Archive for month: May, 2025

The launch of the seventh print issue of The Bibliophile, Biblioasis’s charmingly irregular press publication, coincides with 2025’s Independent Bookstore Day. California bookseller and writer Samantha Schoech organized the first Independent Bookstore Day as a regional celebration in 2014, but it expanded into a national event the following year, making this year Independent Bookstore Day’s tenth anniversary. The event was born out of the urgent need for advocacy and awareness at a time when the very existence of such bookstores was threatened, and it was an opportunity as well to celebrate their role within the literary, local, and wider communities they serve.

Ten years ago, the demise of independent bookstores across the English-speaking world was believed to be inevitable. The previous decade had been disastrous. Decimated by large, conglomerate chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders in the US and Indigo in Canada, undercut at every turn by Amazon, and facing inflationary costs that made it even more difficult for booksellers to survive in the communities they’d long served, things had gotten so bad by 2009 that the American Bookseller Association saw its membership drop by nearly 50 percent. The same year, the Canadian Booksellers’ Association disbanded. There was a sense that bookstores—and perhaps printed books themselves—were anachronisms that no longer served a necessary function in a digital age.

Independent bookstores have long been one of the few places where capital and culture coexist, even if not always comfortably. Most are run as for-profit ventures, though making money has almost never been their primary motivation. One of my many working definitions of independent publishing has been “Idealism, and how to pay for it”: this applies equally to most of independent bookselling. Booksellers do what they do for a range of reasons beyond the mercenary: love, advocacy, as a form of community engagement and outreach, a commitment to making the world, starting with their individual neighbourhoods, a better place. Bookstore owners regularly make decisions which can never be justified via an accountant’s spreadsheet; they stock independently published literature as a form of cultural service (and because they believe in its value); they work with and encourage local writers and artists; they keep books they believe in on the shelves far longer than their conglomerate cousins, increasing the likelihood that they will be discovered; they take an active interest in the success of the books they love, and the customers they know will love those books as much as they do; they allow their shops to be third spaces. Booksellers are at the front lines, alongside librarians, in the battles over censorship and freedom of expression. And this list only begins to capture the ways that bookshops contribute. Every bookshop reflects the individual predilections and passions and decisions of the people who run them; each reflects the individual communities they serve. If you are blessed to have more than one independent bookstore in your community, you’ll find books on the shelves of one that you will never find in the other, and vice versa, books you would likely never have otherwise discovered.

Perhaps it is for these reasons, among many others, that independent bookstores have experienced a renaissance over the last decade, over which time hundreds have opened across the continent, with a new generation of booksellers figuring out, individually and collectively, how to make this business work, striking a balance between idealism and commerce and in the process showing us different ways businesses can operate. And readers, who understand the importance of freedom of choice, and who thrill to the possibility of analog discovery, the power of the browse, are supporting them in greater measure every year. Perhaps this is happening because we all know better now what’s been lost, and what’s worth fighting for. And this, too, is a reason to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. The survival of these individual businesses gives us so much—including, at this politically uncertain time, hope.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day.

Dan Wells,
Bookseller and Publisher

20 Bookstores for 20 Years: Leviathan Bookstore

Our 20 Bookstores for 20 Years feature today is Leviathan Bookstore and bookseller extraordinaire James Crossley! Leviathan is the newest store on our list—after eight months of stocking a two hundred square foot pop-up space, they moved to a brand new location in the South Grand Business District of St. Louis, Missouri and their grand reopening was just last month, in March. When you drop by, you’ll be welcomed by a surprising variety of books from the biggest bestsellers to the tiniest hidden gems, and plenty of cozy corners where you can pour over idiosyncratic pages. In his twenty-plus years of being part of the book business, co-owner/bookseller James has been a Biblioasis supporter no matter where he is. Read on for Dan’s praise of Leviathan Books and to discover why The Discovery of Honey by Terry Griggs remains James’ favorite Biblioasis book.

Dan on James Crossley and Leviathan Bookstore: I first met James Crossley in Minneapolis at a bar in the closing hours of Winter Institute perhaps close to a decade ago now. After a beer or two loosened our tongues, we got to talking about everything under the sun, though never straying very far from the world of books (and baseball). Since that time, he has come to be one of my favourite and most trusted readers, booksellers, and humans, as close as I may come to experiencing American transcendentalism in the flesh. After a career selling and managing books for others, he has, with his partner in love and literature, Amanda Clark, finally been able to open his own. There’s no store I look forward to seeing more.

James on why The Discovery of Honey is his Biblioasis pick: “It was love at first line when Terry Griggs and I met. The Discovery of Honey lofted me instantly into the air with narrative verve, buffeted me with the same rough tenderness it metes out to its irrepressible young heroine, and set me back down stunned, smiling, and satisfied. I wish I could read it again for the first time.”

In good publicity news:

• The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in a number of outlets this week:
  • Wall Street Journal: “[A] quietly frightening debut . . . The Passenger Seat inhabits both characters’ states of mind, at times mesmerizingly, depicting their braggadocio, their resentments and their paranoia.”
  • Globe and Mail: “Powerful and extremely well written . . . nuanced, propulsive, literary, unsettling, haunting.”
  • Midwest Book Review: “An impressive level of literary excellence.”
  • Necessary Fiction: “[A] striking novel.”
  • The Guardian: “Confident, precise and simmering with intellectual energy. The Passenger Seat flirts with allegory but never renounces an urgent relationship to contemporary configurations of masculinity.”
• Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on CBC Ideas for the episode “Libraries are fighting for their freedom—and our democracy.”
• On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in Lit Hub and the Toronto Star.
• Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, was interviewed in The Hill Times and CBC News.
• Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in the West Trade Review: “Displays first-person prose of stunningly high quality and a belief in language at once arresting and propellant.”