Public Matters: The Death of Expertise and East City Bookshop

 

Cover image of The Death of Expertise,
with ECBS bookmark

WIR: The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols

I sometimes imagine I might try to pitch a book to publishers, calling it The Surprising Origins of the New Science of the Untold Story. I'm not entirely sure what the content of the book would be, but I'm reasonably confident that I could get a contract with the title. My rate of visiting roughly 10 or 11 new bookshops a month has given me a certain sense of what phrases and framing appeal to book publishers. I think of this, in part, because it's pretty clear to me that Tom Nichols's The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, was an easy sell to publishers. It's the kind of book that's going to appeal to people who consider themselves readers. 

I was first tempted to pick it up in September 2025 at Bluestocking Bookshop in Holland, Michigan, but the edition on sale at that used bookshop was the original one, which was published in 2017. I resisted the temptation to buy it then, in part because of a concern that it would be a little dated, so was happy to stumble upon the updated and expanded 2024 edition in paperback at East City Bookshop in Washington, DC (more about that below). 

Nichols's book describes a real phenomenon--a kind of "post-truth" society in which standards of argumentation and evidence have collapsed and political discourse has suffered. He puts it this way:

“the democratic stability that relies on a thoughtful and informed public is dissolving before our eyes; the dismissal of learning and expertise is now an ingrained habit of mind that is crippling the ability of millions of citizens in democratic nations to exercise even basic civic and social responsibilities in their communities.” (p. xv)

However right he is about the presence of an epistemic crisis, it is less clear to me that he provides an explanation for why it has happened that we can put to good use in changing things for the better.

Nichols asks the reader, at least implicitly, to accept that his status as an expert on international relations makes him enough of an expert on expertise as such to guide the conversation along. I'll grant the premise that he is a participant in the knowledge economy whose particular brand of currency is unfairly devalued. To his credit, he exhibits a droll self-awareness along the way about how he himself engages in or perpetuates some of the failings he catalogs.

Nichols defines the death of expertise as "not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization” (p. 5), and that the crisis is less of an epistemic one relating to facts and evidence, or standards of argumentation than something akin to a psychological allergy to the idea of expertise itself. He writes, "the death of expertise, however, is a different problem than the historical fact of low levels of information among laypeople. The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge” (p. 21).

In other words, Nichols's book is about (anti-)democratic social psychology. The principal beast of burden in this narrative is the Dunning-Krueger Effect--that less-competent people tend to be more confident of their correctness, and more-competent people tend to have greater awareness of their fallibility. This phenomenon is abetted, he argues, by a false egalitarian ethos that flattens distinctions of knowledge and authority in the service of facile notions of equality.

Nichols cites a few other psychological studies in the course of his argument, but there's a big part of his "diagnosis" that was more difficult for me to tie down to an evidentiary basis. The main term that appears across the book, in a ratio disproportionate to studies to back it up, is "narcissism," and its variants. "Solipsistic," "childish," "ignorant," "laziness," and a few other derogatory terms get subbed in along the way.

For example:

“...conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations. Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism. Some people would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are the result of issues beyond their control, or beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.” (p. 61)

Nichols may be correct that this broad social phenomenon is a consequence of the growth of individual psychological failings, but the appeal of his argument seems to go to the pre-existing biases of his intended audience of people who think expertise is a good thing. To a certain extent, it amounts in the end to a kind of punching down or a narrative of cultural decline with an implicit appeal to some version of "the good ol' days." It makes intuitive sense, but the drift of the book suggests the main way out of it is to shame people for that character failing.

Nichols's style is quite accessible, and the book is an engaging read. I do worry, at times, that his simplicity of expression leads him to gloss over some important distinctions. For instance, he tends to conflate the word "smart" with "educated" or "informed.":

“...and yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.” (p. 7)

I certainly give credit to Nichols for affirming that education is not something one can finish--something that is easily forgotten in discussions about it and related topics (including literacy).  I expect, though, that what we need to examine here is not the idea that everyone is as smart as everyone else, but something else. It may be equal access to American education. It may be systemic acknowledgments that something other than discourse and reason guides our policymaking to begin with.

Also to Nichols's credit, despite the pathological social psychology that informs his thesis, he acknowledges the challenges that low levels of various kinds of literacies play in the current challenge. (As a background point, currently about 54% of American adults read at or below the adult equivalent of a 6th-grade level; the average public health instructions for COVID-19 were written at a 10th-grade level.)

Although Nichols puts his finger on a real issue, I found myself not particularly helped by a vibe within the argument that felt a little like a rant about "kids these days." He is right on a good many things, and the world is not getting any less complex, so we need explorations of how to address these issues. I have not yet picked up and read his subsequent work, Our Own Worst Enemy, but the title and summary suggest it continues the narcissism hypothesis. Again, there is much Nichols is likely right about here, but like much of the discourse he criticizes, it's not likely to win anybody over who doesn't already agree with him.

For alternative takes on the current crisis in public discourse, I can propose a few other books taking approaches that are more empathetic, are more philosophically or psychologically rigorous, or a combination of all of these things--providing, perhaps, a more hopeful prospect for what's going on and how to fix it:

• Any recommendations I might make here for Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism or "Lying in Politics" are likely superfluous in light of the resurgence of interest in Arendt in the last three Presidential election cycles. Still, a rich array of insights here as to who benefits and how from collapsing commitments to a notion of truth.
• More recently, Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation provides some crucial insights with regard to the social consequences of an information economy catalyzed by dopamine triggers. Interestingly, she points out that one of the consequences of pervasive lying in discourse is the creation of a "scarcity mindset." (NPR's Hidden Brain interviews here.)
• I found a tremendous amount of value in Dannagal Goldthwaite Young's Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Young provides a more compassionate account of the psychological commitments connected to community and identity that drive some of this phenomenon. She doesn't believe the problem is symmetric across the political spectrum, but she understands what's happening from a perspective that accords more legitimacy and authenticity to the inner motivations. (Hidden Brain interview here.)
• For the more philosophically inclined, I think Danielle Allen's concept of "epistemic egalitarianism," articulated in her Justice by Means of Democracy, has some good room to grow. Importantly, she also identifies the way modern political theory has afforded public autonomy equitably.
• Similarly, Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth provides more of a conceptual apparatus to reclaim liberal epistemology, which embraces the deliberative tools for productive, pragmatic democratic advance. With some judicious dipping into folks like Charles Sanders Peirce, Rauch articulates a vision for healthier discourse and redeems some of the existing mechanisms for course-correcting. (Nichols also acknowledges that scholarly review is a hallmark of communities of expertise.)
• Finally, for a more popularly-oriented "how-to" manual of communicating across difference, you might want to give I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times by Mónica Guzmán a try. Guzmán approaches the conversations across difference with a personal, familial framework. While this is not exactly the question of expertise Nichols tackles, if Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is correct, it is not narcissism driving the problem as much as core anchors of identity. Guzmán gives some basic tactics for authentic engagement with the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table.

