This is what a prop­erly func­tion­ing just-in-time inven­tory sys­tem for books looks
like. Elliott Bay Books in Seat­tle, not so far away really.
Photo by sea turtle/Creative Commons.

My career as a book­seller really began in the late 1990s, when I dreamed up a scheme for get­ting New Star’s books into a few stores, a scheme that I called Plan A. My People’s Co-op con­nec­tion was the key here. Plan A would never have hap­pened, had store man­ager Ray Viaud not accom­mo­dated my pro­posal back in 1997. Plan A saved New Star Books when our dis­trib­u­tor failed in 2002, and the rest of the Cana­dian pub­lish­ing indus­try was decid­ing to go all-in with Indigo-Chapters.

To recap, the prob­lem I was grap­pling with as New Star’s pub­lisher was the shrink­ing space for our books — in spite of the sup­pos­edly bur­geon­ing retail book trade. The People’s Co-op was typ­i­cal, in that New Star’s sales of $1K to $2K per year there had fallen to less than $300. The stan­dard nar­ra­tive was that us small pub­lish­ers had lost touch with the mar­ket. Our books were being ordered in 1’s and 2’s and 3’s instead of the for­mer 5’s and 10’s, because that’s what the “mar­ket” was dic­tat­ing. Don’t worry, our reps, and the book­store buy­ers, reas­sured us; “just in time” inven­tory man­age­ment tech­niques would see to it that books for which there was demand would be stocked.

But that promise was not kept. Most of the time, those 1’s and 2’s and 3’s would not be re-ordered when they sold, sim­ply because they fell under the bookseller’s radar. A book that was ini­tially ordered in quan­ti­ties of less than 5 had already been judged as not likely to sell in the quan­ti­ties required by the book­seller. The soft­ware tools they were increas­ingly reliant on were not trained to spot poten­tial steady-sellers, they were look­ing for bestsell­ers. Worse, our books, which since the early 1990s were avail­able through main­stream dis­trib­u­tors, were also being returned pre­ma­turely to those dis­trib­u­tors to free up the bookseller’s credit: the tech­nique of “churn­ing” that I described in this post.

There is a fun­da­men­tal truth about book buy­ers that has been stead­fastly ignored by the archi­tects of this re-engineering of the book trade. It is the fact that, as sur­vey after sur­vey and study after study has shown, some­where between two thirds and three quar­ters of all book pur­chases are what they call “impulse pur­chases”. That is, the vast major­ity of books are pur­chased by peo­ple who had no inten­tion of buy­ing that par­tic­u­lar book that day. Maybe they had heard some­thing about it, maybe the cover caught their eye, maybe the book­seller hand­sold it to them: in any case, the book was pur­chased only because of its pres­ence in the bookstore.

Let me under­line the impor­tance of the “impulse pur­chase”. The most valu­able bit of real estate in any retail estab­lish­ment is the cash desk. Shop­keep­ers will clut­ter that space with dis­plays of inex­pen­sive, but high-margin, items that shop­pers will pick up on impulse as they pay for their pur­chases. Retail­ers who demand pay for dis­play (gro­cery stores, and the stores mod­elled on them: e.g., chain book­stores) often won’t rent this space out at all, but reserve it for themselves.

The con­cept of “just in time” inven­tory is based on the premise that a cus­tomer enter­ing the book­store has a shop­ping list, lay­ered with the belief that they will ask the book­seller to spe­cial order a title they can­not find. This sup­pos­edly amounted to pretty much the same as hav­ing stocked the book all along. Mean­while, the store’s valu­able real estate could be devoted to the “big” books from the “big” pub­lish­ers because, well, that’s what was going to be dri­ving their sales, and their prof­itabil­ity, here in the New Economy.

