Great Literary Twitter Feeds to Follow

I'm on Twitter more and more these days, not tweeting but following the feeds of favorite music venues ("Just announced! Your favorite band playing a show - win tickets!") and library career sites ("New full-time position available not in a city near you!"). I also enjoy reading the random musings and observations that are shared, such as this one from the Toronto Zine Library:

Twitter is actually a pretty excellent medium for keeping up with places like zine libraries and other literature-oriented establishments. I mentioned Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in my last post. I have a soft spot for Housing Works because the proceeds from all sales go toward assisting those living with AIDS.
 

In addition, the bookstore is staffed almost entirely by volunteers. So for the staff there, working at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe - sorting through bags and boxes of donated books, selecting books to sell and shelve, hosting a string of in-store concerts and other events, and preparing food and beverages at the in-store cafe - is a complete labor of love. As if Housing Works Bookstore Cafe couldn't be more awesome, it also has a great Twitter feed.

The Twitter feed of Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is among the "30 Essential Literary Twitter Feeds to Follow," as chosen by Virginia K. Smith at Brooklyn Magazine. The others include Melville House, an independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; Mellow Pages Library, an independently run library and reading room located in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn; Bookslut, a litblog and webzine founded and maintained by Jessa Crispin, who is based in Berlin, Germany; Literary Rejections, a site that shares writers' personal experiences with rejection; and Greenlight Bookstore, an independent bookstore that's in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. And this is just for starters!

Check out all "30 Essential Literary Twitter Feeds to Follow" at THIS LINK.

Reasons to Love Local Bookstores

There are so many reasons to love bookstores, especially independent ones. They provide a warm and inviting atmosphere that welcomes browsing, enabling you to discover great books that you may never have come across otherwise.

Image via seventyone12 on Flickr

Indeed, the "luxury of browsing" is one of the "10 Lovable Things About Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores," according to BuzzFeed. Another is author events, where you can see big names in person for the cost of a book...or oftentimes for free. I've lost count of how many shining stars in the fields of music, literature, photography, stage, and screen that I've seen at local bookstores, including Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Annie Leibovitz, and Alan Cumming.

Bookstores also provide a sense of community. This is especially so with the smaller, more specialized booksellers, such as feminist, LGBT, and activist bookshops. Typically, they cultivate a sense of community by offering in-store volunteer opportunities, meeting space for like-minded people, and events of interest to those who frequent such neighborhood establishments. For a while, I volunteered at a women's bookstore, and I was embraced by a wonderfully diverse and immensely friendly group of people. It was definitely one of the more gratifying experiences in my life.

Image via Project Latte on Flickr

Another alluring aspect of brick-and-mortar bookstores is the cafe. Normally I don't patronize the cafe in bookstores because I'm too busy browsing the shelves (and once I find a book, I buy it and then I'm gone). Although for a brief time, a local bookstore had this hard-to-pass-up special where if you purchased books totaling X amount, you could get lunch from its cafe for free - and I'm talking about a full-sized sandwich, chips (or crisps, if you're in the UK), and a beverage. You better believe I went to the bookstore cafe then! But if you go to almost any area bookstore, you'll find that the cafe is the most popular place in the store.

Browsing, a sense of community, and the cafe are just three of the "10 Lovable Things About Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores." To find out all 10, see the BuzzFeed article HERE. And go to your local bookstore to discover more to add to the list!

The above photos are of Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City.

How a Bookstore Selects the Books It Sells

I think anyone who's ever browsed a bookstore has wondered why certain books were on store shelves and others weren't. As Sam Sacks, a book clerk for Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, explains it in the New Yorker, it all comes down to the personal bias of those who run the bookstore. "Bookstores are human places," Sacks says. "They are extensions of the personalities of the men and women who operate them." What about the customers? A longtime bookseller confided to Sacks: "We do this for the books, not for the customers."

The interior of Housing Works Bookstore Cafe.
Image via e.j.i./flickr

If you've been a customer at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, located at 126 Crosby Street in New York's SoHo neighborhood, you were undoubtedly surrounded by its sizable and eclectic selection of books. Where did they come from? According to Sacks, they're "from publishers or magazines getting rid of their overflow, from the apartments of lifelong readers who have died, or simply from the shelves of New Yorkers who need to clear the space." So, how do certain titles reach store shelves? There is a method, despite the personal bias that's inherent in picking inventory. Sacks illustrates this in his New Yorker piece.

At Housing Works, Sacks sifts through all the boxes and bags of donated books and selects what the store will sell, both at its brick-and-mortar location and on its website. He admits to a preference for certain genres: "I have always thought that the backbone of a good used-book store is formed by its fiction and history sections, so whenever possible I separated these books for the floor. Naturally, there were exceptions," he says. "Specialized histories with a narrowly scholarly focus are better sold online - so a history of the Punic Wars makes it to the store; a study of urinals during the reign of Hadrian doesn't."

Just as Sacks has a propensity for particular genres, affecting what is sold at Housing Works, he also has a fierce aversion to certain book forms, like the hardcover. "I do not like hardcover books," he discloses. "They are needlessly bulky and cumbersome, far less attractive or readable than their svelte paperback siblings. Unless the hardcover was of a perennial seller (your Doris Kearns Goodwins or John Irvings), I didn't allow them to eat up the limited shelf space."

It's interesting to read about what goes on behind the scenes at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe and the other bookstores where Sacks has worked, including The Strand and Barnes & Noble, the latter of which he says is "unjustly maligned. It's true that the mind governing these stores is corporate, but the staff tends to be far better read and more informed than detractors allow, and the selection is large and egalitarian." For more insider information on the bookstores whose selections are not as large as Barnes & Noble's and are much more curated, see Sam Sacks' article for the New Yorker, "The Bookstore Brain: How Bookstores Choose Their Books," at THIS LINK.