Bookstores are arsenals of democracy

Lanora Jennings

I am behind the front counter of my bookstore, chatting with another bookseller. The door whips open and a meticulously dressed woman marches in as if she is on a critical mission. She grabs a book from our front display and as she stomps up to the register, she demands to speak to the owner. I am not finished introducing myself before she launches into a jarring tirade: “I can’t believe you carry this book! You should remove this from your shelves. It’s so violent and there’s children killing children! Kids should not be reading this!” As she slams the copy of The Hunger Games on the counter, my mind is spinning. Aside from occasionally having the left-leaning books in the politics section turned around backwards, this was my first confrontation with a customer over the content of a book. I was fortunate. The encounter in my bookstore was harmless. After the woman said her peace, her body visibly deflated. In a much calmer voice, she asked us where she could find the book her book club was reading. When we asked for the title she said, “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Unfortunately, so many of these encounters are much worse. This conflict has happened repeatedly in bookstores in America for over 200 years. Of the multiple incidents this year alone, a bookstore in Florida was harassed by a conservative TikToker; a bookstore in Baltimore suffered multiple racist attacks on social media that were so terrible the owner feared for her safety; and a group of Neo-Nazis demonstrated in front of a New Haven bookstore. As long as there have been bookstores, booksellers have been threatened, arrested, jailed, fined, and prosecuted. Author events have been upended by protests. Stores have been bombed, windows smashed, and inventory vandalized. Booksellers have been entrapped, framed, and closely monitored by the FBI. As journalist Elizabeth King wrote, “Attacking bookstores where authors of color or Jewish, queer, or leftist authors discuss their work, or because of the kind of books they sell, has been a common fascist tactic since fascism rose to prominence in the 1920s, and clearly, it is still with us today.”[1]

Booksellers also fought back. They’ve testified in court and to Congress, organized protests, circulated petitions, educated their communities, spoke truth to power, and much more. Along with librarians and publishers, our bookseller forebearers’ sacrifices and hard work helped shape our current legal precedents that define what is considered obscene material and solidified our First Amendment protections. Countless times in history, those booksellers have been called to service to uphold those principles. Currently, our freedoms feel as if they are precariously balanced on the edge of our dark past and once again, American booksellers are finding themselves in the vanguard. I have been collecting stories of booksellers in history who have fought for the ideals of liberty and the freedom to read. On this year’s Independent Bookstore Day, it seems fitting to memorialize those booksellers and take a moment to learn from them. Below are a few of their stories.

In 1903, Walter H. Knight, a clerk at The Old Corner Bookstore, a long-running and venerable institution in Boston, sold a copy of The Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, a fantastical if not scatological tale about a giant and his son. A few days later, the same man, an undercover agent of the Watch and Ward Society, returned with a police officer in tow. They arrested the clerk for selling obscene literature and later, the owner. Mr. Littlefield of the Cornhill Bookshop wrote to The Boston Globe, “I think it is an outrage…the idea that these fellows [Watch and Ward agents] hanging around a little store like that in order to trap an inexperienced boy, and for selling a book that has been on the market for 300 years and that will be sold when the members of this society are all in their graves.”[2] As professor Andrew Thacker noted about the aftermath of the resulting publicity and legal case, “…the notion that the bookseller was primarily responsible, and hence guilty, for supplying obscene materials began to be rejected…”[3]

In the 1920s and 30s, private organizations crusading to “protect the public” from obscene materials grew in strength and number all over the country. The most infamous were Anthony Comstock’s The Watch and Ward Society in Boston and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Tufts professor Neil Miller wrote, “[Comstock’s] moral crusades, his penchant for vicious hyperbole, his harassment of liberals and three thinkers…and his often-questionable tactics—use of entrapment, for example—antagonized many.”[4] Yet, Comstock’s downfall began in a bookstore. In 1929, a Watch and Ward agent visited the Dunster House Bookshop in Cambridge. Located a few blocks from Harvard Square, the customers were primarily Harvard students and faculty. The owner, James A. DeLacey, was a respected bookseller and a favorite of Harvard intellectuals. The agent inquired about obtaining a copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The store did not ordinarily stock the book but offered to place a special order. DeLacey managed to source a secondhand copy from a Harvard student (some allege this student was also a Watch and Ward agent). The subsequent legal cases changed how we define obscene materials. Dunster was harshly punished. His sentence included four months in the House of Correction and extraordinarily punitive fines. He quickly became a cause célèbre with Harvard students raising money to help pay them. While the tactics used by the Watch and Ward society were not different from those used in the past, they made the mistake of messing with a beloved institution. The consequence of the Dunster Bookshop fiasco was a renewed energy for obscenity law reform, which soon resulted in an important change in the state law: Obscene language or passages in themselves were not enough to ban a book; they would have to be viewed in the context of the entire work.

