What to Read While Supporting Local Bookstores
Bookstores are hurting, but book lovers can help. Also talking about elephants, marmalade, face blindness, Goodreads catfishing, and Radium Girls.
Hi! It’s raining today. I hope that means you’re curled up in a fluffy blanket and munching on a flaky pastry.
This Week on Bookseller GoFundMe
Bluestockings Books, a collectively-run bookstore/cafe/activist hub for radical thought, is moving to a new location on the Lower East Side. They’ve launched a GoFundMe so they can design the new space to be fully accessible for disabled folks and to invest in a technological overhaul that will help them better fulfill online orders. They also offer monthly membership packages and host virtual, ticketed events as another means of support.
Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers, a lively little bookstore in Williamsburg, is celebrating their 20th anniversary by fundraising during its pandemic-related closure. They’ve launched a GoFundMe, but you can also buy books and gift certificates online. They even have Surprise Book packages available, which conceptually delights me.
Mercer Street Books & Records, a small and wonderful bookstore in Greenwich Village, is in danger of closing. They’ve launched a GoFundMe and are working to raise a shit ton of money, if you can spare even a few bucks. It’s a favorite used bookstore of mine from when I was in college: I had class in NYU’s Mercer building, right next door, almost every year. I’d usually grab a toasted bagel with drippy butter and an iced coffee in all seasons from the neighboring cafe to munch on during class, then head over to the bookstore with some pals and get gently chastised for bringing the dregs of my iced coffee into the store.
If my bit of nostalgic monotony doesn’t move you, maybe Zadie Smith will:
Without exaggeration, if Mercer Street Books closes you might as well just shut down the village and call it a day. It is a centre of culture, a library's reading room, a record store, a tiny gallery (constructed of art book covers) a late-night hang, an autodidact's paradise, the site of the best overhead conversations to be found beneath fourteenth street, and a great place to find out just how little the reviewer who received your latest proof actually read of said proof (spine unbroken; zero notes made.) Without Mercer what's left? Frozen yoghurt? Vegan cupcakes? To do my particular kind of work, these past ten years, I've needed Mercer's like a body needs food. I can't be the only one. Long may it continue!
Prolific Instagrammer @newyorknico posted about Mercer Street Books this week, and it really does look like people are showing up. I hope you do, too!
The Articles
‘Am I Being Catfished?’ An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic, The Guardian (~22 min). This article from 2014 is internet famous. (Those of you who read it the first time around, I see you.) The gist is that YA author Kathleen Hale became obsessed with one particularly negative book review that was posted on Goodreads, which caused her to embark on a journey to find and confront the reviewer in real life. I’ll let you read the essay to find out what happened and why; when you’re done, read this 2019 BuzzFeed article in which reporter Scaachi Koul catches up with Hale and provides a number of updates to the story. I got to thinking about it because it is truly wild to me that Goodreads, an Amazon subsidiary, is simultaneously one of the most powerful tools in the publishing industry and also one of the most technologically stagnant.
How To Move Your Elephant During a Pandemic, The New York Times (~8 min). This is the story of how Mara the 50-year-old elephant endured extreme hardship and eventually made a 1,700-mile journey during a global pandemic to an animal sanctuary that granted her space and freedom to roam.
My Life With Face Blindness, The Washington Post Magazine (~22 min). What else is there to say? This is a personal essay from someone with prosopagnosia, aka actual, diagnosed face blindness. No, I will NOT give you context about why I was Googling this at an indecent hour on a Friday night.
If this interests you, give The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks a read as well.
Marmalade: A Very British Obsession, Longreads (~19 min). Paddington loves marmalade and so do I.
I had to include this fascinating chronicle because of my mother. After hours of coaxing and de-cluttering, we managed to put together two boxes of books that she felt ready to part with. When she returned from donating her wares, however, she revealed that she snatched one last book from the donation pile while nobody was looking: the 1981 edition of Great British Cooking, A Well-Kept Secret, which includes many mentions of marmalade.
