Making Your Store a Community Center

To supplement the panel discussion at the ABA education session "The Bookstore as a Third Place: Making Your Store a Community Center Through Innovative Events" at this year's BookExpo America, ABA asked booksellers to submit descriptions of innovative events that have helped to make their stores into community centers. Here, Erika Arthur, events coordinator for Food for Thought Books, a worker-owned collective bookstore, in Amherst, Massachusetts, describes an event that underscores her belief "that the arts, politics, books, and fun, in combination, hold so much potential for community building and social change."

By Erika Arthur

Food for Thought Books in Amherst, Massachusetts, recently put together a great event that garnered super media coverage, brought in scads of folks who'd never been here before, sold tons of books, solidified the commitments of our long-time customers, was amazingly educational ... and people had tons of fun.

Our store, a worker-owned collectively-run business, expanded to twice its size in January. We waited until the spring to have a grand-reopening party in our new beautiful space. We decided to combine it with a book release party for local DJ and graphic designer Pablo Yglesias, whose book had just been released by Princeton Architectural Press. The book is called Cocinando: 50 Years of Latin Album Cover Art. In Cocinando, Pablo has collected an astounding collection of colorful album covers and makes smart commentary on the social and political context in which this art and music were created.

We planned the slideshow / book signing / party for April 30, the day before May Day so the diehards who stayed until midnight could ring in the workers' holiday in style. Pablo presented a beautiful slideshow and talked for about 45 minutes to a crowd of about 50 people, many of whom had never been to our store before. He then signed books as more people filtered in, ate, drank, mingled, and complimented us on our new space. Pablo then changed roles, stepped behind the turntables and along with another local DJ, spun Latin music until nearly 1:00 a.m. Many folks came specifically for the dancing because they had experienced Pablo's DJ-ing at local salsa nights.

The event was a great success, and we still hear about it from grateful customers. It was the perfect party for people who aren't completely comfortable at parties because they could always stick their noses in the books!

This event is clearly not something we could do all the time, but it underscored my belief that the arts, politics, books, and fun, in combination, hold so much potential for community building and social change.