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.

As regular readers will know, I’m leading a workshop called “Strangers to the Covenant” with Zachary Moon and this morning was the first workshop. Although it was billed as a workshop for high school students and adult young Friend (so 15–35 years old), though almost all of the participants are high schoolers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fifteen minutes early to center in worship; two of the attenders came in the room and sat with me and one by one everyone came in and joined the worship. I had to wonder if a group of older Friends would have been able to resist the temptation to ask about each other’s jewelry, complain about the air conditioning, etc.

Julie reports that the cafeteria food is good. We’ve also been happy patrons of Gillie’s and Bollo’s Cafe.

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year’s Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don’t know what internet access I’ll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.

So I’ve decided to write down all the conversations or questions I get about my dress this week. I should mention that I actually prefer curious questions to the strange staring I sometimes get. So here we go:

• While ringing up a Gathering store order: someone I’ve known for years asked me whether my clothing was “a theological statement or if it was just comfortable.”
• While troubleshooting the store computers and answering a cellphone call from the office: compared to a literary character named “Cosmic Possum,” who was described to me as someone able to seemlessly live in both the past and modern world (at the time the reference was made I was working two computers and taking a cell phone call.
• Walking by the dining hall, an older Friend called out “Looks good!” I said “Huh?”, he replied “that’s a good outfit!”

Monday:

• “Nice outfit” again, this time from Nils P. As soon as he said it I warned him that I was keeping this log and that he should expect to see himself in it.
• I talked a little bit about dress with a friend from Baltimore Yearly Meeting, a gay Friend involved with FLGCQBC who is identifying more and more as conservative and thinking about going plain. One concern he raised was avoiding sweatshop labor. (I pointed out that plain dress is a cottage industry and that the seamstresses are usually local and believers.) He also doesn’t want to look “like a farmer” as he walks around the city of Baltimore. (I talked about how I have limits as to how plain I go and don’t want this to be a historical outfit but one which people might actually be able to see themselves adopting. I also talked about how I still want to identify on some level with urban anarchist culture, which has a sort of plain aesthetic.)

Tuesday:

• An extended conversation with a bookstore customer from California. She began by asking if I’m doing plain dress for the same reasons as another plain dresser here, who I’ve seen but not met yet. We began talking about motivations and what it’s like and how it is for women, especially who lead active lives. I talked about my wife’s Julie’s practice, which includes leotards when she’s working at a gymnastics coach. We also talked about different kinds of QuakersIt was a great conversation.
• While sitting on a bookstore couch blogging: “You’re looking very distinguished here, with facial hair and susspenders. Is this what married life does? You’re looking very Quakerly. Does thee also have a hat?”

Wednesday

• I spent sick mostly in bed…
• I did have a brief, fever-fed conversation with some of the other plain dressing youths and soon-to-be plain dressing youth. It’s not about dress, but about being Quaker and about how we live as Friends.

Thursday:

• I had an extended conversation with a couple who run the Equal Exchange table about plain dress, Gohn Brothers catalog and avoiding sweatshop-made clothing for union-made clothing. There’s a lot of people interested in this and the issues really connect with simplicity and justice issues.

Subject: book prices

I really wanted to buy the below book [Why Grace is True], but I checked amazon. com. Their prices: new is $16.07, or used from $5.94. Your price is $22.95.

I know how hard it is to be competitive, but I wanted to let you know that people do comparison shop.

Blessings, C.

Dear Friend,

Yes, Amazon, Walmart and the rest of the global media/distribution juggernaut will always be able to underprice us on the mainstream books.

What we offer is a much wider selection of Quaker books than anyone else. We don’t just have the more watered-down books aimed at the general population (mostly with the unsaid premise “what you can learn from those folksy Quakers”), but a whole list of books about Quaker religious education, Quaker vision, Quaker belief, Quaker history and what it means to be a Quaker today. We don’t just have the HarperCollins titles, but those from Quaker publishers that Amazon’s never heard of. We easily beat Amazon in selection and we certainly match them in speed and customer service.

