The latest subject of Bookselling This Week's What's in a Name? series is Lemuria Books, which opened in Jackson, Miss., more than 40 years ago with a name that was intended "to represent the store's then countercultural leanings."
Owner John Evans was 24 years old when he founded Lemuria: "I wanted to feature books on metaphysics, counterculture, psychology and the occult," as well as titles by some of his favorite authors, including Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. "I was traveling all around looking for alternative books and couldn't find very many of them in many places in the South, so I decided to open my own store. I thought, well, I don't want to call it John's Books; I'm not that narcissistic. And I can't really call it John's New Age Bookstore or Counterculture Bookstore, not in the middle of Mississippi, at least."
He decided to call it Lemuria, after a mythical civilization that was purported to have existed before the lost city of Atlantis. "The lost continent of Lemuria was home to the creative aspects of occult, myth, and hieroglyphics, the symbols of the first books ever written," Evans noted. "I found that out in a book, and I just got into the whole aspect of the creative process of transference of thoughts through words and ideas, and creativity, and all of the things that Lemurian culture is mythologized as."
Over time, the name's relationship to the store's brand has changed: "In a way, we still represent the counterculture today, at least where we are, but I also think we represent the current culture where we are, too. That is one of the ways our bookstore has changed. But we've always been interested in giving the community something alternative and, hopefully, we are still doing that."