A New Moment for Black Bookstores | Publishers Weekly

A version of this article appeared in the 08/31/2020 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A New Moment for Black Bookstores

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Eugene Holley Jr., writes about jazz and African American culture observes, Four Black booksellers navigate today’s shifting social, political, and economic currents.

From l. to r.: D.L. Mullen, owner, Semicolon in Chicago, Dionne Sims, owner, Black Garnet Books in Minneapolis, VaLinda Miller, owner, Turning Pages Bookshop in Goose Creek, S.C.

The publishing world has had to adapt to a business landscape that is rapidly changing as a result of the pandemic and the response to continuing police violence against unarmed Black people. The 130 Black-owned bookstores in the U.S. have had to deal with these broader challenges, as well as with cultural and economic forces that uniquely affect them.

Marcus Books, one of the country’s best-known and oldest Black bookstores, was cofounded in 1960 in San Francisco by two African American doctors, husband-and-wife team Julian and Raye Richardson. Rising rents forced Marcus Books to close its San Francisco store six years ago, but it moved to Oakland...

Among the books recommended at Semicolon are titles by Octavia Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and N.K. Jemison, as well as Kiley Reeves’s Such a Fun Age and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (which Mullen said did very well), plus “any Afro-futuristic writer.” She added, “Fiction is easier to understand, and something you can build empathy from, as opposed to statistics and numbers. Anti-racism is rooted in empathy—you have to understand the plight before you can support it.” 
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Source: Publishers Weekly