Yours truly and spouse at East City Bookshop

AWIGI: East City Bookshop, Washington, D.C.

In my fantasy life of starting a bookstore, I imagine my store's brand being something like "Civitas Books" or "Res Publica Books," in part because I'm drawn to the civilization-building, community-building force that local bookshops represent. Importantly, I fully believe a robust fiction section is key to such an offering because, as the above-mentioned Hannah Arendt affirmed, our ability to think politically requires the ability to see things from others' points of view--a capacity fiction cultivates.

East City Bookshop, a woman-owned book shop in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C. is just such a civilizing offering. Appropriately enough, it is a moderate walk along Pennsylvania Ave., SE from the U.S. Capitol building. I visited there last fall, when we were in DC for a friend's wedding, and had the opportunity to visit our son as well. East City is his "local." It's very close to Little District Books and Capitol Hill Books, which each have their own distinctive curation and offerings.

East City, at least at the time of my visit, put the "public matters" up front, with a robust non-fiction section adjacent to the cashiers at the upstairs, ground-level of the store, visible through the front-door entrance off the alley. When one ventures down the stairs, other worlds of imagination open up, with both the fiction and children's book section below. As I believe I mention elsewhere, the kids' book sections are not my wheelhouse, but I do a lot of evaluation of a shop on the curation of the "staff recommendations" sections. They are an index of the qualities of readers on staff, and their diversity, and an index of how the store falls along the continuum of "conservative," "progressive," and "radical" proposed by Josh Cook in The Art of Libromancy. The virtual version of these recommendations on their website provides a healthy sense of the diverse cadre of readers on the team and their interests and tastes.

To corroborate this, I recall a great conversation with the two booksellers at the cashier's station, which spoke to other vital qualities in booksellers (imho): curiosity. The one young man I spoke with the most, who appears to have since left the team, was interested in my poetry recommendations. His mother, I believe, was herself a poet and/or an English teacher, and had inspired his own interests in poetry. I may be getting the details a little off here, close to half a year later.

East City is coming up on its 10th anniversary of being in business, and founder Laurie Gillman's "About" story for the shop resonates for me in a number of ways. In some respects, the shop reflects a kind of "being the change" we want to see in communities, and fills a need within a community where the ranks of the "hyper-literate" are deep. As one indication of this, my anecdotal but reasonably extensive experience of street-level, pedestrian literacy finds that the Capitol Hill neighborhood just to the north of East City has one of the highest levels of Little Free Libraries per block I have ever seen. I say this as a resident of a major university neighborhood.

My recent conversation with Lisa Uhrik of Franklin Fixtures and PLENTY Downtown Bookshop in Cookeville, Tennessee has had me reflecting on the kind of narrative arc that bookshops draw their patrons into upon entering. I'm starting to pay attention to this a little more, but it makes sense to me that the "Public Affairs" matters in East City are at the ready for the person dashing in off Pennsylvania Avenue, and that those who descend into the roomier basement level will be rewarded for their "immersion."

That said, I recall being tempted by an Ada Limón poetry title in another "recommended reads" section adjacent to the cashiers. I can definitely see a way in which even this relatively small shop provides an easy way from going in for the book you want, and finding the one,... two, three, or more... books you didn't know you needed. Gillman implicitly nods to DC's largest indie in Northwest D.C. in her "About" narrative. East City doesn't have the available floorspace at the moment to match the stacks depth there, but they hold down their particular corner pretty well.

And, importantly, from the design, curation, and specific recommendations from the staff at East City, I can confirm that expertise is not dead.

Charm City Double Feature: Baltimore Bookshops; Hamnet and O Caledonia

 

WIR: Hamnet and O Caledonia

It's a minor truism of my earlier days blogging about murder ballads that "death is a good plot device." Today's post links up two titles published a little shy of 30 years apart, but connected in a number of ways--including being up front that they involve the death of a young person. Trust me, this info is not a spoiler in either case. It also happens that I picked both of them up based on the recommendations of Baltimore booksellers, both located within reasonable walking distance of Charm City's Inner Harbor. Both books were among my top dozen fiction reads of 2024. (Sorry, I'm a little late to press, I know--I have a significant backlog I'm trying to address...)

Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell

With the recent movie adaptation of Hamnet and the stage adaptation (one currently up at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater), any detailed review I might offer here feels superfluous. I did find a few things about it, though, that might elude the attention of the standard review. I read the book in December of 2024.

As readers and viewers know, Hamnet tells a love story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, and the death story of their eleven year old son, Hamnet, who falls victim to the plague. O'Farrell provides this news in the front matter of the book, before the narrative even starts. Again, it is no spoiler. For what it's worth, William Shakespeare is never actually named in the book.

Hamnet was my introduction to O'Farrell's fiction, and I feel compelled at the outset to note that I've rarely, if ever, encountered a prose style so gripping. My best way of explaining it is that I feel that the story clung to me as I was reading it. It conveyed a sense of urgency stylistically that made it difficult to put down, but yet avoided inducing a full-on claustrophobia. (Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall created that kind of reaction for me.)

For me to go too deeply into the Shakespeares' love story likely would involve spoilers, so I'll avoid that as best I can. What I did find most marvelously depicted in their relationship was an intersection of two kinds of literacies. This is, perhaps, where my own particular interests focus differently than others' might, but I think the story has value in showing how people develop skills to navigate the world with the tools the world affords them. 

