Rare Book Monthly
Articles - November - 2008 Issue
Bookselling in a Red and Blue World
An early anti-war book, said to have been suppressed by the British Empire.
My accountant just moved into a brand new, more expensive location. Will he be able to stay there? And too many retail parking lots around here seem eerily empty and a LOT of stores have drastic sales signs out on the street. I've always enjoyed the mix of small town establishments which seem so different from the suburban areas. Will I have to start buying everything over the 'net, while we're surrounded by a lot of empty storefronts and discount stores full of Chinese junk?
I can hear my husband, Mark, outside pounding. He set himself the task of completely finishing and/or re-building the skin of our warehouse and back yard area. He's lucky. He can take out his political frustrations on the structure. He can fill his mind with things like trying not to fall off the different roof areas. He can see all of his progress clearly in the new shingles, new doors, and new stone surfaces. Boxes moved and boxes shipped are all signs of progress, not to mention the care and feeding of our politically incorrect but paid-for SUV, used sparingly for hauling. My keyboard-pounding is not as purgative.
I don't feel like we're working in a patchwork country; I feel like we're standing at the edge of a precipice. Not just a credit-swap pit, but somewhere on the edge of a house of cards, or precariously near the event horizon of a black hole, sucking in all light, not just red and blue waves.
We have only a little bit of time to do some big things with our physical environment. If you have ever studied Al Gore's climate change map, the coasts get pretty much swallowed up with the rise in the oceans, and that includes Cape Cod. How do we deal with that apocalypse on a day-to-day basis? Climate change is the most democratic of disasters.
What is our role in the degradation of education in the inner city? How can we possibly afford to have generations of children growing up with no learning and no hope?
How can we stop the carnage of Iraq and Afghanistan?
Many years ago, when I was working on a Ph.D. in comparative mediaeval literature, I had similar anxieties. Then I made the (in hindsight wrong) decision to leave the program in favor of a more socially activist life. I found it difficult to study more esoteric literature when so many things were happening, like the movement for Civil Rights, that had deep importance for me. It took decades to finally finish that degree.
This time, despite our very strong feelings about this election, we certainly will not be making any life-defining decisions based on the results. We are determined to push through the election and use our publishing company, our rare books business, and our lives, to reflect the things that mean the most to us.
Our imprint, Clock & Rose Press, revived Scapegoats of the Empire, the Breaker Morant story that took place during the Boer War, an early, moving memoir with a strong anti-war theme that was thought to have been suppressed by the British government or its sympathizers. We have published other controversial books, ranging from the Enron Report to Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes.
