Written by Steve Yates

Saturday, May 2 is Independent Bookstore Day all across America.

Independent bookstores, including Jackson’s Lemuria Books, are inviting rank amateurs, such as me, onto the sales floor to work part of Saturday as Guest Booksellers in violation of almost every accepted business principle I know.

Imagine being greeted at your local law firm by a Guest Attorney. After all, President Dwight David Eisenhower did declare May 1 Law Day, so why not? “Hi, I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Attorney. You look like you’re really into estate planning? Great! Let’s light in here with Charles Dickens and Bleak House.”

Or imagine sitting down Saturday in confessional, and instead of Father Jerry, you are welcomed to the Solemn Rite of Reconciliation with, “Hey! I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Priest. Why so contrite? Look here, let’s read us some Gerard Manley Hopkins and get some perspective. Or check out the new Collected Frank Stanford—now that guy knew what was coming for all of us!”

With so many guests running around, I’m pretty sure the authors of The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World’s Toughest Marketplace would say, “You have lost all control of your value chain.”

But, you see, anything can happen at an independent bookstore. The value in an independent bookstore isn’t just the shelves and all those whispering spines and enticing covers. The reading community that gathers there, that’s the preemptive, experiential, demand driven “thing” about Lemuria. That reading community is the reason you should come on in Saturday.

Where else could you meet Matthew Guinn and get to participate in his incredible story. And at any good book signing, you are going to see Marshall Ramsey, Rick Cleveland, Billy Watkins, Gerard Helferich, Teresa Nicholas, Carolyn Brown, Patti Carr Black, Alan Huffman, Diane Williams, Ed King, and so many other authors from our community with wonderful books. You can meet more authors in one good night at Lemuria than you will in a whole year at an MFA creative writing program.

But I’m not being entirely fair to Lemuria and its calculated business decision to allow me and other authors to join you in commerce. Lemuria has supported me through two novels—Morkan’s Quarry and now its sequel The Teeth of the Souls—and the Juniper Prize-winning short story collection, Some Kinds of Love. And in fact, The Teeth of the Souls would have perished in the dustbin had it not been for the close reading and tough love of Matthew Guinn and Paul Rankin, both of whom I met at readings by other authors at Lemuria. And Lemuria welcomes me all the time as the assistant director/marketing director of University Press of Mississippi. I may not be able to help you with estate planning or with your immortal soul, but I will know where some of the good books are shelved. And heck, I bet you can introduce me to several as well—I welcome that experience.

Maybe we should revise the headline here, and remember the extraordinary miracle of a great independent bookstore, remember why we would celebrate and invite in rank amateurs as Guest Booksellers.

THIS CAN ONLY HAPPEN AT AN INDEPENDENT BOOK STORE

What’s in that vague pronoun, this?

Real books

Real experience

Real reading community

What does it take to activate these three really wondrous elements, to create the spark so THIS can happen?

You. Come on in this Saturday.

 

 

Steve Yates is the author of The Teeth of the Souls: A Novel, and the Juniper Prize-winning Some Kinds of Love: Stories. Follow him at Fiction and History

 

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