A Conference Report by Carla Schäfer (University of Münster)
Publications authored by Queers and People of Color, as well as the institutions that disseminate them, have in recent years increasingly become the target of right-wing culture wars strategies. Within Anglophone book studies, these developments, and especially the manifold strategies of resistance enacted through print cultures and literary institutions, have prompted sustained scholarly engagement. Works such as Kimberley Kinder’s The Radical Bookstore (2021), Kristen Hogan’s The Feminist Bookstore Movement (2016), and the interventions of activist bookseller Danny Caine are only a few contributions to this lively discussion.
This year’s conference of the Bookselling Research Network, held from September 12th-14th at the English Department of the University of Münster under the title Bookselling as Resistance, situated itself within these debates by focusing on bookstores as sites of community building, alternative knowledge(s), and political mobilization.
The conference opened with a lecture by the local antiquarian Michael Solder. The prominent placement of his talk underscored the close interweaving of theory and practice, which proved central to the debates of the following days, and which is rarely encountered in the humanities with such consistency. In his talk, Solder drew a line from the medieval libri catenati—books fastened with chains and locks—to the small-edition diaries of Anne Frank printed in the Netherlands after the war, and on to the role of antiquarian bookselling today. Antiquarian bookshops, he argued, are not merely repositories for forgotten books but can actively raise awareness for present-day forms of erasure and censorship.
Kristen Highland’s lecture likewise addressed forgotten resistant booksellers and the strategies and pitfalls involved in rendering them visible. Deploying digital humanities methods, Highland presented a new map of New York’s nineteenth-century book trade, which included, the first Black-owned bookstore in the United States. Operated by David Ruggles, the shop functioned as a meeting point for the abolitionist movement and has thus been repeatedly subjected to hostility, including arson attacks.
Repeatedly the discussion returned to a perceived lack of archival material, which continues to impede systematic research into bookselling practices, and to the importance of persuading booksellers to document their labor. In their lecture on the history of Edinburgh’s Radical Bookfair Christina Neuwirth provided an example of painstakingly documented resistant bookselling practices: The publication A Meeting of the Continents. The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books 1982–95 edited by Sarah White, Roxy Harris and Sharmilla Beezmohun (2005). Both in the publication and in Neuwirth’s remarks, concrete practices of resistance took center stage, making clear that these often have less to do with the dissemination of grandiose ideas but rather with tireless, usually unpaid organizational and care work. Illustrative examples included reminders to purchase red tablecloths, the provision of shelter from racist mobs, and the everyday necessity of offering bathroom access to trans people in response to recent anti-trans legislation in the UK.
Anke Vogel, in her lecture on the history of leftist bookselling in West Germany, examined the conditions under which it might still exist today as part of a counterpublic. Vogel further recalled police raids directed against leftist booksellers, situating these within broader patterns of repression. In this context one can also situate Sarah Pyke’s research on Operation Tiger, during which in 1984 more than 140 titles of queer literature were confiscated en route to the London bookstore Gay’s the Word—a striking example of how resistant bookselling was deliberately criminalized and suppressed. Despite the centrality of such experiences, more recent examples of state violence against booksellers—such as the case of Palestinian booksellers Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, which made headlines earlier this year—unfortunately went unmentioned at the conference.
At the close of the first day, Tora Åsling presented the latest Industry Insights Report of the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF) and thereby bringing contemporary experiences of booksellers into focus. The report on the topic of censorship and freedom of expression took as its point of departure the increase of hostile attacks on booksellers in the form of vandalism and intimidation.
Some of the experiences mentioned in the report were echoed by the owners of bilingual bookstores in Berlin interviewed by Inge Orlowski. Further structural challenges they encounter are the absence of state cultural funding, rising rents, and deficient import infrastructures. Remarkably, some interviewees also reflected on the literary industry’s own complicity in processes of gentrification.
An invitation to think more deeply about urban displacement and to decenter middle-class notions of bookselling was extended by Kanupriya Dhingra, whose lecture examined the criminalization and eviction of the booksellers of Old Delhi’s Sunday Book Bazaar. Her analysis illuminated how, under the guise of regulating informal cultural economies, authorities enact processes of urban cleansing, spatial restriction, and censorship, and how booksellers responded through localized practices of resistance.
In summation, the organizers of the conference Chandni Ananth, Ellen Barth, and Corinna Norrick-Rühl created not only a warm and invigorating space for discussion but also a remarkable program which provided manifold points of departure for renewed reflection on the ways in which literary texts and institutions can resist authoritarian developments, while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the conditions of possibility for literary resistance and autonomy under capitalism.
Bookselling as Resistance? © 2025 by Carla Schäfer is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0
