A bookshop owner sold more than 10,000 copies of his 16-page zine, “How to Resist Amazon and Why.” At a critical moment for independent stores, he’s on a mission to convince readers to help fight the e-commerce giant.
If you know anything about the Raven bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, then you know that it charges more for books than Amazon. Advertising higher prices is an unlikely strategy for any business, but Danny Caine, the Raven’s owner, has an M.F.A., not an M.B.A., and he talks openly with customers about why his books cost as much as they do.
Midway between Topeka and Kansas City, Lawrence has one of Kansas’s most distinctive downtowns. The Raven sits on Seventh Street, half a block off Massachusetts Street, named in the eighteen-fifties by the nostalgic organizers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, who had come west to oppose slavery and then arranged for other abolitionists to join them in the years before the Civil War.
“The Raven was smaller then,” Kelly Barth, who has worked at the bookstore for twenty-four years, told me. “In those days, it was all paper inventory, and Pat and Mary Lou had these shelves of file boxes with hundreds of thousands of index cards with titles and author names, and you kept the inventory by hand.
Caine felt that way from his first visit to the store. Originally from Cleveland, he and his wife moved to Lawrence for graduate studies. She was a music therapist starting a master’s at K.U.’s School of Music; he had gotten frustrated teaching high school and wanted to study poetry. “I remember the first time I walked in,” he said. “There were these two women trying to cut this screaming, struggling cat’s nails, and I thought, This place is going to be great.
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