Happy International Asexuality Day to those who celebrate (i.e., 50 percent of of people in heterosexual marriages (measured at or after four years)).
Below are some highlighted books from Books & Books, an independent bookstore that started in Coral Gables, Florida in 1982 and now has five locations around Miami.
In the window, Black Queer Dance:
(There were no Black customers or workers in the store when I visited. On March 31, the book was ranked #4,783,207 in sales among all books by Amazon.)
The front door:
(All of these “banned” books could be purchased within the store or checked out for free at the nearby Coral Gables branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library.)
A book about slavery that ended in 1865 is featured in a part of the country that wasn’t settled until 1891 (Coral Gables was incorporated in 1925; Miami in 1896):
Books to teach children about the miracle of open borders:
Coral Gable residents favored closing U.S. borders in 2024 by voting in a narrow majority for Donald Trump.
A book deploring climate change and wealth inequality:
A house right at sea level on the water in Coral Gables will cost $10-20 million. How many of those folks would like to see everyone’s wealth equalized so that we all live in 2BR apartments? Some additional private poolside reading:
Here’s a 4400-square-foot $8.5 million apartment one block away from the bookstore in which a person can read about the horrors inflicted by the privileged and the propertied:
More about Blackness in a store free of Blacks:
If the Black-White conflict isn’t large enough…
Since transwomen are women I can’t know if there were any in the store when I visited. None of the people getting in and out of the passenger seats of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, G-Wagens (“the new Corolla”), and similar cars were uttering feminist slogans or wearing T-shirts like this one from Target:
During my brief visit, nobody in the store either browsed or purchased any book like the above. A book featured in the window ranked #4,783,207 at Amazon and I don’t think that customers in Coral Gables are either more Black or more Queer than Amazon customers overall. The function of these displays, therefore, has to be something other than motivating people to buy the displayed books. What is the commercial function, then? Customers of independent bookstores like to think of themselves as part of the #Resistance during visits whose primary purpose is getting a sandwich and coffee or maybe a cookbook for their never-used dream kitchen?
Our Raytheon overlords in Coral Gables are doing well with our government military spending.
Thanks, lion, but as far as I know Coral Gables doesn’t have any military bases or military contractors. You’re saying that some Raytheon execs have gone to the Biltmore to play golf?
It might have been Intellisat. There was a job listing long ago which said “not remote” in Coral Gables which in the lion industry usually means defense contract.
May be they are appealing/Serving to their clientele.
Anon: Of course they are, but how? They are displaying books that don’t sell at Amazon and plainly have little possibility of selling in Coral Gables. Why does it appeal to customers to see books that they will never buy?
@phil Their clientele may not buy these books, but they like the appearance and display of these on the shelves. They might think, they are supporting these causes by buying other books from these stores.
Anon: That’s a great theory. It’s even cheaper than easier than being an “ally” for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ (not for the homeless, for example, because that might require donating money to build housing). One can be virtuous simply by walking into a store with “Black Queer Dance” in the window. One can #Resist patriarchy and Donald Trump by buying a book on interior decoration from a bookstore with anti-patriarchy and anti-Trump books displayed prominent. One can contribute to river-to-the-sea liberation by getting a book about Taylor Swift in a shop that prominently displays “Palestine: A Socialist Introduction”.
Indie bookshops purchase their inventory from one of two main distributors which specialize in indie titles. Then there are a few more specialty distributors for indie kids books and graphic novels. These distributors provide a quarterly “frontlist” of titles to stock for that season as well as genre/trend suggestions. The business is more sales driven than people might imagine. That is, the publishers/distributors are pushing the books to the shops, not the shops carefully selecting the titles. The shops are usually just an absentee owner with a staff of minimum wage workers.
Is it true for Barnes and Noble too? Last time I visited (and bought books, mostly STEM) it had annotated Main Kampf on the shelves. Which I did not particularly like, but freedom of speech is freedom of speech. What distributor pushes that?
Then it started aggressively push nonsense books, starting with Michelle O and it went downhill from there. I still visit the stores sometimes though, not as often.
WM: I would believe you if not for the prominent display of Black Queer Dance, roughly 5 millionth in sales at Amazon. I don’t doubt that seeing Black Queer Dance motivates customers to open their wallets, but what is the mechanism? They’re not opening their wallets to buy Black Queer Dance.
@perplexed, no. Barnes and Noble acts as its own distributor. The publishers and wholesalers sell to B&N corporate. The shops then order from B&N’s own stock pool. Oddly enough, Barnes and Noble store managers have a lot of freedom to select what they think will work in their store. Thus, there is more variety between B&N stores than there is between generic indie bookstores like Books & Books. In my metro there are 10 Barnes and Nobles and they are quite different in terms of what they stock and how the merchandise is arranged. The three indie bookshops closest to me are all nearly identical despite having different owners.