Mira Braneck is a bookseller and writer. Currently the receiving manager and Books to Prisoners Program coordinator at A Room of One's Own, Madison, Wis., she previously sold books at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa, and interned at The Paris Review. A recipient of a Books Across Borders fellowship, Braneck attended the London Book Fair in March. Below is her report from the fair.
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| Mira Braneck (l.) with Pierce Alquist. | |
Just one short week after attending my first Winter Institute, I found myself England-bound, en route to the London Book Fair. As the first Books Across Borders' fellows to attend the LBF, my compatriot Pierce Alquist and I considered ourselves to be the unofficial test run. Shelf Awareness gets the scoop: our attendance was an overwhelming success.
The London Book Fair is a major international publishing industry trade fair. Unlike the Frankfurt Book Fair (which is open to the public several days, and is, I learned, five times the size of what I encountered in London), the LBF is exclusively for industry professionals. Booksellers are not the primary audience nor attendees for these types of international book fairs, which tend to cater to publishers and those in rights acquisition. That said, Books Across Borders recognizes the vital role that booksellers play in promoting international literature here in the States and thus sponsors their attendance to further connect booksellers to the international book world. As a bookseller and reader with a passion for literature in translation, I was eager to meet with publishers from all over the world and hear from the presses that are working on the cutting edge of translated fiction.
I knew the fair would be hectic, but I think I underestimated just how large it would be, drawing 33,000 visitors over three days. At this deeply international fair in a deeply international city, people from all over the world were in attendance. The air was electric with the sense of deals being made: people shaking hands, running to meetings, and taking calls over smoke breaks outside. Imagine Winter Institute on steroids--then multiply that by a hundred and put everyone in a suit.
We were hosted by the Booksellers Association (the U.K. and Ireland's version of the ABA), which held two days of bookseller-specific programming in a small room separate from the rest of the fair. The BA's room was a welcome reprieve from the general frenzy; inside we were met with tea, sales pitches, and general camaraderie. I was pleased to learn that British booksellers are just as friendly as those stateside.
Some things, like sludgy conference coffee and bookish totes, appear to be universal. During publisher pitches, I heard the usual romantasy pitches, "weird girl lit" classifications, and Moshfegh, Mandel, and Ferrante comps. I did learn, however, that just as the more mundane aspects of bookselling (handsells, the Christmas retail season, etc.) transcend continents, so too do the more pressing preoccupations of our distinct industry: the American political situation, the rise of fascism, saving democracy and the dangers of AI were all at the front of everyone's mind.
As part of the BA's programming, Pierce and I were scheduled to co-lead a talk, "Bookselling in America," moderated by the inimitable Nic Bottomley of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath's exceptional indie bookstore. I'd expected our audience to be curious, wary, and concerned--and we were met with that exactly. What is it like to sell books while masked federal agents arrest and disappear our neighbors in the street? How does it feel to operate important cultural spaces that are major flashpoints in the culture wars? What are the logistics of navigating our government's famously increasing censorship efforts?
A Room of One's Own, where I am the receiving manager and Books to Prisoners Program coordinator, occupies a very particular space in this current sociopolitical moment. We are a 51-year-old feminist bookstore. We are queer- and trans-owned and largely operated. We are adamantly and ardently abolitionist, leftist, and anti-genocide. We dream of seeing liberation in our lifetime. If you are at all familiar with our store, you know that we are an inherently and pointedly political space.
When Pierce and I described the work we, and many other booksellers across the United States, are doing--offering space to organizers, handing out whistles, running mutual aid fundraisers--you could see the U.K. booksellers' concern and shock. Someone came up to us after and said, kindly and a bit incredulously, that she couldn't do what we do. She doesn't have the energy. To her, and anyone with this (very understandable!) feeling, I say: you will do what you have to do when you have to do it. And, odds are, you will have to, as most of the Western world swings right and continues to elect far-right governments.
I sometimes forget just how steeped in our own context we are. British booksellers talked about a noticeably sharper sense of tension and polarization on recent trips to the States. The notion of ever-present firearms came up multiple times--something I often forget is not the norm elsewhere, and not a factor people have to take into account when hosting events or operating in a public-facing industry like retail. What begins to feel normal--clashes with aggressive customers, concern about event safety, the ever-present threat of censorship--is not the norm everywhere. Talking to these booksellers was a good reminder that the social tension within which we're simmering is real, increasingly difficult, and abnormal.
Things weren't all doom and gloom. I attended a talk with Sylvia Whitman, owner of the famed Shakespeare & Company in Paris, who ferried her father's bookshop into the 21st century. Her conversation, featuring shop poltergeists, William Burroughs, and the joys and frustrations of hosting a robust events series, was truly a treat. As a devout small press reader, I loved meeting with the indie publishers who put out some of my favorite books in translation. As a nerdy bookseller who loves shop-talk, I enjoyed talking about the ins and outs of American distribution. I even took the Tube out to the new Fitzcarraldo offices, where I was met with a big, sunny room, the familiar white and blue aesthetic, and a bag of books. I am happy to report that amidst all the social upheaval, literary fiction lives on.
The best part of the LBF was talking to other booksellers at a pub after the day's end, as is often the case (while Winter Institute's panels and rep picks are informative and invigorating, I think I'm not alone in saying that the author dinners and parties are perhaps the most memorable aspects of the affair). I met booksellers from other radical shops, and even visited Common Press in Shoreditch, which I would count as Room's unofficial sibling store (if you've been to both, you'll see the similarities). It was fantastic and heartening to get into the nitty-gritty with booksellers from the U.K., and see how resonant our work is. The U.K. is shifting right, too, and experiencing a wave of anti-trans and -immigrant sentiment. I found it heartening to talk to booksellers who are at the forefront of the work in their communities in the fight against this hateful moment.
All in all, my trip to London was incredibly invigorating. To the American booksellers reading this, know that we have international support in the work we're doing. Our friends across the pond see what we're up against, and they salute us.