—that changes and deepens as we age.

During a publisher luncheon a few years ago, Christopher Hitchens told me that he thought you have to be of a certain age to read Proust. He’s right. There are books that were closed to me in my 20s, 30s and 40s that have opened now. I find this is one of the consolations of growing older.

We can increase the quality of attention we bring to reading with practice.

In this way, becoming a sophisticated reader is like getting good at sports or learning how to throw a pot.

Perhaps these points are banal and obvious. These are the same things, after all, that I was taught when I was six years old by the librarian at Civic Park Elementary School in Flint, Michigan in the 1950s. But they are worth repeating.

This is a photograph my wife Dianne took in 1992 at the Tikse Gompa, a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh. Note the monk’s intensity. He is reading a Buddhist sutra out loud (just as we’re told Christian monks did in the Middle Ages) from a book whose individual pages are each a single block print of text. This is pre-Guttenberg.

In this religious tradition, monastics go through a long period of preparation before they are allowed to see a religious text, and then they commit it to memory.

What is the difference between the reading experience of this monk and the way you read?

Finally, I want to call your attention to Single-Minded Way, a teisho by the Soto Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Substitute “read” for “cook” in the following:

To cook . . . is not preparation, according to Dogen; it is practice. To cook is not just to prepare food for someone or for yourself; it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook! That is also an expression of our sincerity, a part of our practice.

I’m particularly intrigued by the word sincerity here. Isn’t sincerity an odd but appropriate word to use in this context?