In my head I heard what was being said, but in my guts I knew it was nuts. “Just in time” was never in time. Con­sumers would not be rewiring their behav­iour to con­form with some com­merce professor’s self-serving the­ory about proper behav­iour in a cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket­place. Book buy­ers, never the most tractable of con­sumers, con­tin­ued to behave the way they had always done. Some­times they special-ordered a book, sure. (More and more, that “spe­cial order” was a book that would have been on the shelf under the old regime.) But most of the time, at least two times out of three any­way, they lim­ited their pur­chases, includ­ing their unplanned pur­chases, to what was avail­able in the store that day. And if what had been cho­sen for them didn’t appeal, they just left it. This “com­mand econ­omy” in books, which looks more like the way the Soviet Union did busi­ness than it resem­bles any the­o­ret­i­cal model of free-market cap­i­tal­ism, is as prob­a­bly the biggest dri­ver of the returns bloom that has seen return rates rock­eted from 10 to 15 per­cent on the eve of the giant chains, to the present-day 30 per­cent or more which is con­sid­ered “nor­mal” and work­able by main­stream publishers.

What if, I thought, New Star was able to replen­ish that ini­tial order for 1 or 2 of our books when they sold? So I asked our man­ager Ray at the store if I could run a lit­tle exper­i­ment. He was quite agree­able (an act of gen­eros­ity I did not fully com­pre­hend until I learned, years later, how dif­fi­cult con­tem­po­rary book­store sys­tems make this sort of behav­iour). Start­ing in 1997, the People’s Co-op stopped order­ing our books through what­ever big Toronto-based dis­trib­u­tor they were get­ting our books from, and allowed us to sup­ply directly, mon­i­tor stock lev­els, and replen­ish as necessary.

The effect was instan­ta­neous. Sales did not dou­ble, and they did not triple. They quadru­pled. Not over an extended period of time, either: overnight. One year after we imple­mented Plan A, our sales at the People’s Co-op had gone from less than $300 in the pre­vi­ous year, right back up to $1,500 — the same level it had been at, before all this crazy ratio­nal­iza­tion gripped the trade.

If a book sold, we replaced it. If the replace­ment book sold, we replaced that. If a book sold steadily, we made sure that we were never out of that title: “just-in-time” inven­tory in actu­al­ity. In let­ting New Star try Plan A, Ray not only pro­vided some much-needed vin­di­ca­tion for my unortho­dox views; he inad­ver­tently saved the press. Because thanks to the People’s Co-op exam­ple I was able to point to, I was able to per­suade fif­teen or six­teen other book­sellers over the next decade or so, to sign on with New Star’s Plan A. For a time around the col­lapse of our dis­trib­u­tor, Gen­eral Dis­tri­b­u­tion Ser­vices, the cash flow from our Plan A stores made it pos­si­ble for New Star to con­tinue. At its peak, Plan A was bring­ing in around 20 per­cent of our sales to the inde­pen­dent sec­tor — an aston­ish­ing fig­ure; remem­ber that Plan A was never more than 15 or 16 stores at any time. Over the ten years of its exis­tence, Plan A sold prob­a­bly 4,000 to 6,000 books that would oth­er­wise not have been bought, because they would not have been avail­able for purchase.

Plan A went too much against the grain of the book trade, how­ever; and a few years ago I was obliged to wrap it up. I’ll delve into Plan A, and the rea­sons for its demise, in the next post in this series. But in the mean­time, Plan A, and the People’s Co-op Book­store, and the store’s man­ager, Ray Viaud, saved New Star Books.

After Desire, the new book of poems by George Stan­ley, is now avail­able and being shipped to the last remain­ing book­stores car­ry­ing this sort of thing. It is the San Francisco-born Stanley’s eighth book and his first since Van­cou­ver: A Poem (a final­ist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize) came out in 2008.

After Desire con­sists of four parts. Some of the pieces in the first sec­tion, ‘After Desire,’ appeared in an issue of the Capi­lano Review devoted to Stanley’s work. Two other suites of poems, ‘2005–2011′ and ‘Open Space,’ fea­ture work that has been writ­ten since, or dur­ing the period when Stan­ley was writ­ing Van­cou­ver: A Poem. ‘Open Space’ includes ‘West Broad­way,’ appar­ently the first sec­tion of a longer, Van­cou­ver: A Poem–style work on Stanley’s Kit­si­lano neigh­bour­hood. And one sec­tion of After Desire, ‘1971,’ presents three poems writ­ten not long after Stan­ley moved to Van­cou­ver that were then lost for forty years.

