Running a bookshop in 21st century America is a fool’s errand: it revolves around tech that is 2,500 years old, and “growth” is when the collection spills onto the floor. But Quixotic though this business may be, it has something no venture capital unicorn ever will: the humble, unhurried power that gives life meaning.
We need sites of real, physical serendipity, because we are embodied creatures. We need service that goes both ways, because hospitality is a reflex. We need operations for which speed isn’t mandatory and profit isn’t everything, because time is a far field and space is a smile in the mind’s eye.
This dispatch rooted in daily life at a bookshop in Fort Collins, CO. Lots of what transpires here will be drawn from and inspired by the Reader in Residence, a one-of-a-kind program in which community members spend a month reading books in public, as a creative act. “Reading is art” exists at the crossroads of private life, public space, mental diversity, and the democratic power of literature.