In her defense, it is a cute cookbook that brought us much joy when I gleefully read recipes for kidney pies and suet cakes aloud in the process of purging bookshelves. In my defense, she will never cook any of these things.
The Books
Got a little wordy this week. I’d apologize, but this is my newsletter and I do what I want here!
*A warning that the below section takes on a darker tone than usual. Please accept as penance this photo from amateur bibliotherapist Sarah Caroline, who managed to snag this particularly good haul of books for free from the sidewalk.
2020 has been, among many other things, a unique time for understanding workers’ rights. The concept of an “essential worker” has become common parlance despite the lack of resources dedicated to ensuring worker safety and racial disparities that mean POC disproportionately face COVID-19 infections while working. Food media has functioned as a microcosm for a crash course in contract disputes and equitable pay. Unions representing employees from museums, magazines, and more have taken collective bargaining to Twitter. Truck drivers and warehouse employees were fired in April for trying to unionize; other industries, despite working conditions, still resist organizing.
The internet has changed the arena of these disputes, but the disputes themselves are not new. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the gripping and devastating book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore, which chronicles the lives and legacies of young women who were poisoned by their work with radium paint in the early 20th century.
Despite knowing the dangers of radium for many years, companies continued to hire teenage girls for coveted “studio” jobs—which sounded more glamorous than factory jobs—where they would paint watch dials all day with paint made from radium. Moore explains in painstaking detail how workers were instructed to get their paintbrushes to a thin point for detailed work by licking the brush tips. All day long. Covered in RADIOACTIVE PAINT.
Of course, the workers themselves didn’t realize the danger that radium posed. instead, Moore notes that workers had what was considered “the elite job for poor working girls,” which paid more and came with a certain prestige in the community:
Radium’s luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the "ghost girls" — because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plant so they’d shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock their suitors dead.
One of the many contemporary parallels to Radium Girls is this sense of glamor that comes with certain jobs. This year, employees in purportedly glamorous roles have come forward to report racist and inequitable workplaces. The once-vaulted tech industry, in particular, has inspired a slew of memoirs like Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener (a NYT Best Seller) and Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu that act as labor parables about the industry’s pervasive toxicity. For those working remotely during the pandemic, it has become increasingly difficult to separate work and home; as a result, it can feel a lot like job titles are inextricable from personhood. Radium Girls is a painful reminder of how corporations can manufacture that sense of identity in order to retain the loyalty of employees.
The hardships of the radium girls transformed workers’ safety conditions in the US, but the themes of their struggle—encountering systems that put profits before people—are still very much intact. Unions and labor movements have been positioned as “special interest groups” in recent years, resulting in the US public’s increasingly alienated relationship with labor history. Capitalism and white supremacy continue to undergird the workplace and labor history itself. Grievances about workplace safety are chronicled regularly at some of the most powerful companies in the world, which have renewed urgency and meaning during a pandemic.
When I first read the chilling NPR review for Radium Girls a few years ago, I couldn’t shake its descriptions of these luminescent girls working towards their own deaths. The review already felt prescient in pointing out how many problems faced by the radium girls are still faced by workers today, including “adequate health care, adequate compensation, and—crucially—effective worker protections through a legal system designed to favor corporations.” The review doesn’t mince words, and neither does this book. “Radium killed these young women, but Moore leaves no room for misunderstanding: The companies murdered them.”
Reading Radium Girls in 2020 isn’t intended as a panacea for these problems, but it might help connect the dots between contemporary workplace struggles and this country’s long and fraught labor history. I should note that the book includes graphic descriptions of bodily harm and disease faced by the radium girls; my copy actually had photographs of injuries included. I read the book a few years ago, but I still think about it almost daily. You can read an excerpt of the book here and a condensed history of the book here (this one includes graphic photos).
If you’re on the hunt for another book, Narrative Muse’s recommendation engine will connect you with books/movies/TV by and about women/nb/intersectional voices; the August edition of Vulture’s Read Like the Wind newsletter has been released; and, in honor of August being Women In Translation month, Books Are Magic is regularly featuring and reviewing their favorite works by women that have been translated into English.
Okay, I’ve said enough. Bye!