There will be two oppor­tu­ni­ties to hear George Stan­ley read this month. On Tues­day, May 21, at 7:30 pm at the People’s Co-op Book­store, Stan­ley will be read­ing with Phil Hall, whose book Killdeer (pub­lished by Book­Thug) won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry last year.

The launch for After Desire will be Fri­day, May 31 at the Com­mer­cial Street Cafe. The launch gets under­way at 8 pm; admis­sion is free.

The cover of After Desire fea­tures a paint­ing by Van­cou­ver artist Mina Totino called Plink, and was designed by Mark Mushet.

Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury, Rolf Knight’s vivid and thought­ful mem­oir of his life as an inde­pen­dent social­ist scholar and writer, is pub­lished this month by New Star Books. Knight has writ­ten some of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial his­tory books about British Colum­bia, includ­ing A Very Ordi­nary Life and Indi­ans at Work.

Writ­ten with the same verve and acu­men that Knight brought to his ouevre of works about BC’s working-class his­tory, Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury is described by Mark Leier as “a fas­ci­nat­ing account of a van­ish­ing world … informed by a deep, per­sonal appre­ci­a­tion of work­ers and a smart, pugna­cious dis­gust for cap­i­tal­ism and its apologists.”

Born while his par­ents worked at a remote coastal log­ging camp, Knight was raised in working-class East Van­cou­ver, a period doc­u­mented in A Very Ordi­nary Life and Along the No. 20 Line. A bright stu­dent, he stud­ied at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia and went on to obtain a PhD in Anthro­pol­ogy from Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, train­ing that is put to good use in his obser­va­tions of the peo­ple and the com­mu­ni­ties he encoun­tered in Africa, South Amer­ica, North­ern Que­bec, post-war Berlin, 1950s New York, and 1970s Cana­dian academia.

An ear­lier ver­sion of Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury was pri­vately printed and cir­cu­lated among Knight’s friends twenty years ago, and copies have been avidly sought ever since. Knight was rec­og­nized in 1992 by the Cana­dian His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion with a Clio Award for his life­time con­tri­bu­tion to regional his­tory. He lives in Burn­aby, BC.

Lisa Robert­son, whose first three books are avail­able from New Star, is a fea­tured blog­ger on Har­riet, the Poetry Mag­a­zine blog, this month. Thomas Bern­hard and adverbs; Rousseau, Bunting, Goethe, Williams, and plant tax­on­omy, are some of the sub­jects she’s writ­ten on so far.

Robert­son, who lives in France, lived in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s. Her books XEclogue (1993; reis­sued 1999), Deb­bie: An Epic (1997), and The Weather (2001) were pub­lished by New Star.

Other Har­riet blog­gers include Vanessa Place, K. Silem Mohamed, Alan Davies, Jen Hofer, Bill Berk­son, and David Meltzer.

A cou­ple of years ago, New Star pub­lished Sweet Eng­land, the third novel by Steve Weiner. Steve’s pre­vi­ous books, The Museum of Love and The Yel­low Sailor, had been pub­lished by some of “the big boys” (Blooms­bury; Overlook).

The Museum of Love was gen­er­ally well reviewed, and — remark­able for a debut novel — was a final­ist for the very first Giller Prize back in 1994 (juried by Alice Munro, Morde­cai Rich­ler, and David Staines). Pre­sum­ably because of its treat­ment of homo­eroti­cism, it was widely and respect­fully reviewed in gay pub­li­ca­tions. The title of The Museum of Love sug­gests some kind of vacation-friendly rom­com, but the novel is in fact a dark hal­lu­ci­na­tion, and any reader pick­ing it up on the implied promise of the title and the Giller endorse­ment was surely headed for baf­fle­ment, or pos­si­bly enlightenment.

