{"id":4093,"date":"2025-06-27T02:00:02","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T10:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4093"},"modified":"2025-06-26T21:40:05","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T05:40:05","slug":"principles-and-retail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/06\/27\/principles-and-retail\/","title":{"rendered":"Principles and Retail"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day on social media, I saw an article in SF Gate<\/a> about a San Francisco bookstore that decided it would no longer sell Harry Potter books. The store, Booksmith, told the reporter they didn\u2019t want to contribute in any way to J.K. Rowling\u2019s new foundation that provides funding for those fighting inclusion of trans people in single sex spaces.<\/p>\n

Since I saw the story first on on social media, there were, of course, comments, one of which said it was \u201csad\u201d that bookstores were \u201cbanning\u201d books.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s ridiculous, of course. A bookstore is not obligated to stock any book it doesn\u2019t want to, particularly since no bookstore \u2013 except maybe Amazon \u2013 can stock everything.\u00a0 All booksellers curate what they sell. That\u2019s not banning.<\/p>\n

Now generally most bookstores try to stock books that they think will sell well that are in keeping with the kind of store they want to be. A science fiction bookstore won\u2019t bother with nonfiction bestsellers, but might well offer obscure editions by a revered author.<\/p>\n

And many indie bookstores won\u2019t sell small press books because the publishers can\u2019t offer the return deals that big publishers give them. Both indie bookstores and small presses have tight budgets.<\/p>\n

But bookstores, perhaps more than most businesses, reflect the taste of the people who own and run them, so it\u2019s no surprise to me that a given store might decide not to stock books by an author they despise.<\/p>\n

What makes it a story is that they said exactly why they\u2019re doing it, instead of just not having the books in stock.<\/p>\n

This reminded me of an old friend of mine, known all over the state of Texas as Tiger, though his given name was David, who for a couple of years in the late 1960s owned and ran a record store in College Station, Texas. <\/p>\n

For those of you of the younger generations, this is before music came out on cassette tapes, much less CDs, much much less streaming. Vinyl wasn\u2019t nostalgia; it was the whole ball game.<\/p>\n

College Station is the home of Texas A&M University, which was a wildly conservative place in the 1960s, unlike its arch-rival, the University of Texas in Austin. A&M stands for \u201cagricultural and mechanical,\u201d which tells you it was a serious about farming and engineering (though it also had a good journalism program back in the day).<\/p>\n

Tiger had gone off to A&M because the men in his family went to A&M, even though he\u2019d been accepted at Rice. He lasted a couple of years, acquiring the nickname, and then gave up and started the record store right across the street from campus.<\/p>\n

Now record stores are very much like bookstores in that they reflect the taste of their owners. And certainly no small shop can stock everything.<\/p>\n

Tiger loved the rock music of the time. He had the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and even the favorite local band from Austin, Shiva\u2019s Head Band.<\/p>\n

What he didn\u2019t stock \u2013 what he refused to stock \u2013 was country music.<\/p>\n

His store was across the street from the most conservative state school in Texas in 1969 \u2013 an ag school to boot \u2013 and he wouldn\u2019t stock country.<\/p>\n

I think he made a couple of exceptions. I\u2019m pretty sure he stocked Dolly Parton. And perhaps if he\u2019d started his store a little later, after the cross-over of rock and country that blossomed in Austin in the 1970s, he might have widened his inventory to include outlaw country, especially Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.<\/p>\n

But that didn\u2019t exist yet when he had the store.<\/p>\n

It will not surprise you to learn that he went broke. It was not a wise business decision. But given the politics of the time, and some of the country music of the time, it was a principled decision.<\/p>\n

He was that kind of guy.<\/p>\n

He died very young, not because of his principles, but because cancer sometimes goes after the young for reasons that make no sense.<\/p>\n

I still miss him.<\/p>\n

After he closed his store, he traveled all over the state of Texas, usually showing up on a friend\u2019s doorstep at two in the morning with some great new music that they needed to hear. He was a gentle soul who followed his own path.<\/p>\n

I suspect if he was still around he\u2019d still have principles and that he\u2019d understand a bookstore refusing to sell a particular author\u2019s books because of who she has become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day on social media, I saw an article in SF Gate about a San Francisco bookstore that decided it would no longer sell Harry Potter books. The store, Booksmith, told the reporter they didn\u2019t want to contribute in any way to J.K. Rowling\u2019s new foundation that provides funding for those fighting inclusion of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,184],"tags":[702,1080],"class_list":["post-4093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-selling-books","tag-principles","tag-records"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4094,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093\/revisions\/4094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}