Bibliodiversity and bookcrawls
Bibliodiversity is like biodiversity, but for books. That there needs to be variety. Of books, of publishers, of people.
The other weekend I was away visiting friends and went on a bookcrawl. We didn't even cover all the bookshops in the city. We went to an independent bookshop, a poetry bookshop (bookcase), a charity bookshop, and a queer bookshop. It was really fun! We chatted to the staff, even traded recommendations with other customers. They all had signs about groups that met there, community events, some had self-published and local author sections, sold merch and badges and posters.
And we barely even scratched the surface. There was a zine library we walked past but it didn't open until later in the day. There's a scifi bookshop in the city centre, another that specialises in self-publishing, several more independent bookshops, and a women's library. As well as a big Waterstones.
In my city... the bookcrawl would be significantly shorter. There are, as far as I know, at least four Islamic bookshops. Which proves this is still a workable system if there's a community supporting it. That's it. That's the independent bookshop crawl.
We have a Waterstones in the basement of the main shopping centre. I'm not complaining about Waterstones - at all. They are lovely there. It's not an independent bookshop though. There's also The Works. I shouldn't be down on The Works. There's Forbidden Planet. They sell books but I'm a bit reticent to call them a 'bookshop'. There are a few very nice secondhand bookshops.
There used to be more though. Most recently, there was an indie bookshop in the city centre. It was only open a few years before covid killed it off. When I was younger there was an anarchist bookshop at the secular hall. There was a multicultural bookshop at the back of the wholefood shop.
Bookshops get the books on the street: bibliodiversity starts with publishers. My brother and his wife got me a gift voucher from Persephone Books for my birthday. It was already clearly a bit different: a beautiful card with a catalogue. The voucher was for 'a book', because they are all the same price and that had a pleasing simplicity to it. They specialise in twentieth-century women writers so the catalogue is an education in and of itself.
Persephone Books reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century. All of our 155 titles are intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written. As well as novels we also publish short stories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, gardening books and cookery books; each title has an elegant grey jacket and a patterned endpaper, along with a matching bookmark.
I got Katherine Mansfield's Journal. The physical book itself is gorgeous. As for the contents, I can't believe it was out of print? The product page says they reprinted it and Wikipedia lists a 1954 edition, so it seems to be the case?
And if it weren't for a small press dedicated to printing exactly this kind of author it would still be out of print and I'd be on Internet Archive - except I wouldn't because it was looking through the catalogue that gave me the idea. Small presses, as we can all imagine, are in crisis. Bookshops, even in urban areas of half a million people, are an endangered species. Publishers do more than just make the books and shops do more than just sell them. They build an ecosystem - curation, and community and I think we all agree we need those things more than ever.