Hello everyone,
Curation.
It’s a word that, when applied to bookselling, sort of gets our backs up. We hear a lot of booksellers say that they “curate” their stock. We hear that we “curate” our stock. Honestly, we’ve even said it about ourselves. Some booksellers use this word to sound important and sophisticated, and others use it as a way to frame the confusing thing that booksellers do. How do we choose which books we sell? How do we form our identity as a dealer? After all, it’s clear to see that one bookseller is not like another.
The word “curate” isn’t exactly right. It’s an art word, not a book word. We like it. We get how a book collector would see their books as art objects and feel that they curate their collection as an art collector does. But we’ve known actual gallery curators, and what they do is, like, a very specific thing. They go to school for it. It’s above our pay grade. We don’t know exactly what professional curation is all of the time, but we do know enough to know that it isn’t bookselling. It works on a finer scale than the on-the-fly selections of a marketplace.
We don’t curate here at Brown and Dickson as much as we are just picky. Sure, there’s a lot of knowledge involved, and there are definitely booksellers in the world who have micro-specialties that make them the experts in their field, but honestly a bookstore is, for better or for worse, a place to buy and sell things. The cultural tendrils of informed choice do influence us, but they never wholly determine what is on the shelves of a bookshop.
A professional curator may be tempted to stray from their gallery’s focus, but they are trained for exactly this kind of scenario. The bookseller isn’t. Every box we open curves our sense of self in a new direction. What we carry on our shelves is determined by availability, market demand, and whatever documentary we watched last night that’s making us hyper-focus on the availability of yams in the Antebellum South.
This is why, for example, our newsletter might offer you the high-minded power of C.G. Jung beside the boobilicious night-crawling sex of Vampirella. Sure, a blunt descriptor of “curation” could be applied, and there’s probably a Jungian reason for it too, but this is honestly an insult to people ACTUALLY curating collections of worth and rarity. The truth is, unless you’re working at a level so refined where ONLY illuminated manuscripts are your bread and butter, a wilder approach must take root.
Bookshops and book collections are never FINAL. They are not, as some have incorrectly described them, institutions. They are not museums. They are fluid stores of cultural memory, subject to rewriting the way you might tape over an old VHS tape. The Dick Van Dyke Reunion Special disappears in favour of a Super Bowl.
A bookstore is also a business. This fact will break the hearts of all anti-capitalist readers, including our eleven-year-old son who is on his second read-through of The Communist Manifesto. “Stupid bourgeoisie,” he mutters at the dinner table. But the whole point is to move things through the pipe. If they aren’t moving, you’re not eating. You can be picky, but things that don’t fit always make their way onto the shelves, and we have come to embrace these contradictions. Honestly, how many books would we have not read if we stuck to our cultured guns? Despite our intention to only have high-minded literature and voluptuous boobs in our shop, there will, in the 50 boxes of any collection, be works that contradict, beguile, and quite simply, offer Catholic confusion. This mess, this puzzling resistance to finality, is what we’ve come to love about the biz. It’s always a surprise.
Please enjoy this week’s bizarre medley of new arrivals. If you think a book on the list is crass, please know that we don’t think our customers are crass. True, we are a little bit crass. Irreverence is our favourite. If you think we’ve wandered from the path of hip curation, please know that we never used that word without knowing it was a placeholder for the lack of a better one. All we can do is open the doors to our wonky library and say come on in.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