One would be hard-pressed, I believe, to identify a figure more significantly accomplished in reading and writing literacy than William Shakespeare. We can, I think, put fully aside for the present purposes whether Shakespeare really was "Shakespeare," and consider Farrell's character as a literary figure operating at the pinnacle of writing in his age. As a woman of 16th century England, Agnes was not afforded access to the same set of "tools" (reading and writing), which would have come from schooling only afforded to boys, at least within her class and setting. The Agnes we meet in Hamnet, however, has deep understandings of the natural world and of healing arts.

I think this interplay among the characters, as they navigate their lives with each other and the depths of their grief over their son, will "preach," as they say. It's a helpful example of understanding human talents more diversely and broadly, and not supposing intelligence or capability only on one continuum. This theme is further beautifully advanced in a scene where Agnes seeks her brother Bartholemew's help in understanding how to help her husband free himself from a miserable existence working in his father's glove-making shop. Bartholomew understands the value of "proper work," and what constitutes "proper" work is different for people of different strengths.

"He needs work to steady him, to give him purpose. He can't go on this way, an errand-boy for his father, tutoring here and there. A head like his, he'll run mad." (p. 160)

 May we all find our "proper work" to steady us and give us purpose.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

O Caledonia is a revelation. Believe the hype printed on the cover. The quote from Ali Smith declares it "one of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century." It is Elspeth Barker's only novel, and I have no notes, and no quibble with Smith--although I'm eager for it to become better-known.

As with Hamnet, Barker's novel discloses the death, indeed the murder, of its young protagonist in the opening few pages. What happens on the way to returning to the scene of the crime by the end of the book is magical, both in terms of Barker's prose and the remarkable character Barker creates.

I'll let an excerpt of Maggie O'Farrell's introduction to the book speak to the quality of the prose:

"O Caledonia is one of those books you proselytise about; you want to beckon others aboard its glorious train. I have bought numerous copies as presents, pressing them into people's hands with an exhortation to read without delay. I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O Caledonia as her favourite book; I'm happy to report that it was a decision I've never had cause to regret. When I taught creative writing, I would read aloud the opening chapters to my students and I would constantly break off to say, 'Are you hearing this? Do you see how good that image/word choice/sentence construction is? Do you?" (p. x, British spellings and emphasis in original)

 I have no argument with O'Farrell's assessment here. The book is a masterpiece of prose style (it's Scottish!, after all...), in its 188 page span.

Distinct from this stylistic treat, however, is that Barker generously gives us the opportunity to spend time with the book's protagonist, Janet--perhaps one of the top 5 characters I've encountered in all of fiction. (This is undoubtedly an unreliable rating, but is at least good for the books I've read in the past three years or so...) Her death is awful, no lie. Her life with a family and others that don't understand her is challenging. Her existence, fictional though it may be, is glorious. The book's epigraph provides the tie between Janet and its title--Sir Walter Scott's couplet about Scotland, "O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!". 

As with Hamnet, I'm inclined to reflect on this aspect of the novel in light of some common tropes and challenges about literacy--particularly with regard to getting students to read the whole book. In a world where some school-based reading strategies seem to over-emphasize various skill-based elements, such as allusion or foreshadowing, symbolism or irony, books like O Caledonia are a reminder of what a treasure it is just to spend time in the virtual presence of a character. 

Now, per O'Farrell's style-based praise above, it's clear that Barker's work presents many of those techniques to analyze. I would place the Janet character, however, in the realm of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Barbara Kingsolver's Damon Fields (in Demon Copperhead) where the value to the reader is distinctively tied to a virtual companionship with the protagonist. (Kingsolver's Fields obviously owes some heritage to Dickens.) This may indeed be highly idiosyncratic to the individual reader, and there may be a number of reasons that O Caledonia or Demon Copperhead will never find their ways into a school classroom, but these works are reminders to me that novels present virtues never fully digestible into "skills" or even easy summary. 

AWIGI: Charm City, hon! -- Charm City Books and Greedy Reads

Baltimore is almost as difficult for me to pick bookshops from as Chicago is. I'm a fan of The Ivy, Atomic Books, Snug Books, Red Emma's, and a few others, but am focusing today on Charm City Books and Greedy Reads - Fells Point. This is almost entirely because they introduced me to the books discussed above, but also has the advantage of lifting up two shops reasonably close to Baltimore's Inner Harbor and tourist/convention districts.

Yours truly and son, outside
Charm City Books, August 2024

Charm City Books

I have Charm City Books's Daven Ralston to thank for introducing me to Hamnet. I visited there with my son in August 2024, during a baseball-focused trip to Baltimore. (Although I've lived in Chicago most of my life, my baseball allegiances were forged in Maryland.) A family-owned shop, Charm City Books is located about a 20-minute walk due north from Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It's just a little bit north of the newly revitalized Lexington Market and only a 3 or 4 blocks from the Walters Art Museum.

When we entered, we were greeted by Daven, and her little dog, too. At some point I'll have to hashtag stores with pets, particularly for those folks with allergies. I'm not very reactive to dogs, but I am pretty reactive to cats--so I try to be disciplined in my assessments of the shops, without letting my histamine responses unduly tilt the table.

Charm City Books clearly does a lot with a little space, including a vibrant kids' section within a relatively small footprint. Daven's presence in the shop was terrifically friendly, and made going with the bookseller's recommendation all the easier.

Just to hang in there with the baseball theme, my continued following of CCB's social presence makes it clear that it is doing an all-star job of playing its position as a progressive (in Josh Cook's typology) community book store. It's supporting community book drives, advancing school and community engagement initiatives, increasing book access for furloughed government workers, and positioning itself as welcoming and accessible for people to walk right in and be charmed. It's curating with diversity of content and readership in mind. Their event game is strong, and it's clear that it balances both adult and kid-based audiences.

CCB is a store for readers, and a welcoming point of entry for the book-curious of all ages.

___________________________________

Although I was actually just trying
to use the palm activation on my 
cell phone camera, this also works
for confessing my greedy reading.

