Chapter 4: On Gifts

...and a different way to think about indie bookstores

Hello, readers! I’m glad you are here. In keeping with this month’s theme, this post is free to all subscribers. I’d love for you to forward it to anyone who might find it thought-provoking or affirming. As you’ll see, the crucial thing about a gift is that it moves. And remember that a paid subscription is itself a gift because every penny goes to Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca’s local cooperative bookstore.

Donations and Other Kinds of Support

In the autumn of 2021, Buffalo Street Books circulated a survey among its customers which produced some revealing answers. Only 61% of the respondents were owners of the cooperative—people who have already been converted to the cause—yet when we asked if they would favor a “donation” option at the register, fully 85% voted “yes.” Beginning the week of Thanksgiving, the credit card terminal gave in-store customers the option to add 1%, 2%, 5%, a custom amount, or nothing to their total. All those finger taps added up over the busy holiday season.

In just five weeks, Buffalo Street Books received $2500 in donations, or 2.4% of in-store sales. This is not, by itself, a game-changer (the amount essentially covers our credit card fees). But it signals something enormous: a widespread understanding that indie bookstores transcend capitalism, that they are deserving of support from outside the marketplace, that their value exceeds even their inventory.

If this is true, then indie bookselling requires a monumental paradigm shift in order to survive.

There are a lot of people right now who are actively and energetically seeking to bring about this paradigm shift, and here I’ll mention four relatively new efforts.

• Bookshop.org is a benefit corporation which sells books online and then disperses 75% of their profits to indie bookstores—$21 million since January 2020; Buffalo Street Books received $3202 from Bookshop in 2021 and $1902 in 2022. Wired recently ran a profile of founder Andy Hunter.

• The Book Industry Charitable Foundation is a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which acts as a safety net for bookstores, raising money from publishers and marquee authors, and giving money to booksellers, bookstores, and comic book stores.

• Reimagining Bookstores is a new movement of booksellers who are dreaming big—they aspire for communities to embrace bookstores as a social cause through a new wave of investments similar to the underwriting of public libraries, museums, public radio and television, and non-profit journalism and literacy organizations. One popular idea at their inaugural gathering in October 2021 was raising $50 million for a foundation that will make low-interest loans and grants to bookstores, offer legal advice and business consulting, and provide other resources for bookstores looking to adapt to the post-pandemic ecosystem. Publishers Weekly reported on Reimagining Bookstores just last May.

• The philanthropic arm of Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective has launched a project to support indie bookstores in underserved areas, called book deserts. They are currently helping 20 bookstores in three-year cycles and are looking to expand to 30. They provide legal support and mentoring in addition to funding.

Your patronage of indie bookstores joins you to these progressive efforts to redefine bookselling for the future. They should inspire you, impress the hell out of you, maybe even humble you a little bit—all these people working passionately to keep the lights on at indie bookstores for you to walk in, tilt your head, and start browsing the shelves.

A Philosophical Turn: On Gifts

I fervently hope the foregoing also inspires you to think more broadly about capitalism and the parameters of a market economy that simply doesn’t work for bookstores, just as it doesn’t work for the related and essential industry of news. Can expanding the scope of philanthropy to encompass industries like bookselling and journalism be one front in the radical effort to reform our economic system for a growing populace and a warming globe? In other words, we know beyond a doubt that books are vital to a citizenry, vital to a humanely defined economy that meets the needs of everyone within the planet’s capacity. Any imagining of the future must include a node in the network for bookstores. What if, by designing a system that safeguards and makes sustainable this industry, we are also pulling the rest of the system into alignment with the values of independent bookselling as enumerated in Chapter 2 of Open Book: discovery, community, nurturance of the arts, erudition, and pleasure? That’s the world I want.

But let’s go even further: can we envision a flourishing bookstore industry whose design comes from its reason for existence, form following function? What happens if we think dimensionally about books and their travels through the world, with booksellers as their important conveyors?

