Why Funky Little Bookstores Matter

(Photo by Mike Gooch)

As announced heretofore in this "space," your Humble Beitel-blogger spent a sizeable chunk of his weekend at the first annual Greencup Books/the2ndhand.com Bookfair, Bazaar, Punkshow, and All-Around Good Time.

Mainly I was hawking a grand total of $11-worth of Red Mountain Reviews.

But it got me thinking about art, commerce, and the necessarily grassroots nature of their confluence.

First, a little about Greencup from Birmingham's Black & White City Paper. The project of the place is certainly quixotic. Be an enclave of the avant garde. In downtown Birmingham, Alabama. A place that exists largely for bankers, doctors, lawyers, and their clients to tend to their business from 9-5 Monday through Friday. The rest of the time, there might as well be tumbleweed scooting through the streets.

Greencup is, therefore, a place you have to seek out on purpose. In that way, it is more like a church than a business. It is far more interested in process than products.

Case in point: the best thing Greencup has going for it is the feng shui. There's eclectic clutter, of course -- Dia del Muerte masks, old typewriters, clown paintings, not to mention racks and racks of weird used books -- but go upstairs in the late afternoon and the sun spilling through the westward wall of windows is nothing short of ecclesiastical.

Greencup is, indeed, a place for likeminded people to "fellowship," as they like to say in the megachurches down here. This weekend's bookfair was a case in point: writers, literary magazines, musicians, insanely small record labels, community activists, all-natural soap-makers (!). All came together to display their wares. Often -- too often -- these sorts of folks make their art and/or soap in insular enclaves, and Greencup is a place that can break those enclaves and serve as a breeding ground for cross pollenization. It is a cause. An outreach. A place to sublimate the individual self to something larger.

Or it can be those things.

The other feeling I get from Greencup -- and this is by no means an unpleasant feeling, but it does present an enormous challenge for the store and the people behind it -- is that it's a lot like my friend Robin's basement back in high school. Robin's parents let him have free reign over their basement because they didn't really know what else to do with him. In an unprecedented display of initiative and strategic vision, he turned it into a Greencuppian lair of idiosyncratic oddity. There was a ping-pong table and a parlor of sorts. There was a television, of course, and a strobe light. Because his parents never ventured down there, it became the gathering place for a gaggle of bored, shiftless teenaged boys who thought it the height of entertainment to pee en masse in a suburban backyard.

There were good things about Robin's basement: lots of memorable moments (the idiocy of teenaged boys is so often comic -- or at least laughable) and, by and large, it kept us out of trouble. But it was a place of last resort. Not one of us wouldn't have traded it for the company of a pretty girl or really anything else that held out the promise of feeling truly alive.

And that's the challenge of a place like Greencup. How to cultivate and enliven a progressive arts-oriented movement without becoming a stillwater for people and ideas that have nowhere else to go.

I, for one, am rooting for them. I buy books there and you should too, whether or not you're a Magic Citizen. Think of it as a kind of tithe. After all, there's way more megachurches out there than there are Greencups, and that's no accident. Like a lot of things, it's all about the collection plate.