Pushing the borders of bookstores

Life can be a drag: long work days, senile professors, receding hairlines, coy women met in… Life can be a drag: long work days, senile professors, receding hairlines, coy women met in bars ’round 1 a.m. who turn out to be less woman than they first appeared æ a real drag. Our economy, the half that’s not devoted to making us miserable, promises to numb us, to distract us, to soothe us and to snuff the life right out of Jiminy Cricket. I thank it for that.

I couldn’t go on without dollar menus, Phantom Planet ring tones or “Adult Swim,” but with so many different kinds of consumers to satisfy, every now and then something that pleases another strikes me as vile.

Every chain bookstore covers its display tables in microwaveable revelations strategically packaged with tropical birds, colorful food, majestic infants or adorable cities. Irritated that these seemingly idiotic authors have managed to get published, I have on occasion opened the cover of such a volume.

Each time, my prayer to discover a way to justify the book’s publication has been denied. I’ve found only clever, condescending, trite, reassuring, seductive words forced upon virgin paper. Almost instantly after opening any such book, I violently snap it shut to silence the paper’s weeping pleas to be burned.

There are fine books in these stores. The stores also offer the opportunity to read expensive, hardcover new releases for the price of an iced tea. They are not the most devastating incarnation of America’s need to annihilate silence and intimacy. That’d be Avril Lavigne.

My reaction to bookstores populated by products aimed at daytime television viewers may be a little extreme, but it comes from a need to defend the other volumes sold at the same locations æ brilliance, passion, effort, the history of human need and achievement bound by ink and resting on paper sleeping on shelves, neglected.

My reaction also comes from a sense of loss. As long as I can remember, every time I’ve walked into a library or bookstore, I’ve gotten this feeling that right around the next shelf I’ll stumble into some book that will answer all my questions or change my life in some transcendental manner.

The feeling’s been muted over the years, but I still feel it kicking against its soundproof white walls every now and then. It’s in tribute to my hope, long ago locked up in an asylum run by my own cynicism, that I resent these chain bookstores pimping the latest distraction to the desperately trendy.

Whatever the result, I don’t think there’s any sinister intent guiding inventory selection. They sell what they think people want to buy, and people buy what they think they’re supposed to, myself included. I was browsing through the government and politics section at the Borders near my workplace, when I came across a volume of Noam Chomsky’s views on anarchy.

Anarchy’s a fascinating topic that I’ve read next to nothing about, so I pulled a copy off the shelf and flipped through it. The editor wrote a nifty introduction, so I checked the publishing company to see what else they’d put out. Turned out it was some company called AK Press. I did a Google search and came up with http://www.akpress.org.

Their Web site introduces the company: “AK Press is a worker run book publisher and distributor – our goal is to make available radical books and other materials – with which you can make a positive change in the world.” The materials AK Press distributes “are less and less available from the corporate publishers, booksellers and Web sites.”

Their Bookmobile program connects small groups intent on protecting ideas and discourse from the omnipresent incubi serving Rupert Murdoch’s Orwellian empire. AK Press provides instructions and discounts for setting up tabling and other methods of independent book, music or magazine distribution.

I was unprepared to find a company dedicated to any principle and surviving to whatever extent in a market that’s so completely saturated by corporations that have no faith in the average American.

Quality music, movies, books and less popular forms of art aren’t likely to reach the public through the same channels that now funnel money to those who don’t need to invest in depth. There’s no simple solution.

While a Web site full of anarchist philosophy and obscure poetry is unlikely to transform the masses, at least AK Press is making sure those radical books and unpopular ideas are available to anyone trying to find them.

E-mail Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu if you’re interested in Bookmobile.