“A good bookshop is like a genteel black hole that knows how to read”*…
Some good news…
Riding strong gains in the second half of the year, bookstore sales increased 28% in 2021 over 2020, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales were $9.03 billion, compared to sales of $6.50 billion in pandemic-ravaged 2020.
The rebound was not quite enough to bring 2021 bookstore sales back to 2019 levels, falling 1% below 2019 sales of $9.13 billion… [but] was higher than the 19.3% increase for the entire retail sector…
Book shops are back: “Bookstore Sales Rose 28% in 2021,” from @PublishersWkly
* Terry Pratchett
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As we browse, we might spare a thought for an author whose works are eminently worth picking up on one’s next bookstore run: social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey); he died on this date in 1895. Born into slavery, he escaped to become a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
He was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens; indeed, some Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great thinker had once been a slave.
Douglass believed in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto “No Union with Slaveholders,” criticized Douglass’s willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
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