Greedy Reads - Fells Point

Greedy Reads holds down a friendly, daytime corner in the bar- and restaurant-dense Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore. It is a happily short distance down Aliceanna Street from the Blue Moon Café, home of the "Sweet Baby Jesus" crabmeat and egg dish. Although I didn't get to GR-FP on that August baseball trip, I returned to Baltimore about a month later for that year's ProLiteracy Conference a little further west down Aliceanna from the shop.

One of two Greedy Reads shops, the Fells Point location maximizes its small footprint, as far as shelf curation and maximizing the number of quality reads within a space. I visited the Greedy Reads - Remington location in 2025 to compare. Although the curation is equally good (unsurprisingly), I prefer the Fells Point spot. It's a little ironic, I suppose, that the Remington location is closer to more residential neighborhoods further north in Baltimore, it feels less walkable to reach. And, while the available space is larger, the shop feels a little colder--with a more warehouse-like feel.

I think I have a Greedy Reads "Shelf Talker" sign to thank for connecting me to O Caledonia, although the word "Caledonia" in the title would have caught my eye, and I likely was completely suckered by Ali Smith's cover blurb. That said, my stop involved a great chat with the bookseller there, including discussing a few ways GR was plugged into the indie bookshop movement. My memory has faded too much over time to have confidence that the person I spoke to then is still on the staff list now.

Although the Fells Point location is too small and densely packed with books for much in the way of on-site events, it's clear that both GR stores (also progressive, in the Josh Cook sense) have a commitment to community impact--promoting donations to a variety of community-serving causes. I think the Fells Point location had a small kids' section, but I rarely focus on that area.

I do have the clear memory, though, that Greedy Reads - Fells Point is likely in the top 10-20% of serendipity per square foot. It's a store for readers, and stands a strong chance of introducing you to the book you didn't know you needed.

 

People Like Us, Call & Response, and the Power and Potential of Local Indies

WIR: People Like Us by Jason Mott 

In this post, I'm going to direct you to my separately published review of Jason Mott's People Like Us in The Christian Century. This was my second review for that publication. Being somewhat new to the magazine review game, I rushed out and bought a copy as soon as I received and accepted the invitation from TCC's Books Editor, Elizabeth Palmer. It occurred to me only after I got back that I was likely to get a review copy.

People Like Us was one of my top 20% of 2025 reads, for all the reasons you can read about in the linked review, and probably a few more besides. I'm hoping to get to Mott's prior Hell of a Book sometime soon, or at least before the end of the year. It won the National Book Award in 2021.

AWIGI: Call & Response Books

Interior shot of Call and Response Books
source: Call and Response Facebook page,
photographer uncredited

I'm fortunate to have 6 local, independent bookstores within about a 30 minute walk from my home, and Call & Response is the closest, by about 0.l mile. Also, as a general rule, if I'm going to seek out a book by an African-American author, I'd like to do my best to support Black-owned stores dedicated to getting such stories out to readers. Buying a book from a store I want to support is fair consolation for my "oops!" moment of not realizing I would get a review copy from the magazine.

Call & Response opened in May 2024, just a week after that year's Chicagoland Independent Bookstore Day Book Crawl. I visited there first during its opening weekend, if not Opening Day, picking up a copy of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by DePaul University Professor Francesca T. Royster.

Amidst all my bookstore wanderings, I'm reasonably certain I've been back to C&R about a dozen times, and have regularly enjoyed good chats with owner Courtney Bledsoe, and Tamara, an alum of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores who works as a bookseller with Courtney. I've been to several "start-up" stores in recent years, and see Call & Response as doing great work in getting off the ground--not just in terms of content curation in the process of building sales and inventory, but in the number and variety of community engagement events C&R runs. These events include Book Clubs (of course), Open Mic Nights, Trivia Nights and Friend Speed-Dating. Also, they've been "punching above their weight" in terms of supporting area book signings, including one with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The store's presence and activities are particularly meaningful because Courtney grew up in the neighborhood. Although I'm inclined to wax idealistic or romantic about the power of local indies, I think there's something to celebrate here in booksellers who start a business to build the kind of community they want to continue living in. 

C&R is part of a growing group of Black woman-owned bookstores in Chicago. Semicolon Books has received a lot of press, especially since 2020, but others in the area include Da Book Joint, Burst Into Books*, as well as Build Coffee & Books (which is, at least as of my last visit, much heavier on the café operation than the bookselling). I also had a chance to visit Last Chapter Bookstore in Chicago's Roscoe Village neighborhood during last year's Chicago Indie Book Crawl. It's a bit out of my wheelhouse as a Romance-focused store. For those of you outside Chicago who consider Evanston "Chicago," I'll happily add L'oreal Thompson Payton's Zora's Place in Evanston to this list.

(*Full disclosure: I serve on the Planning Committee for Burst Into Books's annual Words of Wonder Litfest on the South Side of Chicago)

Call & Response's "About" statement from their web site says a lot about this important niche in bookselling:

Call & Response is a Black woman-owned bookstore focused on fostering a love of reading, community, human connections, and the sharing of ideas across cultures and backgrounds. With the knowledge that the publishing industry has historically overlooked and sidelined writers of color, we place the voices of Black and other authors of color at the center of our work. We hope to provide a space for the many people who, for so long, have not seen ourselves represented in literature, empowering all to share their stories with the world.

In a future post, I'm looking forward to digging into Char Adams's Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore (AWIGI: Source Booksellers, Detroit), and am also looking forward to celebrating Source and the legendary Ms. Janet Webster Jones.  Adams's book provides a helpful directory to Black-owned bookstores in its appendices, unfortunately missing both Burst Into Books and Call & Response. (No criticism there; the landscape shifts constantly.)

As with many indies, Call & Response is preaching the message about the power of local independent bookstores, especially against the [amazingly large online retailer], on its socials. More importantly, perhaps, Courtney Bledsoe has been on-point and positive about the community impact of stores like hers in the face of recent and planned corporate incursions by Barnes & Noble.

