Q&A with Brad Johnson / East Bay Booksellers
Q&A originally published in Nectar’s newsletter on February 12, 2021.
Our indie bookstore highlight for February is East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, CA! Read on for a Q&A with owner Brad Johnson.
Q: Tell us about East Bay Booksellers. How are you all doing right now?
Brad Johnson: It’s sort of a weird time. The holiday rush has passed, and we finished the year strong, so we’re now just trying to figure out what 2021 can and/or will look like. First and foremost, we’re trying to make sure everybody stays healthy. There’s a temptation to treat so much of what we’re doing as “biding time” or “treading water.” To some extent, that’s kind of true. Right now we are caretakers of a shared space that very few people can share in the way they’re used to (or how it was designed to be!). The result is that we all have to create new routines and rhythms for ourselves, knowing that these may need to change at nearly any time. For some of us, like me, that works well. For others, it’s a bit of a stress.
To help out, we’re constantly trying to figure out ways to be socially-distant booksellers. If all we do is fulfill orders, then we’re all going to get burned out quickly. So, we keep experimenting with ways to recommend books via online features, web catalogs, and the like.
Q: We love the “surprise me” feature on your website, the browsing catalog Stacks, and the individual catalogs of staff recommendations. Can you talk more about these features? How has the community response been in general over the past year?
Brad Johnson: All of those features have been evolving over the course of the past year. My hope, which is coming into fruition, is that the development of all these features will not be centralized. I like having as many hands and personalities involved with these as possible. It keeps the virtual realm of the store as unexpected as what our space is in general.
Our customers have been amazing throughout all this. We’ve erred on honesty in all things. Sometimes this can be awkward in the moment—like when we’re explicit about public safety and common courtesy. Mostly, it’s just been telling people in the clearest terms the most helpful thing they can do for you. Early on, I asked people to either to buy gift cards and hang onto them for a while, or buy books that were already on our shelves. I was not at all prepared for how well they’d take us up on both. The gift cards bought us time and helped subsidize some of the losses; the purchases buoyed our morale and encouraged us to keep on stocking the off-the-beaten-track books.
Q: Has the way you think about books and the publishing industry at large shifted over the past year?
Brad Johnson: This is the sort of question where I get myself into trouble with some people. I’m very discouraged by the pace of consolidation happening in the publishing industry. The full-bore corporatization of literary art threaten my enthusiasm at times. It also, though, is the sort of challenge I enjoy, finding the things that defy the trends. And there are definitely presses and people kicking against the gears in their own ways.
My primary advocacy is that bookstores must be about something if there is to be anything resembling hope for the industry. Because our operations do not work in the spectrum of corporatization we’re witnessing now, thinking about this “something” is important. Because I’m not even sure it’s necessarily books! Books are obviously great, but it’s the people who create, read, mark up, get angry at, cry over, and learn from them that matter. We work with these people and we sell to these people. To me, figuring out how to make sure your store is about them—in all the varied ways this shakes out—is an act of defiance to the almighty dollar.
Q: You’re also the co-host of the podcast Faced Out. Can you tell us more about the project?
Brad Johnson: Faced Out began as a way for my co-worker, Elizabeth Freeman, and I to decompress after the long, supremely depressing early days of pandemic bookselling last spring. We joke that it’s a book podcast that very rarely ever talks about books. It’s pretty narrowly focused on “in the weeds” bookselling issues. We’ve had some great conversations with booksellers like Hannah Oliver Depp and Angela Maria Spring, as well as Lisa Lucas (formerly the director at National Book Foundation, and now editor at Pantheon Books). People have described it as two booksellers getting drinks after work and getting things off their chest. And yeah, that sounds about right.
Q: What are you reading right now?
Brad Johnson: My reading is all over the place. I’ve been reading lots of John Donne, mostly his later religious texts and largely out loud (though usually whispered so my wife doesn’t throw something at me). The Vintage edition of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel. I’m not religious at all, but I’m enthralled by his use of language.
I’m also reading the new paperback release of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done from University of Minnesota Press. I love this book because it is not for me. It’s not even an invitation to be an ally. Rather, it’s an opportunity for me to be quiet and actively cede intellectual space I never owned in the first place.
And finally, I’m absolutely loving Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule from Haymarket. Walia’s synthesizing of such broad topics as migration, capitalism, and nationalism, in a shockingly tight argument about how pervasive the violence of borders is, is a wonder.
Q: What is your favorite book to handsell?
Brad Johnson: John Keene’s Counternarratives is a staple on my staff recommendations display at the store. I even found a way to work it into the “New Fiction” holiday Stacks catalog. It’s just a flat-out work of contemporary avant-garde genius. If I have anything to do with it, and hopefully as a bookseller I have some very small part to play, people will be reading it for quite some time to come.