The Yel­low Sailor was, if any­thing, even stranger than The Museum of Love. The back­ground for its nar­ra­tive arc — a young, unformed man try­ing to gain his bear­ings in a soci­ety that is bewil­der­ing to him — is Ger­many, in the debris of the First World War. No Giller nom­i­na­tion this time; and no groundswell of inter­est in the gay press, the homo­erotic themes in this one being more muted / con­strained / marginal.

Com­mer­cially, nei­ther book made much of an impact. The print edi­tions are unavail­able (though Blooms­bury has reis­sued The Museum of Love as an e-book).  I’m a lit­tle embar­rased to admit that I bought my copies of both books off remain­der tables. At least I bought mul­ti­ple copies. I had no choice with The Yel­low Sailor: I never saw a copy until it made its debut on the remain­der table. Most book­stores (no doubt after con­sult­ing their Book­Man­ager or Word­Stock for Museum of Love sales) never ordered it in the first place.

The reviews of both books tended towards baf­fle­ment, as if the reviewer felt obliged by the publisher’s imprint or the Giller nom­i­na­tion to notice the book, but at the same time to not fail to notice that The Museum of Love and The Yel­low Sailor both fell well out­side of the bounds of con­tem­po­rary main­stream lit­er­ary fiction.

You are begin­ning to see why New Star Books was cho­sen to con­tinue the work begun by Blooms­bury and the Over­look Press. It wasn’t the reviews that counted against Steve Weiner when it came time to find a pub­lisher for his third novel; it was the sales figures.

Sweet Eng­land is unam­bigu­ously a work of art. Steve Weiner is using lit­er­ary devices — nar­ra­tive, descrip­tion — in the ser­vice of reveal­ing some­thing about our­selves, and about the anthill we have derived for our liv­ing, that can­not be cap­tured using more straight­for­ward tech­niques of expos­i­tory prose. He relies upon the same semi– and un-conscious effects that poets work with. It also incor­po­rated a sub­tle polit­i­cal under­tone, pos­si­bly not even inten­tional, as the reader can’t help rec­og­nize Weiner’s Lon­don as a city shaped by neoliberalism.

Tech­ni­cally, Sweet Eng­land is a tour de force, a 150-page seam­less nar­ra­tive with­out any breaks (“He awoke the next morn­ing feel­ing .. .”), even though the action appears to take place over a few days. And, despite the fre­quent typos in his man­u­script (Weiner has to fight through arthri­tis to get to the key­board), the novel was as pol­ished as any­thing we’ve seen here.

It was obvi­ous to our read­ers that Steve Weiner was not so much a nov­el­ist, as an artist whose medium was lit­er­a­ture, and that he is work­ing in a tra­di­tion whose prac­ti­tion­ers were peo­ple like Beck­ett, Angela Carter,  David Mark­son, and (one of Weiner’s acknowl­edged influ­ences) Ben Okri. Weiner’s influ­ences are as likely to be film­mak­ers (Broth­ers Quay, who pro­vided the Sweet Eng­land cover; Jan Svankma­jer) as writ­ers. One reviewer com­pared Weiner to Todd Haynes.

New Star did not sell Sweet Eng­land effec­tively into the inde­pen­dent sec­tor of the book trade. Our sales reps at the Lit­er­ary Press Group did bet­ter with Indigo-Chapters, obtain­ing a pretty decent ini­tial order — respect­ful num­bers that expressed con­fi­dence in Sweet Eng­land as a solid lit­er­ary title but not nec­es­sar­ily one that was going to be a best­seller. With the reviews and pub­lic­ity in hand, we could con­fi­dently point towards their stores to sat­isfy con­sumer demand. And — one fine fea­ture of chain book­selling — if a book starts to sell, the com­put­ers will notice, and order more books.