Local Indies and the Corporate Behemoth

Former building for Marshal Field & Company department
store in Oak Park, Illinois, likely pre-2011, when the building
served as a location for Borders (source: Wikipedia,
credited to "Zol87)

My neighborhood, like several across Chicagoland (including Oak Park, depicted above), is about to get a new Barnes & Noble. I want to strike the right balance as I discuss this development and the impact of other major chain stores, in part because I am committed to strategies that increase book access, especially in Chicago. The B&N coming to my neighborhood will be easily accessible to several bus routes and one commuter train line serving the broader South Side. If B&N can add to book access without destabilizing the existing ecosystem, that's a positive. I suspect, however, that that's not an effort B&N itself will make, and whether it happens will depend on the community's ongoing engagement with the "home-grown" independent booksellers. It remains to be seen how much the Hyde Park Barnes & Noble will adapt its offerings to serve the reading interests of that broader South Side.

It's not too difficult to see that Barnes & Noble's development plans in Chicago focus on areas that already have relatively high saturation of local, independent booksellers. The most prominent of these, so far, has been the Wicker Park location on Milwaukee Avenue. The arrival of Barnes & Noble precipitated the demise of nearby Volumes Bookcafe, according to Volumes's co-owner Rebecca George. George has noted that her sales immediately dropped by about 20-30% after B&N's arrival in the neighborhood.

Recently, WBEZ (Chicago's Public Media station) convened George, C&R's Bledsoe, and B&N's CEO James Daunt for a conversation on one of its morning talk shows, "In the Loop." It's a 23 minute conversation, and well worth the listen for the issues it raises. Kudos to substitute host Clare Lane and the participants for an illuminating discussion--definitely more light than heat--that gets to some of the core issues around the local bookstore landscape and the potentially destabilizing effects of big chains.

Listen to the "In the Loop" conversation here.

I had a few reflections after listening to the segment. First, Volumes has a case, and Daunt's suggestion that B&N is a different kind of business than Volumes doesn't ring true. Second, Courtney Bledsoe does a terrific job of staying positive and focused on the distinctive offerings a store like hers can offer. She projects a seriousness about the added precariousness introduced by a new neighborhood B&N near her, and remains focused on the distinctive values and opportunities her store has in a way that does ring true.

Despite Daunt's general civility, there are a number of unfortunate aspects to the case that he presents. To my ear, one can hear the moral turmoil involved in having been on both sides of this particular kind of "Empire vs. the Scrappy rebels" confrontation. His Daunt Books had to square off against large chains in the U.K. before he was hired to run Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately, his description of this experience insinuates that the indies getting their business displaced just need to become better at their jobs.

In some sense, it's the quintessential capitalist conundrum. Even as businesses vie to offer services of benefit to the community, they compete not merely to compete, but they compete to win--where "winning" amounts to "vanquishing." At least the big ones do this. I don't think any of the region's local, independent booksellers see their goal as to put any of their peers out of business.

Daunt also seems to argue that Barnes & Noble is just a different kind of bookstore, and isn't going into any neighborhood that already has something like it (implicitly, "something like it" being a large, chain bookstore). This strikes me as a deliberate obfuscation of the oxygen-sucking power that large retailers, with greater capacity to discount books, play within the bookselling ecosystem.

It is not the case that B&N is filling in geographic gaps in bookstore access or accessibility. When I did the 2024 Chicagoland Indie Book Crawl, I wanted to do it as much as possible on foot and by transit within the time available. To that end, I picked the Milwaukee Avenue corridor as the best way. It had the highest concentration of local independents participating in the Crawl (as well as a major used shop in Chicago that doesn't participate). I walked from Skunk Cabbage down to Open Books in the West Loop, 8 stores in all.

That said, Chicago is a city with 2.7 million people, not counting the suburbs, and there should be more than enough business to go around. Even in a city as bookstore-rich as Chicago, there is likely more business to go around. B&N, though, is not exactly "hitting 'em where they ain't." In addition to the bookshop dense Milwaukee Avenue corridor, B&N is planning stores in Hyde Park and Downtown, as well as a near west suburb of Oak Park. Each of these locations has at least 4 local, independent bookstores within a 30 minute walk or a 5-10 minute drive. Again, I'm not buying the idea that they are avoiding direct "competition" with the local indies.

I called it an "Empire vs. Rebels' affair above rather than "David vs. Goliath," in that Malcolm Gladwell has argued that the latter scenario is really one that favors David. I keep this in mind in this instance partly because in at least two instances, B&N is taking over former Borders locations, and in a 3rd is moving into a space about 2.5 blocks away from an old Borders location. Oak Park is giving B&N tax breaks to recoup the space it's moving into, which was a Marshall Field's department store before it was a Borders. It seems to me that history might provide some lesson there. I only hope it is not after B&N drives other stores out of business.

The remaining matter for me with regard to Daunt's comments in the WBEZ discussion, is that he's clearly going to avoid conceding any points that will run contrary to B&N's ownership. B&N is currently owned by Elliot Advisors, a UK private equity firm. I've talked to one B&N alum who is aware that one clear possibility for the chain going forward is an Initial Public Offering to make the store a publicly-traded company. 

In the publicly-traded situation, the priority of "maximizing shareholder value" will enter into the mix of other values present in the bookstore ecosystem, and not necessarily for the better. This is especially the case if it reduces the diversity of voices available and the economies of scale a large chain can afford wind up sucking the oxygen out of the local indie book market. Profit, growth, community benefit, increasing diversity of voices and representation are all values that can co-exist in theory, at least, but how they get optimized in a pinch winds up making a big difference. It will likely diminish the range of "people like us" who get their stories out there.

I see the dilemma on the consumer side as well. In my own personal spending reckoning as a customer, as much as I support local independent bookstores, I tend to mentally kick myself if I forget to use my 15% discount card (from the Book Crawl) when making a purchase. My "bargain brain" and my "healthy community" brain don't completely jibe, even when I'm aware that my purchase dollars at a local bookstore provide me with a wider range of community-building benefits than buying it from a big corporation would. I can't, however, ever bring myself to participate in the behavior Rebecca George describes at Volumes, where customers would set down stacks of books they picked up off of her shelves and just go up the street to buy them, at a discount, from B&N--essentially "showrooming," with or without a camera.