Marion Dodd, the first female officer of the American Booksellers Association and co-founder of the Hampshire Bookshop in Northampton, MA, wrote that a bookstore is “an arsenal of democracy” in their newsletter, The Book Scorpion[5]. The Second World War was raging, and Dodd would not remain neutral. In a speech at the 1942 ABA Convention, she encouraged fellow booksellers to fight the rising fascism and suggested “a few important things we can do at once.” Among her recommendations, she urged booksellers to go out into their communities to talk books and “invite civilian defense groups to…discuss books with the background of knowledge.” She said, “Science is working overtime. Technical books can help win this war.” Book history scholar Barbara Brennon writes, “Dodd saw her enterprise as a more important undertaking than simply the sale of a commodity; she believed it to be…one of the priceless adjuncts of a free society.”[6]

In 1945, pedestrians on West 47^th Street in New York were captivated by a bookstore’s elaborate window display. Celebrating the publication of a new book by Andre Breton, The Gotham Book Mart had both Breton and Marcel Duchamp design a surrealist scene that included a headless female mannequin clothed only in an apron. Proprietor Frances Steloff soon received a complaint from the New York Society of Vice. Surprisingly, their objection was not to the mannequin, but to the cover of a book that featured a Robert Matta painting with an exposed breast that was in the permanent collection at MOMA. Steloff was intimately familiar with the vice squad, having multiple runs-ins. Her inventory had been seized more than once. After her arrest for selling Ulysses, Random House editor Bennet Cerf employed the lawyer for her defense. This famous test case, The U.S. v One Book Called Ulysses resulted in a landmark decision for freedom of expression, affirming that offensive language of a literary work is not obscene when it does not promote lust. Steloff responded to the window objection by attaching the calling card of John S. Sumner, the head of New York’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, to the “objectionable” portion of the poster. She wrote in large letters “CENSORED.” Publisher’s Weekly reported that the window, “drew larger crowds than before.”

The most famous court case of the 1950s was People v. Ferlinghetti. In 1957, the founder of City Lights Bookstore, along with a bookseller, was charged with publishing and selling obscene material, namely Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. The significant legal victory expanded the definition of what constituted obscene materials, stating a work must be judged by its effect on its audience and the community, not just a single person or small group. If it is not offensive to all, then it is not obscene. City Lights was not the only store in this era called to the front lines. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, many leftist and communist booksellers were caught in the McCarthyism snare. The trials reveal not just a flagrant disregard for civil liberties by the prosecution, but a wildy exaggerated sense of books and booksellers as a threat to national security. Marquette University professor Shirley A. Wiegand points out, “When viewed from a historical context, these campaigns of ‘preventive justice’ constitute a chain of civil liberties violations with links that connect events centuries ago to the present…government officials have…overimagined threats to the country from alien sources and then violated citizens’ civil liberties….in times of national crisis, free speech often suffers.”[7]

In 1967, J. Edgar Hoover initiated a new phase of his Counter-Intelligence Program explicitly directed at destabilizing the Black Power movement. Black bookstores were specifically targeted. The director ordered each Bureau office to “locate and identify Black extremist and/or African-type bookstores in its territory and open separate discreet investigations on each.”[8] Even more disturbing, Hoover wanted the Bureau to convince African American citizens to spy on the bookstores. Drum and Spear in Washington, DC was just one of many stores harassed by the FBI. The thriving bookstore located near Howard University opened in June of 1968, just weeks after the uprising following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drum and Spear was run by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee organizers such as Charlie Cox and Judy Richardson. The store quickly became an indispensable source for books on Black identity and politics.

Their mission was not just raising consciousness through access to Black books but also mobilizing the community. The store was continually under surveillance. Richardson was harassed by agents who followed her home. She said, “It was clear that they were not trying to find anything out…they were trying to…stop people from coming in the store…if they were trying to find something out, they would have been more secretive.” The store was also repeatedly investigated by the IRS. Hakkim’s Books, Liberation Bookstore, and Aquarian Books all underwent surveillance. The Afro-Asian bookstore and Micheaux’s famous Harlem bookstore endured severe harassment. The number of Black bookstores significantly dwindled in the late 70s. While multiple factors influenced their demise, scholar Joshua Clark Davis points out that the FBI’s investigations undermined the viability of these stores. The stress of the harassment and losing customers to their justified fear of encounters with the police is too much of a storm to weather.[9] There are more insidious ways to restrict access to books than merely banning them.