I’m willing to bet that a substantial portion of the new hardcovers you purchased in a given year are gifts for your friends and family. How many of your favorite books were gifts to you? Wrapped and given, unwrapped and received, checked out of a library, found on a dusty shelf at a used bookstore, purchased from a homeless person’s blanket spread out on an urban sidewalk, taken from a Little Free Library box, purchased in high anticipation on its publication day from the “New Titles” table at your neighborhood bookstore—no matter how it comes to you, a book is always a gift.

A work of art which circulates in a gift economy—this is what I mean, following Lewis Hyde’s brilliant formulation in a book which I wish I could give to every living person: The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The simplest definition of a gift is “a thing we do not get by our own efforts.” A gift is distinct from a commodity, which means that its value is not determined by its price, but from the way it circulates, from the network of relationships it creates in its travels through the world. The gift designs its community.

I would like to suggest that independent bookselling will thrive by modifying market logic to embrace the gift economy.

The central characteristic of a gift is that it must move. Not the exact gift you’ve just been given—you are allowed to keep that. But you must pass along the spirit of the gift to someone else, and until you discharge this obligation, you “suffer gratitude,” in Hyde’s gorgeous phrase.

Or to put it another way, if a market economy seeks equivalence or the exact right price for a good, the gift economy is crucially unbalanced because it is never precisely reciprocal, and the surplus creates forward momentum, just as scarcity pulls that momentum toward itself. The gift economy focuses attention on what the act of giving sets in motion.

I’ve argued that bookstores need gifts—of money and volunteer effort—but they also dispense gifts, not just the books their customers buy to give to loved ones, but also the books they donate in the community and the partnerships they create to amplify literature and literacy.

Bookstores are nodes in a circle of literary gift exchange, and to strengthen their place in the economy, we should strengthen this circle.

In this re-envisioning, indie bookstores’ need for customer engagement and support is an asset, not the failure of a business poorly adapted to the free hand of capitalism. In a gift economy, you have the privilege and the pleasure of using your money to support your values. Bookstores don’t need your charity; they should earn your gift by the many ways they convey gifts to you. Just as a book is at once a commodity and a work of art, so is an independent bookstore at once a retail business and a cultural institution.

Ask yourself: what am I willing to do to preserve this way of buying books? Am I willing to place indie bookstores in the same category as museums and theaters—cultural and educational cornerstones of the community that cannot live by sales alone? Am I willing to become a bookstore patron in both senses of the word—customer and donor—to recognize the true value of what I find within its walls?

Here’s what supporting independent bookselling can look like:

It can look like buying yourself a book—a gift!—for no reason other than pure pleasure.

The Next Chapter of Open Book

I’m still hoping to bring you an interview or two with innovative booksellers at mission-driven bookstores—but booksellers are busy people! So who knows what next month will bring, but I’ve also been working on an open letter to an enormously influential person in the book world that is making me happy.

Book Recommendation

If you haven’t read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, please do yourself the favor of at least flipping through it to see what catches your eye. [I would link to it, but it appears to be backordered everywhere. Oh the irony—a book about the circulation of gifts is backed up! Check eBay, and marvel at its many covers over the years.] I highly recommend the first part, “A Theory of Gifts” (the second part is a bonus treat, with literary critical readings of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound). Hyde applies an anthropological understanding of traditional gift economies to art: “If a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift and if it is received by its audience as a gift, then is it, too, a gift?” He is most interested in what an affirmative answer means to the creative process: “If the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?” I challenge you to read it with another question in mind: what does thinking of art as a gift mean for the dissemination of art, not just its creation and interpretation?

Related: Gavin Aung Than’s lovely comic, based on a John Green quote: “Make Gifts For People”

Unrelated: I’ve recently read two excellent doorstopper books about climate change, taking place over three generations and extending into the future, highly recommended for anyone who liked Richard Powers’ The Overstory. The first is The New Earth by Jess Row, just published in March, and the second is a slightly older title but one that extends much farther into the speculative future, Greenwood by Michael Christie (also, inexplicably, out of stock). Remember that you can get audio versions of all of these (I listened to The New Earth and it was a great ensemble performance) at Libro.fm, the ethical alternative to Audible that allows you to designate an indie bookstore to receive a portion of your audiobook purchase.