Q&A with Jeff Waxman / Open Borders Books

Q&A originally published in Nectar’s newsletter on December 12, 2020.

Our indie bookstore highlight for December is Open Borders Booksin Jackson Heights, Queens. They’re a rad mutual aid bookstore, offering used books on a pay-what-you-can scale, fundraising for local aid organizations, and much more.

Read on for a Q&A with Jeff Waxman of Open Borders Books and info on how to support!

Q: Tell us about Open Borders Books and its mission.

Jeff Waxman: Open Borders Books is a collective with two ideas at the center: everyone should be able to afford books and even "nonessential" workers have something essential to offer the community. Our books are all pay-what-you-like and half of all funds raised go to local aid organizations like Make the Road and the Jackson Heights Community Fridge that support our neighbors while the other half are start-up funds to continue our work and make it permanent.

Because of who we are individually and collectively, it was natural that whatever we could contribute to the neighborhood during the coronavirus crisis would be based in books and that the community we could muster to help would be a community of readers. We've met hundreds of our reading neighbors at this point and every one of them is excited about what we're doing here.

Q: How is the project going? What're your hopes for it in the future?

JW: Open Borders is a healthy and growing collective and we're lucky in that we all have complementary ideas about where we go from here, so we'll be drawing that map together. There's about ten of us working on this project and many of us have been booksellers by avocation or occupation, but we're also publishing people, artists, writers, teachers, academics, librarians, and culture workers. The pay-what-you-can model will always be a part of our DNA, but with winter coming and infection rates spiking, Open Borders is now offering mail order and we're working out browsing-by-appointment for our used books. We're stepping up our presence on bookshop.org, beginning a few exciting book club projects, and investigating how to form a legal entity to continue building the resources our community needs.

Q: In addition to buying books from Open Borders Books' Bookshop page, how can people help support the store and the Jackson Heights community?

Donate foreign language books to us! Or some really sick new releases in English! Or drop some of that cash you've got idling in your Venmo account on the used books we post to Instagram! Or join our book clubs!

Listen: Jackson Heights is something special—tens of thousands of families from every corner of the Earth and speaking close to 170 different languages built a singular neighborhood that's a bastion of progressive politics and workers rights movements, a home to a multiplicity of faiths, and the center of a lively queer community. It's a multigenerational, multinational, multicultural smorgasbord in a real estate and job market that is impossibly punishing.

A community like this needs a bookstore unlike any other store you've ever seen, and we're learning as we grow what form that will take. But we need other things to grow, too--legal services, physical space . . . it's a long list. If you want to help us create a new model for bookselling that's rooted not just in serving up the best in books, but in serving the day to day needs of the people, drop us a line and let us know what you can do to help.

Q: You're also the partnerships director for the House of SpeakEasy's bookmobile and co-creator of The Bookstore at the End of the World, another mutual aid project. Can you tell us more about those projects?

JW: House of SpeakEasy has given me a tremendous opportunity to work with great people in the pursuit of an impressive mission. And it puts a smile on my face every day I get to step out in the city to see that the reading public in every neighborhood, not just the spots close to bookstores, have something fresh to read. Everything I do on the street and all the coordination I do with partners, other nonprofits, publishers, and city agencies on behalf of the bookmobile informs what I can bring to Open Borders, and vice versa.

The Bookstore at the End of the World is a gift that has not stopped giving. In a moment of confusion and anxiety in the early days of COVID-19, it gave me clarity and it gave me purpose and it introduced me to dozens of smart booksellers who are passionate about what they do. Any one of us could have found a way to put a dollar in their neighbor's pocket, but to create a real community of affinity from nothing and bend the tools at our disposal to good purpose was a real source of joy in a time without much to go around. It might not be over!

Q: Has the way you think about books and the publishing industry at large shifted over the past year?

I have always had opinions about what independent bookselling is and should be, and what independent publishing represents. I've been outspoken against Amazon for more than a decade, I've been a vociferous supporter of the best independently published books and I've never left anyone—stranger, Airbnb host, or friend—in suspense about how I feel about this world or a bookseller's role in it.

But in the last year or so, through my work in the streets and through the brave and impressive acts of my colleagues, I came to realize how fucking damaged the publishing industry is, from the top all the way down. Books are priced too high for many people to purchase them; books are priced too low, apparently, to grant a living wage to those who sell them or work on them or write them. There's failure in this industry on almost every level and it's preposterous that I've been to as many martini lunches as I have when my bookslinging brethren are uninsured; it's embarrassing that there are 100 more midlist white authors than there are Black authors in almost any bookstore in America; and it's totally absurd that when I roll out onto the streets of NYC I meet so many people who don't own any books at all when I know for a fact that there are massive warehouses full of books all over this country. 

I absolutely still love selling books, but we've got to find new ways to do this shit that won't leave people, either readers or writers, out in the cold. A runaway bestseller in America is read by one half of one percent of the 330 million people in this country. Maybe we need to talk about why the industry is failing to give people the stories they need to live or why we're failing so consistently to put books in people's hands. That's pretty much been my job for fifteen years, so it's my failure as well, but I'm trying real hard to be better. Making books accessible is key. Open Borders is a good start.

Q: What are you reading right now?

JW: Jericho by Charles Bowden is a book that feels like it was brought in from the wild on a golden plate by a madman. His work is my new religion and if I ever put pen to paper in a creative way, it's his writing that I'll hopelessly measure against my own. He's the fucking truth. Also on my bedside table: Like Flies From Afar, João Gilberto Noll's Harmada, Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and The Age of Skin by the warm-blooded genius Dubravka Ugresic.