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Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel We’re So Famous (Bloomsbury USA), editor of the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster), Conversations with Jonathan Lethem (Uni-versity Press of Mississippi), No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road (Dzanc), with Mary Cotton, and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic), with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton. He is a founding editor of the national literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College. Clarke is the co-owner, along with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in the Boston area. He was interviewed by Mount Hope staff member Chelsea Silva.

Chelsea Silva: How would you describe the overall atmosphere in bookselling at the moment?

Jaime Clarke: There’s always apprehension in bookselling, I think, because it’s a cultural insti-tution, one at the mercy of taste (however that is defined), which means the winds can shift at any one moment and erase everything you think you know about selling books. The collapse of Borders was probably the most Earth-shattering moment for bookselling in recent his-tory. It changed the way publishers treat bookstores in that Borders owed publishers a lot of money when it folded and so now small independent bookstores are on short financial strings with publishers. You used to be able to order a book and pay the bill down the line. Now you have to pay quickly so you have to make a decision about keeping the book on the shelf or returning it for credit, which ultimately just hurts the author of the book in question. The one saving grace, always, is that most booksellers are optimists and so the boring business part of bookselling is easily shrugged off. It’s always been a struggle and will always be so.

CS: What role do booksellers play in the distribution of books? How is this different from Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item…” section?

JC: You could argue that booksellers are the chief handsellers of books to readers. That Ama-zon feature you mention exists because, well, Amazon is not a bookstore and so they don’t have booksellers to make personal recommendations to readers. Associative browsing on a website isn’t anything like talking about books and authors with booksellers. Those who have done both know what I’m talking about.

CS: You’ve been running Newtonville Books since 2007, amidst a rising tide of eB-ooks and Amazon sales. How have these developments influenced your business over the last five years?

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JC: Truthfully, not at all. Amazon has been around since the mid-1990s, so their influence was established by the time we saved Newtonville Books from closing in 2007. Amazon’s stated ambitions have always been to become the Wal-mart of the internet; they began selling books only because books were already sitting in warehouses all across the country ready to ship. It could just as easily have been lawn furniture or lamps. My only beef with Amazon is their corporate sleaze in terms of dodging their responsibilities vis-à-vis collecting sales tax, bully-ing publishers into giving them exclusive, more favorable terms, which they need to be able to offer books at such a steep discount, hoping you’ll also buy a barbecue grill from them while you’re shopping. It’s hard to keep perspective, but it’s easy to remember that most people in the country don’t have an independent bookstore in their neighborhood. I grew up in Phoenix and the closest bookstore was a Borders that is now gone. To reach the wonderful Changing Hands in Tempe, I’d have to drive for a half an hour every time I wanted a book. So Amazon thrives for that reason. But recently Amazon has started to have a wandering eye: they regret spending so much money on a dedicated e-reader, it seems, and are now looking to be the world’s largest purveyor of data services, to compete not with Wal-mart, but with Apple et al.The quote-unquote rise in eBooks is of no concern to us. I know the headlines are startling, but if someone invented chocolate toothpaste today, the headlines tomorrow would indi-cate that sales of chocolate toothpaste are up 1000 percent, and so forth. I’m old enough to remember when audio books were going to be the end of books, and it settled at about 20 percent of the market, before being overtaken by new technology. eBooks look to be about the same percentage of the market as it begins to settle. My hope is that people who wouldn’t dream of holding a real book in their hands because it gets in the way of staring at a screen all day will become readers via eBooks. Then maybe one day they’ll want to see the real thing, much like seeing the Mona Lisa after glimpsing all those posters and t-shirts.

CS: What do independently-owned bookstores offer that chains or online sales do not? Does the dissolution of chains like Borders leave more room for independent book-sellers?

JC: I guess I’d say just about everything except selling books as loss leaders in the hopes cus-tomers will buy some other kind of merchandise. We treat customers as readers and engage in conversation with them as such. Also, we feel an independent bookstore should be a literary meeting ground for the neighborhood so we host three bookclubs, a writing workshop, and two or three readings per week. Plus, as every true reader knows, the browsing experience can’t be replicated online. When Borders first went under, people expected us to be gleeful about it, but in truth the world needs more bookstores, not fewer. As alluded to earlier, the real effect has been how publishers treat independent bookstores in the wake of Borders’

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colossal failure, and that effect has mostly been negative.

CS: What kind of physical space and character did you want to create for the book-store when you moved?

JC: We realized pretty quickly that we had the opportunity to design a store from scratch—the previous tenant was a real estate office—and so we hired an architect to help us with all we didn’t know about the hidden design involved in creating a comfortable retail space. We’d seen a picture of a front counter made out of books in Australia, and hired a carpenter to build one for us. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen books cut in half on a table saw; it was both painful and exhilarating. Mostly we wanted a clean and inviting place where the outside world could be forgotten for as long as readers want to spend inside. We’ve been told the place feels like a library, and that’s exactly what we were going for.

