July 25, 2024, 2:51pm
Last week, shortly after the announcement that JD Vance would be joining the Republican ticket, I was working my bookstore gig at The Golden Notebook when a woman came in and asked me if we had any copies of Hillbilly Elegy. I took a glance at the inventory, told her we did not, and started to suggest that if she was looking for a book about the Rust Belt and its socio-political context in the 21st Century, I could recommend… This woman, older and tapping a black Amex on the counter, interrupted me to say that she didn’t want “some other book” and asked if we could order a copy of Vance’s book for her.
I told her that we could, but she would have to pay for the order in advance. A local and a somewhat frequent customer, she expressed some shock at this: usually, The Golden Notebook allows people to order a book and pay for it upon pick-up. I explained that this was the store’s policy on hot-ticket books (to ensure that someone doesn’t go buy it elsewhere and leave us in the lurch) and although she had some attitude about it, she gave me her card and paid for the book and then scowled her way out of the store.
The experience reminded me of a similar one in late 2021, around the release of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci. I was relatively new to the store at the time and the store’s ownership sent out an all-staff email explaining the same policy: that we would not be stocking the book but that we would order it if customers specifically requested a copy, so long as they paid in advance. A few days later, I was working the register and told a customer that we didn’t have the book and wouldn’t be stocking it. The man started shouting about censorship, pulling down his mask and demanding that I take off my own so that he could see my face, and swearing that he’d never buy books from us again. He left without much further incident, but that was not the only such encounter that I or other staff members had during that book’s release season.
When I talked to The Golden Notebook’s co-owner James Conrad, he put the political facet of the stock issue in clear terms: “A lot of the time with political books, people feel the need to demand a bookstore carry their particular political belief. The Fauci book turned into dozens of phone calls from people who have never set foot in our store demanding we order it and once asked to prepay, a lot of them refused. They just wanted to tell us what our own business should have on our shelves, despite the fact that a lot of them never supported our business in the past.”
Indeed, indie bookstores have always faced complicated cross-currents when it comes to the question of what to stock. Some stores have the luxury of massive square footage and the resulting ability to stock just about any book that they’d like—but many stores with smaller footprints have to be choosy about what books go on their shelves. Most of the time, this goes unnoticed or at least unremarked upon: we’ve probably all walked into a bookstore looking for a particular title and been surprised-but-not-that-surprised not to find it on the shelves, particularly when the book in question is older or outside of the mainstream. Bookstores are not libraries, and there is no expectation (or at least there shouldn’t be) that they have every single book at any given moment.
But one of the major reasons that indie bookstores have blossomed in recent years is because of their deep ties to local communities. Customers want to have a sense that their local indie says something about their community, in an expansive and inviting way. When I asked about whether she’d be stocking Hillbilly Elegy, Katie Brown, bookstore manager at Malaprop’s in Asheville, put it wonderfully:
Several of us in the store grew up in Southern Appalachia (me personally, an hour west of Asheville in Haywood County with half my family rooted in Yancey County for multiple generations) and had experiences that, while not exactly like JD Vance’s, mirrored his in a lot of ways. And while I think his story represents his life and is true of some folks in the area, that mentality does not resonate with many of us still here. He forgot the most beautiful part of Appalachia: that we are a community who work together for the betterment of the whole, not to push it apart, and that that community is made up of more than poor white people. Bootstraps don’t apply here—if one succeeds, we all succeed. Vance has created both a myth and a monolith of Appalachia that is so singular while refusing to acknowledge just how diverse our area is. I think folks need to look beyond the Elegy to really understand what Appalachia is as a whole. Stocking Hillbilly Elegy isn’t a priority for us; we will of course special order it for anyone interested in one man’s story. But, I really want to encourage folks to look at other titles and lives that include what I feel like is Appalachia.
I reached out to some other indies to take a quick temperature check on the industry’s plans for Vance’s book and most of the places I spoke to mentioned plans similar to The Golden Notebook and Malaprop’s: they won’t be stocking it, but they’ll take special orders. A few did mention that they are stocking the book “because of significant interest from our customers” while others pointed out that the book is currently back-ordered (HarperCollins told the AP that over 650,000 copies have sold in the last ten days across the print/e-book/audiobook spectrum and they are planning a massive re-print, which I’m sure won’t affect the distribution of other planned titles this season…) and that they’re being honest with customers about the resulting delays and trying to hand-sell some other (coughcoughbettercough) titles.
“We have never had a single copy of Hillbilly Elegy in stock, as we curate our shelves extremely selectively, but are always glad to special-order books for our customers,” said novelist Lauren Groff, whose new Gainesville bookstore The Lynx has quickly established itself as a beacon of free expression in Ron DeSantis’s Florida. “We’re all-in for freedom to read and freedom of expression, and that even includes the work of JD Vance. I’d also like to add that when people express interest in Appalachia, we booksellers at The Lynx are usually excited to hand-sell them books by one of our favorite writers, Mesha Maren.”
That, right there, is really the crux of the work of indie bookstores: to vigorously defend free expression, support the right to read, and champion the writers we believe in. If we stand for the right to read, then we must stand for the right to read whatever you damn well please. If you want to read a particular book, an indie will get it for you even if we really think you should read something else or desperately disagree with the book’s existence—because that’s what we do.
But we also want to shape the reading lives of our communities by listening to and respecting the full breadth of said communities, which is why I’m looking forward to hand-selling copies of Appalachian Reckoning and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. And when somebody thinks that they really need to read JD Vance, lo though I will be tempted to point them in the direction of Alissa Quart’s recent piece instead, I will smile and take their money and then work twice as hard to get better books into the hands of my readers.