This did not hap­pen. New Star, with its admit­tedly lim­ited pub­lic­ity resources, was not able to bring Sweet Eng­land to the atten­tion of the review­ers, blog­gers, prize jurors, &c. that leads to read­ers. Amaz­ingly, we are aware of but a sin­gle review of Sweet Eng­land, in the Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion (pay­walled; but there seems to be a copy here).

Not that it should mat­ter, but Steve him­self was born with­out the self-promotion gene, isn’t on Twit­ter or Tum­blr or Face­book or even MyPage, he doesn’t hang around a cir­cle of writ­ers who review each other’s books, he’s not one for the read­ing cir­cuit (though he is a trooper, and I expect he’d do his best if he ever was invited to one of the pro­lif­er­at­ing writ­ers’ fes­ti­vals). He’s just an artist, sit­ting at his work­bench, painstak­ingly mak­ing his art.

Did we get this wrong? Have we wasted our time, wasted Steve’s time, wasted the taxpayer’s latte, on Sweet Eng­land? Here’s your chance to make up your own mind, at absolutely no cost or risk to your­self — we’ll send you a free copy, just for asking.

Through­out 2011 and 2012, we received returns of Sweet Eng­land from Indigo-Chapters. These returns include numer­ous copies that are not, strictly speak­ing, in “resal­able” con­di­tion: they show obvi­ous signs of shelfwear and/or poor pack­ing for jour­ney back to the publisher’s ware­house. We’ll send you one of those, absolutely gratis. Send us your name and address, and we’ll send you a free copy of an excel­lent, under­noticed, under­ap­pre­ci­ated work of art, at no charge, and with no obligation.

All you have to do is send us an e-mail at info@NewStarBooks.com with your mail­ing address, and we’ll send you a copy of Sweet Eng­land by Steve Weiner. Sorry, offer good only in USA and Canada.

A brief moment in time, it turns out: the Book Ware­house in Yale­town.
Photo by Jor­dan Dawe.

My pre­vi­ous digres­sion in this series con­cerned the intro­duc­tion of “ratio­nal” dis­tri­b­u­tion and retail prac­tices to the book trade, and the resul­tant growth of book­store chains through­out the 1980s and 1990s. These changes increased the shelf space given over to books, but it also rad­i­cally changed the rules of com­pe­ti­tion for access to that shelf space. This marked a dynas­tic shift tak­ing place in North Amer­i­can busi­ness, as man­u­fac­tur­ing lost its lead­ing role and was sup­planted by finance. The “big iron” that used to call the shots — Detroit, US Steel, &c. — was pushed aside, as Citibank et al. took control.

North America’s post-war sub­ur­ban build­ing boom, and higher uni­ver­sity and col­lege enrol­ment dri­ven by gov­ern­ment pro­grams, had done much to increase the num­ber of book­shops through­out North Amer­ica. The chain store boom that began in the 1970s brought on another surge of growth in the mar­ket­place, and the large-format stores that appeared at the end of the 1980s cre­ated what seemed like a glut of shelf space. But the glut was illu­sory, con­sist­ing largely of miles and miles of dis­play shelves that were effec­tively cloned copies of the same much smaller stretch of shelves; and access to that dis­play space for books was now cen­trally con­trolled from the upper right­hand cor­ner of the con­ti­nent. Mean­while, the peo­ple decid­ing which prod­uct went onto those shelves tended more and more to believe they were deal­ing with gro­ceries — the back­ground, indeed, of many of the new execs now run­ning the big book retailers

The ratio­nal­iza­tion tak­ing place within the book trade put enor­mous pres­sure on inde­pen­dent presses to turn their dis­tri­b­u­tion over to cen­tral­ized book dis­tri­b­u­tion ware­houses. The num­ber of books in print had in the mean­time swelled to over a mil­lion, while a typ­i­cal book­store had room for some­where between 5,000 and 35,000 titles (for a Duthie class store). Book­sellers couldn’t be expected to main­tain hun­dreds of sep­a­rate accounts with all their publisher-suppliers. The mid­dle­men dis­trib­u­tors and whole­salers would be able to offer effi­cien­cies to both ends — book­sellers, pub­lish­ers — and the abil­ity to order New Star’s books from the same ware­house that car­ried the offer­ings of the big­ger pub­lish­ers was going to be mutu­ally advan­ta­geous. The buzz phrase of the day was “just in time” inventory.