CS: How has Newton, as a specific community, influenced your shop?

JC: I would say the community inspires us more than anything. The enthusiasm is palpable and it translates into great encouragement, which is always welcome in an industry like book-selling, which is constantly under duress from all the other media in the world.

CS: What do you sense (if anything) from writers, in terms of their relationship to publishers and the industry in general?

JC: This is a painful question. Most of our events are with midlist, literary fiction writers and the landscape has definitely changed for the worse. It’s not a surprise that the big publishers, being owned by corporations, are under pressure to publish bestselling books, which means not taking a chance on little or more literary works. My wife and I both have MFAs, and come from the world of small publishing, so these kinds of literary works are close to our hearts and we do what we can to promote them. That said, there’s a sort of resignation on the part of writers who know that if their book doesn’t sell, they might be dropped by their publisher in favor of someone else who doesn’t yet have a sales track record, i.e., a fresh start for the publisher. It’s insidious and creates a level of anxiety for writers that isn’t conducive to working on the next book; but when you introduce a business element into the world of art-making, well, the two are generally at odds. My only hope is that there will be more and more brave people out there who will start new publishing ventures to give a home to the wonderful work that corporate publishers can’t take a chance on. It’s encouraging to see presses like Two Dollar Radio, Atticus Books, Outpost 19, Roundabout Press, Featherproof Books, Hawthorne Books, Yellow Shoe Fiction, et al. get some recognition for their efforts and find readers for

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their authors. We’ll need another dozen or more like them in short order if we’re to continue to have interesting works available.

CS: Is the struggle of community bookstores a result of consumer apathy or just con-sumer ignorance?

JC: Every year the Pew Center conducts a survey of the population and the latest study shows that only 17 percent of Americans consider themselves readers. I don’t think it’s apathy or ignorance, it’s a much worse problem: we as a society don’t value reading as highly as we do almost everything else. The next time you type u instead of you in an email or a text message, you’ll be proving my point tenfold.

CS: You have a history that involves teaching creative writing at Emerson; how has that background, or Post Road, informed your current work? What are the benefits or detriments to coming to bookselling from a literary background?

JC: I see the bookstore as a natural extension of our background in creative writing. Teaching aside (which mostly confirmed that students are interested in becoming famous writers with-out actually doing any reading), running Post Road Magazine and editing anthologies both build a sense of community, which is what we’re trying to do with Newtonville Books. We enjoy the company of other writers and the absolute best part of owning a bookstore is getting to meet writers and constantly having a new book on the horizon that we’re dying to read. There aren’t really any detriments except maybe the boring business parts of running a bookstore, but even taking out the trash seems more interesting than when I used to take out the trash at Pete’s Fish and Chips, my first job in high school.

CS: Running an independent bookstore is both a passion and a business for you. How do you reconcile the two?

JC: Honestly, we try not to think of it as a business and concentrate on how much pleasure it provides us and our customers. We hire bookkeepers and accountants to worry about the unpleasant things.

CS: A lot of people are concerned that the increase in online business going to “ruin” publishing—do you feel that same concern? Do you think the eBook is good for litera-ture and writing?

JC: My wish, as I said earlier, is that eBooks are somehow creating more readers. My two

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brothers are tech guys and not big readers, but all of a sudden they’re reading things in elec-tronic formats that have expanded their curiosity so that they’ve reported reading a book or two recently. I’ll take that. There will always be books simply because whether we want to admit it or not, we value written records, which is what books are.

CS: Does “the book” have a future?

JC: Whether books are an endangered species or not will depend entirely upon whether or not publishing can make the necessary changes to make their production more logical. The idea of printing an expensive hardcover and then waiting nine to twelve months to bring out the paperback (unless the hardcover is on the best-seller list, in which case publishers understand-ably try to milk every last sale), is changing and must. In Europe, books are published in three formats—hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market—all at the same time. That seems right to me. There are still people who care about hardcovers, but most customers prefer paperback. The publisher makes less on a paperback, which is the problem, but Wal-mart was built on the concept of selling ten things for a little less profit than hoping to sell one or two for maximum profit. That’s an idea that translates. There are a million other problems related to the manufacture and distribution of books, but the book itself will prevail. How readers will find them is the bigger question mark.

CS: What value does the physical artifact have, now that so much information and art is being preserved virtually?

JC: This question might highlight what I’m alluding to above about eBooks creating new readers. People Who Love Books, love books. There’s no doubt about that. It’s the reason bookstores exist. As much as others are trying to do otherwise, there’s no way to replicate the experience of reading a physical book and what the presence of physical books in their home, office, backseat of their car, etc., means to readers. Stripping the information out of a book and making a digital file from it for viewing is something else entirely. It might come to pass that the Millennial Generation never develops an affinity for the physical book having read most things on a screen, but let’s wait to see if that happens before we all start to mourn the physical book.

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