Another Quaker bookstore bites the dust

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Not really news, but Friends United Meet­ing recently ded­i­cated their new Wel­come Cen­ter in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2007, FUM ded­i­cated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Book­store as the new FUM Wel­come Cen­ter. The Wel­come Cen­ter con­tains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of dur­ing busi­ness hours. Tables and chairs to com­fort­ably accom­mo­date 50 peo­ple make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meet­ings, anniversary/birthday par­ties, etc. Reduced prices are avail­able for churches.

Most Quaker pub­lish­ers and book­sellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pen­dle Hill book­store and pub­lish­ing oper­a­tion, the AFSC Book­store in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bar­clay Press in Ore­gon. The ver­i­ta­ble Friends Book­shop in Lon­don farmed out its mail order busi­ness a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a cof­fee­bar: pop­u­lar and cool I’m sure, but does Lon­don really needs another place to buy cof­fee? Rumor has it that Britain’s pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee has been laid down. The offi­cial spin is usu­ally that the work con­tin­ues in a dif­fer­ent form but only Bar­clay Press has been reborn as some­thing really cool. One of the few remain­ing book­sellers is my old pals at FGC’s Quaker­Books: still sell­ing good books but I’m wor­ried that so much of Quaker pub­lish­ing is now in one bas­ket and I’d be more con­fi­dent if their web­site showed more signs of activity.

The boards mak­ing these deci­sions to scale back or close are prob­a­bly unaware that they’re part
of a larger trend. They prob­a­bly think they’re respond­ing to unique sit­u­a­tions (the peer group Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions sends inter­nal emails around but hasn’t done much to pub­li­cize this story out­side of its mem­ber­ship). It’s sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bod­ies have inde­pen­dently decided that pub­lish­ing is not an essen­tial part of their mission.

  • http://www.imperfectserenity.com Eileen Flana­gan

    I don’t see this as a Quaker trend so much as a trend in pub­lish­ing, which is get­ting more and more con­sol­i­dated. I won­der if Friends felt that pub­lish­ing was not part of their mis­sion, or if it was an activ­ity they could no longer sus­tain finan­cially. I have no insider infor­ma­tion on this, just speculation.

  • Mar­tin Kelley

    Yes, it’s cer­tainly true that this is a larger trend. I jumped to the web in 1995 after the small activist press I had worked at for six years more-or-less went under as a result of eco­nomic pres­sures: the clos­ing of the inde­pen­dent book­stores that were our bread in but­ter com­bined with ris­ing paper costs and a con­sol­i­dat­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work that was squeez­ing out higher dis­counts.
    Quaker pub­lish­ing has long been a sub­si­dized econ­omy. There sim­ply aren’t enough of us to make a prof­itable com­mer­cial niche. One issue in all this has been seri­ous finan­cial prob­lems at some of the sub­si­diz­ers (both Friends United Meet­ing and Pen­dle Hill have had major bud­get crises and staff lay­offs). The most impor­tant trends might not be in pub­lish­ing but in the long-term finances of some of our big Quaker insti­tu­tions. Still, I may be biased, but if I were the Quaker Pope, pub­lish­ing would be the last thing to go.
    An inter­nal donor sur­vey or two makes me won­der if pub­lish­ing has dropped off the pri­or­ity list of the cur­rent donor gen­er­a­tion. Twenty years ago these clos­ings would have been a scan­dal. Older Friends then still remem­bered Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly, Howard Brin­ton and that mid-century period where Friends wrote ambi­tious books for wide audiences–it’s amaz­ing to see how many clas­sics from that period were orig­i­nally pub­lished by main­stream com­mer­cial pub­lish­ing houses. Today these clos­ings have barely reg­is­tered in the Quaker world.

  • http://www.imperfectserenity.com Eileen Flana­gan

    Points well taken, Mar­tin, and I do share your con­cerns about it.

  • davidinla

    The AFSC book­store is alive and well. (I am a vol­un­teer there.) The store moved last year, along with the regional office, from Pasadena to down­town Los Ange­les. We no longer have a walk-in book­shop oper­a­tion, but we main­tain a web site to sup­port online order­ing, and we sell books directly at Quaker gath­er­ings and other com­mu­nity events. The URL for the web site is: http://​www​.afsc​store​.org.
    In my expe­ri­ence, it’s impos­si­ble to make money sell­ing Quaker books, but enlight­ened orga­ni­za­tions under­stand the value of dis­sem­i­nat­ing Quaker thought and wit­ness both within and beyond the Quaker com­mu­nity, and they sub­si­dize this activ­ity accordingly.

  • http://www.quakerranter.org/ Mar­tin Kelley

    @DavidinLA: I knew there were hopes of keep­ing the AFSC book­store going after Ken Morgan’s death a few years back. I’m glad to see it continues!