The 1980s saw another rise of censorship efforts with the election of Reagan and the release of the Meese Report in 1986. Dubbed the “censorship wars”, groups like the Moral Majority, run by Jerry Falwell, began an all-out attack on anything that didn’t represent their “family values” across all media: music, books, television and more. For the next two decades, the right shifted their harassment to the Women’s and Gay Rights movements. Womonfyre Bookstore in Northampton, MA endured a series of threats and vandalism starting in 1982. Jill Krolik, the owner, was informed by the police of a bomb taped to a car outside the store. The bomb was a false alarm, but the bag found contained a note that started, “Lesbians must die” and it was signed by the National Socialist Party with swastikas hand drawn over the note. Over the next two years, the store was bombarded with hate letters and bomb threats. The violent campaign wave went beyond the bookstore. Other lesbian-owned businesses were vandalized and there was a series of sexual assaults, beatings, and death threats against women by a group called Stop Homosexual Unity Now (SHUN). In the late summer of 1983, Robert E. Kremensky was arrested for some of the incidents. He served less than two months in prison. The bookstore’s community fought back. At a community meeting that included members from multiple local Lesbian and Gay Alliances led the organizing efforts that resulted in citizen patrols, increased police patrols, and funds for a surveillance camera for the Womonfyre Bookstore. A coalition was formed that demanded the city council issue a strong statement against the harassment and an “affirmation of our lives.” [10]

The war culminated in the Rushdie Affair, in which Cody’s Books in Berkeley was firebombed in what might be considered the first incident of Islamic terrorism in America[11]. Oren Teicher, the Executive Director of the Americans for Constitutional Freedom (and later the CEO of the American Booksellers Association) said in a speech at the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Association meeting that year, “We must fight and be confident that by working together we can make the 90s better than the 80s.”[12] In 1990, the American Booksellers Association formed the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) to support bookstores and fight censorship efforts nationwide. The ABFFE has participated in numerous legal cases and continues the fight to this day.

An arsenal is a collection, a group of weapons. As booksellers face what might be the biggest challenge in our history, I have hope. Our bookseller forebearers pushed back the flagrant civil liberties violations by both government officials and private organizations during times of insecurity. Their struggles rallied grassroots efforts to combat the hubris of power by building and relying on their communities. Those communities include you—authors, publishers, journalists, readers—all of you. Our booksellers need your support, and not just with your wallet. In his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” We are part of their arsenal. Now let us begin.

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Lanora Jennings began her bookselling career at Borders Books & Music. She has worked for two Independent Bookstore of the Year independent bookstores, Politics & Prose in Washington, DC and the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, WI (closed in 2009 after over 80 years in business). She owned her own independent bookstore for a time. She is currently the Midwest Sales Representative and Indie Bookstore Relations Manager for Princeton University Press. She is also the Director of the Bookseller Oral History Project and is working on a book on the history and culture of bookselling in America.

Notes

^{[1] King, Elizabeth. “Why Fascists Storm Bookstores,” The Nation, May 20, 2019
[2] The Boston Globe, November 28, 1903.
[3] Thacker, Andrew. “The Pure and the Dirty: Censorship, Obscenity, and the Modern Bookshop,” Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 29, No. 3, September 2022, pp. 519-54.
[4] Miller, Neil, “Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil,” Beacon Press, Boston, 2010.
[5] Brannon, Barbara. “The Bookshop as ‘An Arsenal of Democracy’: Marion Dodd and The Hampshire Bookshop during World War II,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 92, No.1 (MARCH 1998), pp. 5-31, The University of Chicago Press.
[6] Brannon, et al.
[7] Wiegand, Shriley A. and Wayne A. “Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland,” University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 2007.
[8] Clark Davis, Joshua. From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs, Columbia University Press, New York, 2017.
[9] Clark Davis, Joshua. “The FBI’s War on Black-Owned Bookstores,” The Atlantic, February 19, 2008.
[10] “Women’s Bookstore Receives Bomb Threat,” Gay Community News, Vol. 12, No. 47, June 15, 1985.
[11] Ross, Andy. “25th anniversary of bombing of Berkeley’s Cody’s Books,” Berkeleyside Newspaper, February 4, 2014.
[12] Mutter, John. “MPBA Meets in Denver,” Publisher’s Weekly, November 10, 1989.}