The Coventry neighborhood in Cleveland Heights has a business district with funky stores, good restaurants, some entertaining watering holes, and great people watching. During good weather, there’s qite a bit of pedestrian traffic.
At one end of the business district, occupying prime forst floor real estate, is an honest-to-goodness communist bookstore. No, it’s not a left-leaning book co-op … we’re talking about a good old-fashioned 1960s-style “power to the proletariat” selection of tomes, posters praising Lenin and Che, and the like. It’s something you would expect to see on the streets of Berkeley, not Cleveland.
Aside from the staff, there’s never anybody in there. They have almost no Internet presence. So … what keeps this place in business? Yeah, I know that profit is probably an afterthought, but even communist bookstore owners have to eat, don’t they?
Another thing is that just because they have posters of Lenin and Che, doesn’t mean that their clientele is limited to Leninists. They probably get anyone willing to expose themselves to alternative viewpoints, and these people’s views probably run the whole gamut from just left of Ronald Reagan to full blown Stalinism. I can’t speak for Cleveland, but I know that Milwaukee had a significant history of socialists winning key city posts. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Cleveland has a similar history.
Its worth is questionable, but they may get a disproportionate amount of publicity from the local news media. In St Louis there’s a bookstore named Left Bank Books that is basically, every subject that is anti-white-males-preaching-capitalism type of store. Socialism, gay & lesbian “studies” (?), feminism, minority studies, etc, etc. Many of the books are used. The place is cramped and poorly-lit (is that what’s called “funky”?) and the one time I went in and browsed, I didn’t have any idea exactly what they carried–but they had no “ordinary” books, like the piles of ones you see selling at Barnes & Noble or Border’s. I looked around for a half-hour and didn’t see one book that was interesting to my-(right/libertarian-leaning)-self. They have an “adult” section that when I checked, had not one erotic book worth stealing. The place had a regular stream of customers–you know people like doctors, lawyers and local politicians? Well not those sort of people at all. Scruffy-looking students, mostly. Lots of torn tattered clothes, and fashionably tattered, not “torn from working”. I noted a disproportionate number of sandals being worn.
… -And yet EVERY TIME there’s a local TV or newspaper story, they go to Left Bank Books and ask the owner what he thinks of this-or-that. And every time he says he don’t like big chain stores, and blah-blah-blah. He acts like the local giant stores are out to ruin him personally, he’s one box of Reynold’s away from wearing a tin foil hat. And the most ridiculous part is that he always insists that “we can order any book a customer wants, but there are many books we won’t stock…” … but then, the same customer can just drive over to one of the chain bookstores, and grab a copy there off a pile, and probably pay less at the register. As local news would have you think, he seems to be “the voice of local bookstores”, but the problem with that reasoning is that he doesn’t even attempt to carry books that would sell well. They might as well go to a religious bookstore and ask the same questions—>because after the initial visit, nobody looking for a “regular” book would ever go back to that store.
!
There is one thing I kind-of liked about this bookstore however: they only sell books, with a few small doo-dads on the checkout counter. You don’t have the entire front-half of the “bookstore” given over to aisles of semi-reading-related trinckets, like you do at the big-chain bookstores now. At them you have to maneuver through a miniature maze of girly-feelgood keepsakes like kitten bookmarks and miniature tomes on “friendship” or “sisterhood”.
:rolleyes:
~
My sheer guess is that it’s a “hobby-bookstore” owned by someone who does not depend on it for a living but who maintains it out of Leftist devotion, much like the old American Opinion Bookstores (which were owned by John Birch Society members who had other occupations).
They have branches in Cambridge MA, Berkeley CA, Chicago IL, and Manhattan. They’re the bookstore of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA and God knows where they get the money to run so many stores. Guilty rich folks, I guess.
Why just left of Reagan.
When I was young and stupid my politics were right of Reagan but I still read Marx.
Also - Reagan wasn’t that far right anyway.
That bookstore has been in Coventry for at least 20 years, and as vanilla said, it’s run by volunteers. There are no paid workers. It’s a collective and not considered to be owned by anyone.
Yeah, what’s with that attitude? Would you put quotes around Jewish studies or Black studies? Oh, I forgot, those wouldn’t be “regular” books.
Actually, I live very near that bookstore, and always wondered how they stay in business, even with volunteers. I always figured it might be a front for something.
I’m convinced any kind of niche market store can survive, if they’re well-known enough. They probably have people of their political persuasion coming from miles around. If they’re anything like Montreal’s Librairie Alternatif – our local communist/anarchist bookstore – they probably function as a meeting place, and carry a wide range of books on various leftist movements.
Hell, Victoria, British Columbia (pop. 326,000), can support at least three Christmas boutiques that keep their doors open year-round. That amazes me a little more.
They even have a sense of humor.
Awhile back they had a sign on the window saying Mao more than ever.
Any visitors to Cleveland (Hts.) are well advised to visit this wonderful street.
I used to live there and its diverse, and interesting.
Tommys restuarant has been voted best for years, ad you can’t miss with Mac’s Backs paperbacks.
This former resident of the Cleveland area believes your idea has merit. The longtime leader of the Ohio Communist Party, Rick Nagin, was constantly garnering publicity by writing letters to the editor for publication in The Plain Dealer (city’s major newspaper), as well as various alternative weeklies (Scene, Free Times, Cleveland Edition). Invariably, his missive would be followed by a sentence explaining his position in the local Communist ranks. He also seemed to run for office in every citywide or county election, and eventually even won appointment to the staff of Councilman Nelson Cintron. Whenever a profile of Nagin ran during a campaign, the article generally made note of the fact that Rick worked at Revolution Books.
Incidentally, the Clevelander* interested in spending the day running the gamut of fringe politics could, at one time, spend an hour or so at Revolution Books, then head to the West Side and check out the headquarters of the United White People’s Party. The headquarters featured a sign extolling GOD, COUNTRY, and RACE. Above each of these words were, respectively, a picture of a cross, an American flag, and a swastika.
