Monkey Wrench Books hosted its grand opening last weekend at 214 High St. in Morgantown, W.Va. Owner Lindsey Jacobs told 12 News that while there is still some work to be done around the store, she is excited to begin building a local community of readers as well as activists.
"This is going to be such an amazing community space and such a huge opportunity to build [a] community around books and around activism and around coffee," Jacobs said. "It's gonna be a really great space for us to gather and talk and grow."
During the summer, she had told the Daily Athenaeum, "I wanted to create a community space around books, which I love. But also a place where we can organize and challenge each other, and perform mutual aid. Every community needs an independent bookstore. I'm super excited to get the bookstore part open, but I'm even more excited about the opportunity to build community using the bookstore."
The store's name was inspired in part by Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. In a July Facebook post, Jacobs wrote, in part: "Reading the Monkey Wrench Gang changed my life. It helped me put words to a feeling I'd had since I was little that revered beauty, distrusted authority, and found legal and illegal too rigid a framework, particularly as applied to poor and oppressed people. For a while, I worshipped Ed Abbey, the novel's writer, too."
"I still read the MWG every year (along with Richard Adams' Watership Down), but through the eyes of someone who recognizes that 'Cactus Ed' was and died a racist and a misogynist.... That's one of the many beautiful things about books: they tell us who we were, who we are, and, importantly, who we could be. So Yes! to monkey wrenching, to mutual aid, to fighting for each other and the Earth, and an ardent No! to White Supremacy, individualism, and the patriarchy."