As Danny Caine discusses in How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling (AWIGI: a kind gift from dear friends, doubtless purchased at 57th St. Books), some dimension of the B&N threat would be diminished if stores were more or completely limited in their ability to discount books. See the discussion of the French bookstore ecosystem in Chapter 4. I'd be interested in advocating for this, but am more hopeful than optimistic, at least in the near term, regarding success in such a campaign. (It galls me that the [Amazingly large online retailer] is the first hit for Caine's book on a Google search.)

Ultimately, I think we're better off finding a pathway for the Call & Responses of the world, the efforts of folks like Courtney Bledsoe to contribute to healthy and inclusive democratic cultures in the neighborhoods and towns where they grew up. It feels like the way to be properly (locally) patriotic, in the Wendell Berry sense, which very much involves blooming where one is planted, and acknowledging that the "Empire" stores are the ones that will be much more likely to optimize profit over community benefit (or diversity of voices, etc) every time.

I didn't intend to go on so long about this matter in this post, as indeed the discussion of this issue is going to be a recurring theme here. I hope we'll make some productive advance in driving the conversation and further socializing the community-building value of indie bookstores and local economies.

2025 WIRAWIGI wrap-up

At one level, it's obviously premature to do a wrap-up post as the fourth post of the blog, but 2025 was a big year both for my reading and for my exploration of local, indie bookstore scenes, mostly around the U.S. The individual titles and stores will continue to unfold over the course of upcoming posts, but I wanted to account for a few things in summary at the turn of the year from 2025 to 2026.

I'm a little later than I wanted to be in posting this--partly because of the length, partly because the beginning of 2026 in the U.S. has been exhausting.

Poetry favorites from 2025 (see list below)

WIR: 175 books

I didn't set out with a numerical goal for the year, but had different goals in mind. More on that in a second. I managed to finish a book at an average pace of about once every 52 hours. A few factors contributed to this rate of completion--including that my work (paid and unpaid) involves ongoing research, and that I read at least 3 books simultaneously. I usually have one fiction book, one poetry collection, and one or two non-fiction books going at the same time. This year, I finished 79 novels (or short story collections), 39 poetry collections, 43 non-fiction titles, and 14 books that blurred the boundaries across those categories. 

My main reading goal for the year was to organize most if not all of my reading around "immersion" months--specifically, Black History Month, Women's History Month, National Poetry Month, Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Native American Heritage Month. In July, I read all Icelandic fiction, mostly by Icelandic authors. In December, I focused all my recreational reading on books recommended to me by friends and booksellers. During National Poetry Month, I focused on epic poetry to the exclusion of prose fiction. January, August, and parts of September and October were free-form. I read all the poetry aloud, with the exception of three of the epics, which I read on planes and trains. 

The point of the monthly focus for me was to read with awareness that my various layers of privilege mean that I'm usually an "expected reader." We operate in a world that doesn't always acknowledge explicitly the way it's set up to view white, male, cisgender, heterosexual as "norms." I'm not going to call the exchange even, to be sure, but the goal was to create month-long micro-immersions in the perspectives of those enduring macro-immersions in a world not always or even often optimized to validate, honor, or respect their experiences.

 

For me, this is partly a continuing effort to improve my understanding of two insights: "there is no them; there's only us," and "what you can separate, you can violate." The former expression is commonly linked with Fr. Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries; the latter was used by my college Religious Studies professor, the late Ira G. Zepp, Jr. 

I'll write elsewhere about the "windows/mirrors" dimension of engaging in stories--that literature gives us perspective on others' experiences and reflections back on our own. The metaphor works to do some important work in ensuring all folks have access to both (something the publishing industry on its own doesn't always do well), but the metaphor also breaks down when pushed. Windows become mirrors and vice-versa.

A couple of my recent reads have developed this point for me in helpful ways. First, Elaine Castillo's How to Read Now: Essays (AWIGI: 27th Letter Books, h/t to Drew for the recommendation), wherein she writes:

"[N]one of this work is meant to be done alone. Reparatively critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color. But the logic of empathy would have us believe so; it would have us believe that other people tell stories, which are there to make us feel things, the line between the two neatly delineated. The logic of empathy says 'I feel your pain'--but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. The story I'm telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, be educated by: it's a story about you, too. This work has left a will, and we are all of us named in it: the inheritances therein belong to every reader, every writer, every citizen. So, too, the world we get to make from it." (p. 74, emphasis in original)

I didn't have Castillo's insights when I started my 2025 reading journey, and I'm not sure that my particular intent meets her criteria of doing something more than reading for empathy. I will qualify my assessment, though, by observing that my exercise was not oriented primarily toward empathizing with the stories told, but rather to come up with a way to destabilize white supremacy in my reading environment as much as possible for an extended period. Castillo's point, to my mind, reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates's rebuttal of the late Saul Bellow's racist dismissal of people and cultures of the global south, in which Coates affirms that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. 

To be clear, I don't suppose any of this is close to sufficient work in the face of the enormity of the imbalance, but it is an attempt to push the balance at least a little, in this one area. As Josh Cook writes in The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century (AWIGI: Biblioasis):

"...this specific issue--the mistaken belief in the universality of white dude experience--is a direct source of the unbearable whiteness of publishing and one of the buttresses of white supremacy in our society. Or, to put this another way, white dudes need to read books that make them feel excluded so they can feel the fact of other valid human perspectives." (p. 206)

I also didn't have Cook's book in hand when I started this. I have a sense that human progress depends on constantly refining the insight that we, whoever "we" are, are not the center of the universe. I think Castillo and Cook's insights play well together in this space. 

I'll pop some additional data on highs and lows of the WIR side of the occasion at the end of this post, but move now to the...

Exterior of West Side Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Michigan

AWIGI: 184 independent bookshops

Starting from a few of my local neighborhood shops in Chicago in January 2025 to ending with a half-dozen or so out in the western suburbs of Chicago at the end of the year, I managed to visit a different bookshop about once every 48 hours, on average, over the year. This doesn't count return visits to a few favorites here and there. It also brings my two-year total to 264 (de-duped). 