One of the unan­tic­i­pated con­se­quences of this arrange­ment is a phe­nom­e­non of “churn­ing” stock. The book­seller needs to get in some copies of The Book Everybody’s Talk­ing About. But they’re at their credit limit with the dis­trib­u­tor, and there’s no cash lying around. Solu­tion: round up a bunch of books sup­plied by the same dis­trib­u­tor, and return those books to free up the credit you need. Book­Man­ager, the locally devel­oped soft­ware pro­gram used by about 250 Cana­dian inde­pen­dents to man­age their inven­tory, even has an impres­sive set of tools designed for this purpose.

It sounds like I’m talk­ing about inde­pen­dent book­sellers here. But the techique was pio­neered by the chains, who used returns to, nom­i­nally, keep within the terms of sale they had agreed to (though in prac­tice, these are changed to their spec­i­fi­ca­tions when­ever the old terms prove incon­ve­nient). Inde­pen­dents who ramped up their returns were merely fol­low­ing the trail blazed for them by their big broth­ers — another instance of “Money see, money do.”

This sig­naled a sig­nif­i­cant change in the way the book­stores oper­ated. For the first time, books began to be returned to their sup­plier, not because they had failed to sell in a rea­son­able period of time (about a year), but because they hap­pened to be shipped by a dis­trib­u­tor with some­thing poten­tially more lucra­tive in the ware­house. While the prac­tices of the big chains have dri­ven the returns boom, inde­pen­dents adopted the same big-box prac­tices, and return rates from inde­pen­dents have been every bit as high if not even higher.

The his­tor­i­cally high rate of returns we enjoy today are a phe­nom­e­non of mod­ern book retail prac­tices — which have been largely dri­ven by changes in dis­tri­b­u­tion prac­tices, not by  con­sumer pref­er­ences — and are an arte­fact of the mod­ern sup­ply chain. But returns are not some­thing books do; they are some­thing booksell­ers do. Today’s extrav­a­gant return rates are not a sign that acqui­si­tions edi­tors, book­sellers, or read­ers are stu­pider than ever.

One phe­nom­e­non of this post-1980s com­mand econ­omy that char­ac­ter­ized the book trade is the remain­der mar­ket and stores like Book Ware­house, which flour­ished dur­ing this era. This sec­tor of the mar­ket depended on the over-production of skids of this year’s $40 best­sellers for their avail­abil­ity next year at $6.99 while the paper­back sells for $10.99, or $19. (It is the remain­dera­mas of the world that are now being imper­illed by e-books, which so far are mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant inroads only in this sec­tor of the trade. E-books may not end up doing as much dam­age to the book trade as claimed, but they were surely a fac­tor in the demise of the Book Ware­house remain­der chain.)

The decline in ini­tial orders for new books, com­bined with the greater propen­sity on the part of book­sellers to return sooner and in greater quan­ti­ties, as they in turn expe­ri­ence the pres­sures of “ratio­nal­iza­tion”, was by the mid­dle of the 1990s pos­ing a threat to New Star’s exis­tence. Book­sellers that in 1980 had read­ily taken 10 or 15 or 20 copies of a new New Star title more or less on spec, and return­ing no more than 10 or 15 per­cent of them, were by the end of the decade tak­ing 1, 2, or 3 copies, and return­ing upwards of 30 per­cent or more for credit after a few months.

This was not just facil­i­tated but fueled by cen­tral­ized book dis­tri­b­u­tion. Even stores that thought of them­selves as sup­port­ing small presses were exhibit­ing these symp­toms. The People’s Co-op, which used to sell $1K to $2K a year’s worth of New Star titles in a year, installed Book­Man­ager in the late 1980s, and adopted the prac­tices built into that soft­ware. By 1997, New Star’s sales through the People’s Co-op, employ­ing the lat­est in inven­tory man­age­ment tech­niques, had fallen to under $300 a year.

