John Evans, co-owner of DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood, Calif., responded to Robert Gray's recent Shelf Awareness column, "Preparing for the 1919 ABA Convention," with a quite suitable Letter to the Editor in early 20th-century epistolary style:
Dearest Sir,
I greatly appreciate the piece most recently published in the estimable Shelf Awareness. It was fascinating look back at a century-ago event so paralleling our current time. As with the best backwards-looking it is also a forward-looking article. Not to fall prey to the temptations of an idea, nay ideology, such as Progress which has so long deluded our nation and our society, I am nonetheless encouraged to hope that real positive change could come of this foray into longtime structural limits to the success of bookshops throughout the country.
The century-old arguments for diversity of booksellers, their active intelligences, and passionate commitments to their communities are supplemented by an understanding that the economics of the industry must address the risks to the essential services bookstores provide. One prays that the publishers of our time heed both the lessons of the past and the increasingly vocal booksellers of the present's call for a more equitable distribution of the profits within the business. A call for corrections in the wasteful misuse of industry resources toward those new-fangled online retailers with no devotion to the cultural mission of the book industry as a whole is echoed in the appeals of 1919 for a rational approach to the necessity of bookstores, large and small, in neighborhoods, towns and cities throughout the land.
Thank you for your thoughtful presentation of past thinking and the promise of reasonable considerations for the present, so that all aspects of the book world can further their social utility while protecting the success, especially of that most vital part--the bookstore.
Respectfully Yours,
John Evans
Owner
DIESEL, A Bookstore
California
2019