  • http://quakerpamphlets@blogspot.com Jim Rose

    It is well to keep the dis­tinc­tion between book­selling and book pub­lish­ing clear. Fac­ing com­pe­ti­tion from Ama­zon and other online book­sellers, Quaker book­stores cer­tainly have an upstream bat­tle. I’m not sure but they have to redesign them­selves from an ‘down-the-street’ book­store par­a­digm to ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions like quaker­books and AFSC have done.
    What is more remark­able is that Pen­dle Hill has cho­sen to aban­don book pub­lish­ing. They still pub­lish the invalu­able pam­phlet series, but have decided not to pur­sue larger works. This in an age where ‘print-on-demand’ ser­vices like Light­ning­Source make pub­li­ca­tion truly inex­pen­sive.
    The Quaker Uni­ver­sal­ist Fel­low­ship has now pub­lished two col­lec­tions of essays on Quaker Uni­ver­sal­ism using this tech­nol­ogy and while we are not focused on mak­ing a profit we are delighted to have our titles picked up and sold on Ama­zon as well as quaker​books​.com and uni​ver​sal​ist​friends​.org
    There are other indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions which are using this tech­nol­ogy as well: Quaker pub­lish­ing is not dead and I would encour­age Quaker authors to forge ahead and say what they can!

  • http://www.rainbowfriends.net Alli­son

    Hmm, inter­est­ing. I was just telling my spe­cial friend about a new fan­tasy I came up with, to open up a book­store that was both a store and a non­profit to encour­age lit­er­acy, wholism, and cul­tural aware­ness. It even has a name for it, the name of my new blog in the mak­ing, Rain­bow Friends — Book­store, Cafe, and Cul­tural Hub. I won­der if the prob­lem with these books is that the niche is too small and homoge­nous to be sus­tain­able? My dream is to be a writer, and one that would encour­age peo­ple to be hap­pier and health­ier, with a Quaker uni­ver­sal­ist mes­sage, like my hero Walt Whitman.

  • http://www.quakerbooks.org Lucy Dun­can

    Dear Mar­tin,
    Glad to see you are tak­ing notice of these changes. QUIP did approve a minute (see below) regard­ing the changes in Quaker pub­lish­ing in the Quaker world last year that we have dis­trib­uted, but bet­ter on the UK side of the pond than on this side. Thanks for this oppor­tu­nity to give it wider read­er­ship. Of course QUIP is con­cerned, but we do see a shift­ing from insti­tu­tional pub­lish­ing to self-publishing and there is a lot of that going on.
    One encour­ag­ing note is that sales from Quaker­Books of FGC are bet­ter than ever. I actu­ally credit this to the web­site and our e-mail newslet­ters — both Book Mus­ings (http://​www​.quaker​books​.org/​m​u​s​i​n​gs/)and Angelina Conti’s very fine Author Inter­views (http://​www​.quaker​books​.org/​i​n​t​e​r​v​i​e​ws/). Our very large annual cat­a­log has helped as well, though that is expen­sive to do, another ser­vice to Friends. Of course, the sad piece of this is that some of the increase in our sales are a result of the clos­ing of other Quaker out­lets. I do agree that Bar­clay Press’s web­site is exem­plary and we hope to emu­late and learn from some of their won­der­ful ideas, as well as offer­ing more com­pelling oppor­tu­ni­ties for par­i­ti­pa­tion from our site’s users.
    Lucy Dun­can, prini­pally speak­ing as co-clerk of QUIP (www​.quaker​.org/​q​uip)
    Here’s the minute from our annual meet­ing, 2007.
    07–23 Changes in Quaker pub­lish­ing
    The topic was intro­duced by hear­ing read our minute 06–11.
    Since then fur­ther changes have hap­pened in the United States. Friends United Meet­ing now dis­trib­utes only its own pro­duc­tions, online and by mail order. Their walk-in book­store has closed. This fur­ther shrink­age in US Quaker book­stores strength­ens our con­cerns about the reduc­tions in pub­li­ca­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­grammes around the world. We noted that dis­tri­b­u­tion is just as impor­tant as pub­lish­ing – if one can­not sell a book, why pub­lish it?
    Min­istry which is income pro­duc­ing is now often mea­sured by whether it pays for itself. But Friends are per­fectly will­ing to pay for other sorts of min­istry with­out the need to realise a mon­e­tary gain.
    From the pub­lish­ing point of view Peter Daniels told us that the posi­tion of Britain Yearly Meet­ing pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee is uncer­tain at present and there is a mora­to­rium on projects in the pipeline. Quaker Life is reor­gan­is­ing its com­mit­tees and a review of pub­lish­ing is going on at present.
    Pub­lish­ing is at its heart about intel­lec­tual and finan­cial risk-taking, nur­tur­ing a min­istry of writ­ing and spot­ting ideas that might catch fire.
    As mem­bers of Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tion (QUIP) we feel it impor­tant to stress that being pub­lish­ers of truth is a key part of who Quak­ers are. We urge those who dis­cern pri­or­i­ties and make finan­cial deci­sions to remem­ber that the min­istry of pub­lish­ing is as essen­tial to our work as Friends as it has always been. While we wel­come new forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that sup­port the work of Friends, spir­i­tual for­ma­tion also requires books old and new.
    We ask the clerks to ensure that this minute is dis­trib­uted widely and appropriately.

  • http://www.quakerranter.org/ Mar­tin Kelley

    @Lucy: A lit­tle Quaker­books self-promotion on my site? Classy.
    Thanks for past­ing the QUIP minute here. Google and Yahoo searches show that this is the first time that any QUIP mem­bers have put this online. You shouldn’t have to be a mem­ber of the Quaker bureau­cracy to be able to see this minute. The last year-plus has made me real­ize just how pur­pose­fully opaque Quak­ers insti­tu­tions are in pub­lic, as most crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion passes by gos­sip. Then again, who cares?