My response to all this was Plan A, a con­sign­ment pro­gram that saved the press a few years later when our trade dis­trib­u­tor lost the Man­date of Finance, and was put out of busi­ness in 2001.

The roar­ing tur­bines go silent for a while at New Star world head­quar­ters dur­ing the sec­ond half of April, as we take a bit of a break and recharge before gear­ing up for the rest of 2013.

Although we won’t be here to serve your every need, we’ll be check­ing phone and e-mail mes­sages almost every day for fresh emer­gen­cies. And the book trade can con­tinue to obtain New Star titles from our Cana­dian trade dis­trib­u­tor, Lit­DistCo.

Stay tuned for announce­ments in early May about our Fall 2013 list of new titles.

McNally Robin­son Book­sellers on Grant Avenue in Win­nipeg is the host site for the offi­cial Win­nipeg launch of Indi­gena Awry, the first book of poetry from Annharte in almost a decade. The launch takes place on Mon­day, April 22, in the Travel Alcove — the per­fect loca­tion for a First Nations writer liv­ing in Winnipeg.

Orig­i­nally from Lit­tle Saskatchewan First Nation in cen­tral Man­i­toba, Annharte a/k/a Marie Baker lived for a num­ber of years in Van­cou­ver, before return­ing to Man­i­toba to set­tle in Win­nipeg. Writer, edu­ca­tor, per­for­mance artist, granny, stu­dent, she is the author of Being on the Moon (1990), Coy­ote Colum­bus Cafe (1995), Exer­cises in Lip Point­ing (2003), and a book of essays, AKA, forth­com­ing from Capi­lano Uni­ver­sity Edi­tions.

Admis­sion to Annharte’s McNally Robin­son launch is free. The event gets under­way at 7:30. Here’s a link to more info about the launch on McNally Robinson’s own site. Many thanks to McNR for organizing!

Gabri­ola Island res­i­dent Roger Farr’s IKMQ has been named as a final­ist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize, awarded annu­ally to a dis­tin­guished book of poetry by a BC writer. Win­ners will be announced on May 4 at the annual BC Book Prizes awards din­ner, hosted by British Columbia’s Lieutenant-Governor Judith Gui­chon at Gov­ern­ment House in Victoria.

This is Farr’s first appear­ance as a final­ist for a BC Book Prize. IKMQ, which con­sists of 64 brief prose pas­sages that fol­low the exploits of four “char­ac­ters” — the let­ters I, K, M, and Q — through a series of lan­guage sce­nar­ios. It is Farr’s third book of poetry, fol­low­ing Sur­plus (2006) and Means (2013). It is extremely grat­i­fy­ing to see all that hard work and excel­lence finally pay off for Roger.

Slightly dis­ap­point­ing is Farr’s omis­sion from the BC Book Prizes Tour (par­tic­i­pants are cho­sen by draw), as we had visions of him read­ing from selec­tions like “P.O.V.” and “Fine Bub­ble Hash” to a Grade 6 class in Ter­race. More seri­ously, it is encour­ag­ing that there is room in the BC Book Prizes for work such as IKMQ, which chal­lenges con­ven­tional views of poetry in terms both of form as well as con­tent / sub­ject matter.

IKMQ is avail­able from lead­ing inde­pen­dent book­sellers, Indigo-Chapters, Ama­zon dot com as well as ca, and from our own web­site.

Before we get to why win­ning the lot­tery set the People’s Co-op Book­store back by a gen­er­a­tion or so, let’s take moment to con­sider what’s hap­pened in the book trade since those golden days of Expo 86.