I did some significant road-tripping over the course of the year, and added indie bookshops as side trips along the way. As a result, 2025 involved 26 states, the District, and lower Ontario. I participated in the official indie bookstore crawls in the Twin Cities and Chicago, and an "anytime" crawl in the downtown mall area of Charlottesville, Virginia (6 stores, on Insta). Everything else was DIY. I found one handy way of doing this was to past a Google Map driving route into an AI engine, and ask it to identify bookstores within 5 or 10 miles of my route.

It feels like I have too many highlights to name over the course of the year, from sharing the "crawl" experience with family and friends in various locales, to several kinds of "bookendipity." 

At Just Book-ish in South Boston, I asked about finding a poetry volume by the current or immediate past Poet Laureate of Boston . The bookseller found both for me, and handed me one by the latter, saying, "by the way, that's me." You can guess which one I bought. 

I told the booksellers at Gibson's in Concord, New Hampshire what I was up to, and they sent me to the Old Number Six Book Depot (Insta) in Henniker, New Hampshire (which was a wonderland), and to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At Toadstool, I mentioned what I was doing while chatting with Nadia, a bookseller there, who had recently returned from her own DIY bookshop crawl in Montreal.

The most common question I get when I tell people about this ongoing, and indeed endless, quest is impossible to answer: "What is your favorite?".  As my friend, Pat, pointed out, this is like asking somebody to name their favorite song from their favorite band. No one bookstore can capture everything you might be looking for in that moment, and the best bookstores offer distinctive surprises that only their booksellers and their community culture can offer.

One bookseller/barrista at Inkwell Booksellers Company in Minneapolis asked me if I ever encountered a bookstore I just hated. The quick answer was, "No," at least at that point. To be sure, "hate" is a strong word, so I wouldn't be inclined to go there. I mentioned to her that I often encountered bookstores that didn't feel especially curated toward my interests (e.g. Romantasy or Gothic-themed stores aren't really my wheelhouse), but that this didn't prompt dislike. It just made it less likely that I'd return. I learned what I needed to for the moment.

Regarding "at least at that point": It's my impression, or at least my hope, that one enters a bookstore in something of the same spirit that one enters a book--with curiosity and humility. It always feels to me like an expanding outward--mentally and spiritually. A month or two after that conversation in Minneapolis, I went to a used bookstore in a small city within an otherwise mostly rural section of an East Coast state, and was welcomed by a chalkboard at the door that offered a derisive and misspelled definition of the word "woke." Inside, the bookstore was chockfull of mass-market paperback thrillers, detective novels, etc. It didn't feel ripe for serendipity, even in a specially-designated section of "Women Writers." Sliding somewhere between sorting and segregation...

I won't give that place any more words here, but suffice it to say one of the joys of visiting all these bookstores is finding a spirit of discovery and community, a recognition that we all have more to learn and lots of different things to learn about.

I will say, though, that comparing bookstore communities across municipalities and regions, I can propose groups that can fit what you're most interested in discovering.

Looking for the deepest stacks in town? Off the top of my head: Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, Strand in NYC (Manhattan), Politics and Prose (flagship in NW) in DC, Parnassus Books in Nashville,  The Bookworm in Omaha, probably Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago (it used to be the Seminary Co-op, but I don't think it currently is). I haven't done much comparison in Columbus, Ohio, but it's difficult for me to imagine any other store there has deeper stacks than the 32 or so rooms of The Book Loft of German Village. If I'm wrong about that, please point me in the direction of the one that surpasses it. Powell's City of Books is obvious for Portland (although I visited there shortly before I started my formal count). 

On the other hand, if you're looking for expert curation and making the most magic with the least space, perhaps Wild Rumpus Books in Minneapolis (mostly for kids books), Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul (also kids), Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, Lost City Books in DC, The Book Shop in Nashville, The Next Chapter in Omaha. There are too many to name, and lifting up some of these here is not meant to say that others fall short. Indeed, trying to account for the distinctive communities and bookseller curation in these stores is part of why I wanted to start this blog--so there will be more to come. As you can imagine, it's particularly difficult for me to play favorites in general, and especially in Chicago, where I live.

I've only minimally accounted for used bookstores, which can have their own distinctive characters. Some deep, magical, and well-organized; others "optimized for serendipity."

We'll also have an opportunity to dig into the stores offering special points of focus for their curation--Black owned, women owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Asian-American owned. To use Josh Cook's typology in The Art of Libromancy, bookstores generally fall into one of three categories: radical, conservative, and progressive.

Here's how Cook defines them:
    - Radical: "overtly and explicitly support specifically articulated ideologies and itendities with their programs and stock."

    - Conservative: "[understand] bookselling to be amoral, displacing all of the moral aspects of books onto the writers for what is written, publishers for what is published, and readers for what is purchased."

    - Progressive: "[acknowledge] the inherent political nature of bookselling, that booksellers' decisions influence and are influenced by systems of power that surround them, that bookselling exists in a political and historical context, and that booksellers' systems, techniques, policies, procedures, traditions, and 'common sense' grew within and reflect that context." (pp. 61-62)

I'll dig into some of these in other posts. This one is already too long. I'll finish with an appendix listing my favorite reads by category for 2025.

Appendix

Some of these books are recent, many are not. They are listed in no particular order. I hope to explore some of them more deeply in other posts, and will add the "AWIGI" at that point.

Fiction

-Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor

-A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley

-The She-Devil in the Mirror, Horacio Castellanos Moya

-My Friends, Hisham Matar

-The Round House, Louise Erdrich

-The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley

-The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

-How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu

-América del Norte, Nicolás Medina Mora

-Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

-Animal Life, Auður Ave Ólafsdóttir

-Your Absence is Darkness, Jón Kalman Stefánsson

-People Like Us, Jason Mott

Non-fiction

-The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, Josh Cook

-The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Kerri K. Greenidge

-An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, Matthew Stewart

-The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy, Matthew Stewart

-The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Wendell Berry

-These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore

-Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard

-The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer

Poetry

-The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka

-Dirt Songs, Kari Gunter-Seymour

-Dead Dad Jokes, Ollie Schminkey

-Information Desk, Robin Schiff

-Kin, Margaret Britton Vaughn

-Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

Memoirs, Missives, Mixed Genre, and Miscellany

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

Walk through Walls, Marina Abramović

My Life in Seventeen Books, Jon M. Sweeney

(Most of) my favorite fiction reads in 2025

Murder Ballads and Givens Books & Little Dickens

 

Cover of Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics &
Lore, by Katy Horan

WIR: Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics & Lore

No, you are not flashing back to my earlier blog.