We give a more grounded context to what these books mean to Friends–the reviews on our site’s If Grace is True are written by Friends for Friends. We try to know our books. When people call us up we’ll help with their selection. When they’re trying to decide, we’ll read the table of contents to them. Quaker publishers and booksellers talk about the “ministry of the written word,” which means remembering that there’s a purpose behind this bookselling. These books aren’t commodities, they aren’t units, they’re not ISBN numbers to be packed and shipped. We’d rather not sell a book than sell a book someone wouldn’t value (which is why we’ll include negative book descriptions & comments).

Paying a few extra dollars to support us means your also supporting the outreach and Quaker self-identity our catalog provides for many Friends. Plus you can be assured our employees get living wages and health care (for which I’m personally thankful).

So yes, customers can save a few bucks at Amazon. Always will be able to. But your purchasing decisions are also decisions about who you support and what you value. There’s a price to distinctiveness, whether it’s cultural, religious, regional, or culinary. By buying from Amazon you’re financing a Wall Street-run commodity seller that doesn’t give a jot about Quakerism or even whether grace might be true. If enough Friends choose price over content, then Quaker bookstores and publishers will disappear, our only representation being mainstream books sold at generic shops. That will cost us a lot more than seven bucks.

Well, I hope you enjoy the book. I’m sure Amazon appreciates your patronage.

In friendship,
Martin Kelley

Peter Brock talks about it in “The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660 to 1914”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/1–85072-065–7 and Doug Gwyn has some stuff in “Seekers Found”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0–87574-960–7 but there _should_ be more than that. We tried going from the other end and surfed over to “Anabaptist Books”:http://www.anabaptistbooks.com/ and typed in “Quaker” but not much there.
After telling our customer that we couldn’t come up with too much on Quaker/Anabaptist cross-pollinization, he said that’s what he had been discovering. He asked me why I thought that was. Good question. I told him that Quakers had spent much of the twenthieth century distancing themselves from Anabaptists, and on giving up on our shared ‘peculiar’ testimonies on plainness and separation from the world. This really coincides with the rise of the Quakers-as-Protestant theme and with the renaming of the testimonies in modern secular language.

I walk around, tears in eyes, looking looking for a changed world. See students in goatees, so beat, but they’re smiling, they don’t know, don’t care, you’ve been reduced to a fashion. But you’re here, in the air we breathe, that smell of liberation, of just stand up and laugh and prank and listen to the soul sex spirit bursting within. Smile through the solitary puritanism that keeps everyone apart.

But where are you remembered? Where’s the drum circles? Needing something now, I buy the latest Waldman anthology in bookstore, thirtieth street train station, full of time magazine, hustler, romance novels, lottery tickets. Cashier looks at book, says someone else just bought it too. Oh joy, no drum circles but at least other lost souls not knowing how to share the loss but to remember the immortal words, the words now history, set forever in twelve point times to be read as another Dead White Male poet.

I tell cashier, friendly middle aged black woman that he—points to your out-of-focus head in photo of Corso, the Orlovskys, Kerouac—is dead. “Who is it?” “Allen Ginsburg.” “Oh, that’s him, hmm?” I say, I hope, that there’ll be a lot of people buying these books now, but know yet another illustrated history of Vietnam will be their best seller.

Nightime now. I can’t help it, I look to the sky to see if there’s a new star in the firmament. But overcast, smoggy, orange-skied Germantown doesn’t open to the cliché.

I miss you. You taught so much. How to combine poetry and liberation and politics and the search for wondrous lovely spirit. Since I first saw you speak—1988 Rutgers, Radical Student Conference—I’ve become activist nonviolence publisher, Quaker seeker. You spoke to me, told me I could spin my own life of joy if only I could be open and humble, ready to laugh, but also ready to take lightening bolts upon my head for standing up in row-after-row movie theater America, watch us perform, give us six bucks America.

In new book you say prescription for this America is:

more art, meditation, lifestyles of relative penury,
avoidance of conspicuous consumption that’s
burning down the planet.

To that I say merely, ‘a‑okay,” let’s get back to work. I love you Allen. Peace be with you.

Recovered via Archive.org cache.