Publishing’s image as a sleepy back­wa­ter, which was never really accu­rate — the old­est cor­po­ra­tion in the world started as and still is a printer-publisher — can prob­a­bly be attrib­uted to the fact that, from one per­spec­tive any­way, the book trade circa 1980 was a sleepy back­wa­ter. That per­spec­tive was that of the finance sec­tor: banks, the peo­ple who loan money to cor­po­ra­tions to use as work­ing cap­i­tal. Our his­tor­i­cally low rates of profit repelled their inter­est, so to speak. Until, one day, those inex­orably falling rates of profit, or ris­ing prices of crude oil, or what­ever, finally caused them to turn their atten­tion to us.

That’s when we saw the “boom” in book­store chains and big-box retail­ers. Those exam­ples of hyper­trophic growth were not fueled by any prof­its or suc­cess gen­er­ated within the book­trade itself. Instead, they reflected a hunger to extract more trib­ute from our sec­tor of the econ­omy. The money invested by finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the cre­ation and growth of the book chains rep­re­sented a gam­ble albeit a low-risk one, and the money being ven­tured was not any of ours, at least not in the sense that we might ben­e­fit from its invest­ment. B. Dal­ton and Walden­books, Coles, W.H. Smith, Clas­sic Book­shops: these were by and large not actu­ally suc­cess­ful busi­nesses in the ordi­nary sense. Each and every one of them was an expres­sion of a capitalist-utopian vision in which pools of finance cap­i­tal dom­i­nated the world of man­u­fac­tur­ing, labour, &c.

The result was the reshap­ing of the retail book­selling envi­ron­ment, even­tu­ally into what we have today. Small, single-proprietor book­shops, which for a few cen­turies had been the back­bone of a book writ­ing and read­ing econ­omy, were being swept away, replaced by highly ratio­nal­ized (though hardly ratio­nal) retail oper­a­tions owned by large cor­po­ra­tions with spoons in many dif­fer­ent pots, ulti­mately con­trolled by some bank or finan­cial fund which had pro­vided the loan cap­i­tal. The new boss was def­i­nitely noth­ing like the old boss.

What that meant in turn for a com­pany like New Star Books — indeed, for a coun­try like Canada, with its nascent and frankly frag­ile pub­lish­ing trade — was a shrink­age, begin­ning in the late 1980s (surely a coin­ci­dence), of the shelf space that was effec­tively avail­able to us, though this was not appar­ent at first. The bur­geon­ing chain store phe­nom­e­non went into over­drive with the 1987 acqui­si­tion of the B. Dal­ton chain by Barnes & Noble; and — money see, money do — in 1992 in Canada, with the takeover of Coles by Clas­sic Book­shops / Smith­Books, which had them­selves merged three years previously.

At first, the con­ti­nent was flooded with mas­sive stores fea­tur­ing kilo­me­tres of shelv­ing, cry­ing out for a blan­ket of books to cover up their naked­ness. This was the era that coined the term “wall­pa­per” for book­store inven­tory: an early clue that these new mas­ters didn’t have a clue.

But for a while, it was a party, as pub­lish­ers of all sizes were flooded with orders to fill those dis­play shelves, and to cover those walls. It was never going to last, and this was start­ing to show by 1997 or so.

New Star, like a lot of smaller presses — Press Gang comes to mind — didn’t “fit in” to the new world of pub­lish­ing and big-box book retail. The kind of books we pub­lished didn’t “work” in this new retail envi­ron­ment. Why didn’t we pub­lish more books like, oh, you know, [what­ever]. Inex­orably, as the chains con­sol­i­dated their stran­gle­hold, and as many inde­pen­dents began copy­ing their meth­ods in an effort to com­pete, we were los­ing access to book­store shelf space, which meant eye­balls, which meant readers.

I wasn’t con­vinced that there was no inter­est in the books we did, and I wasn’t inter­ested in retool­ing the list to pub­lish [what­ever] to appeal to the Chap­ters cat­e­gory buyer. As New Star’s pub­lisher, I had to fig­ure out how to get my books in front of read­ers, or get out of the business.

That’s where the People’s Co-op Book­store came along and saved the day.