If you've known me for a bit, you'll be familiar with Murder Ballad Monday, which was a blog I co-founded and edited for about 6 years, up to about 6 years ago. That project was a hugely meaningful one for me in lots of ways, but I think for my purposes generally ran its course. Happily, SingOut! magazine still maintains the archive of posts, although some of the embedded links and videos have gone dead.

Katy Horan's 2025 introduction to the genre is heartfelt, nuanced, and beautiful gateway to a complicated subject, involving not only horror and violence, but a host of other individual and social sins, including misogyny and racism. With stunning contributions of her own visual art, she provides a quite winning starter course for others--speaking both the powerful force of the songs, as well as their many challenging dimensions.

Each of the 20 chapters tells the basic story of a song, provides as a succinct backround, and a short recording history for each. As it's a book, the listening will of course be left up to you and your own devices, but she does provide a version of the lyrics for each of the songs, and her distinctive art work, which has a good "ear" and "eye" for the music.

Horan's explorations do at least two things well. First, she's able to engage the songs sincerely because she understands that exploring a theme through song is different from endorsing that theme. That is, singing about murder or other individual or social sins is not in itself an endorsement or celebration of them. 

For some reason, that benefit of the doubt for artistic distance is not as readily given to singers or songwriters as it is some other artists. For instance, we don't suppose Agatha Christie was a terrible person just because she like to write about murder. A recent installment of NPR's Hidden Brain podcast discussed how horror film-makers and even horror film viewers are not given this space--with reviewers' critiques sometimes focusing more on condemning the "kind of person" who would go see such a film than on the film itself.

I've seen many genre critiques that make overly facile, indeed presumptuous, suppositions about artists' and listeners' inner motivations in exploring murder ballads. Horan, to her credit, doesn't go there, and indeed acknowledges the powerful, meaningful, and creative tension in her own attachment to the genre.

Without dipping too far back into MBM territory, one of my go-to illustrations that art and endorsement are different things is a performance of "Poor Ellen Smith" by Crooked Still (here for official audio; here for an audience video of a live performance). Among the two main variants of that song, Crooked Still performs the more rampantly misogynistic one. sung however, in the gentle voice of Aoife O'Donovan. All kinds of interesting space opens up in the cognitive dissonance between the words we hear and the voice we hear them in. 

Second, Horan gives space to recognize that the times and places that spawned these songs may be different and meaningfully alien to our contemporary sensibilities. Her discussions of "Lamkin" and "Marrowbones" toward the end of this collection give space for the "weirdness" between that time and this. I've discussed in MBM posts how difference between 19th century "courting culture," and 20th century "dating culture" might affect our understanding of how these songs functioned for folks at various times. 

Horan's volume is a fine combination of sound, sight, and sense, blending an artistic vision fully in-line with the Gothic themes and folk traditions of these songs. Murder Ballad Monday had a small cadre of contributors and 6+ years of writing to cover a lot of territory, and there's some overlap here. Horan cites some posts from my fellow Co-Founders in the end-notes. She also provides recording histories and recommended reading for those wishing to take even deeper dives. To that latter list, I would add Steven L. Jones's Murder Ballads, Old & New: A Dark & Bloody Record. Steve's book reworks much of his Murder Ballad Monday material, adding quite a bit more, across an even broader vision of the genre.

AWIGI: Givens Books & Little Dickens

I hope Danny Givens and his family and colleagues at Givens Books & Little Dickens in Lynchburg, Virginia will forgive me for pairing their delightful store with this grisly content. In some respects, what better place than in the Piedmont to find a book on this particular cultural heritage? Indeed, the events of "Poor Ellen Smith," mentioned above, happened not too far south of Lynchburg, across the border in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That said, the atmosphere inside the store radiates welcome, wonder, and discovery--for both adults and kids.

I stopped into GB&LD on a rainy day in May, 2025. I was on a bit of a retreat, and staying at some friends' nearby lake house. I made some day trips to Lynchburg and Roanoke. By rainy day, I mean:

Dashboard photo from the parking lot of Givens Books 
& Little Dickens

My phone was telling me the cloudburst was soon to pass, and I wasn't in a particular hurry. Good thing I already had something to read with me.

Once I got in the store, though, I was immediately drawn in by the overall vibe. To my immediate left was the new books portion of the store, and to my right was the kids' section, including both books and toys. Behind the central info desk and cashier station was a cafe, and the prospect of a solid used book section toward the back left of the store. 

My son had recently stumbled across Horan's book at a bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, and he sent me a WhatsApp message about it. After a little bit of browsing, I figured I would look for it at Givens. I did need a little help, which was happily provided by a staff member behind the desk. She looked it up in the system, as it had just come in.

The brief history of the store on its website relates that it's been family operation for five decades. I dropped Danny Givens's name at the top of this section, as he was mentioned specifically by a friend of mine in the area after I posted about my visit on Facebook. She spoke up to say that Givens was a "key player in local economics and hometown pride." My own visit showed how the store promotes the solid rationale behind local, independent bookstores--with posters pitching "buy local" and explaining the jobs impact behind local retailer:

Poster inside GB&LD (5/13/25)

Painted orange and blue, GB&LD's exterior looks like a converted warehouse or garage, but the inside is warm and welcoming. As I've only visited Lynchburg that one day, and only a couple stores, it's difficult for me to speak to its accessibility for folks in the region. (For context, I live in an urban, academic neighborhood that has at least 6 good independent bookstores within easy walking distance from my home, and a city that affords me access to dozens of others through transit.) I welcome correction if I'm wrong, but it feels to me that getting to GB&LD requires a drive, but if you have a car, it's worth it.

You can take a video tour of the store here.

Givens Books & Little Dickens is set to celebrate their 50th year in business in early 2026. Congrats! Highly recommended as a regional bookstore with strong inventory, good shelf-curation, helpful booksellers, and a welcoming vibe. 

Yours truly at the slightly less rainy
tail end of my visit.