08/21/22
Dear Friends and Readers,
As we approach a milestone of forty years in business, we’d like to offer our heartfelt thanks for your support and friendship.
Our anniversary party will feature a sidewalk sale of books, with authors, artists, local small press publishers, organic food and pasta from Chelsea Michigan, and music! We invite all booklovers young and old to help us celebrate. Please visit our Anniversary Schedule for details.
Special thanks to journalist Randiah Camille Green, for highlighting Book Beat in the Metro Times.
And thanks to boih radio journalists named April from npr’s Stateside talk show, who stopped by last week for an interview and left with an armfull of books. The interview is available online at: 40 years of literature and love.
It’s hard to express what forty years from inside a bookstore was like. When the Book Beat opened on August 28, 1982, there were friends, family, a few curious customers present, and a clown with balloons. Between then and now, the highlights were many, and the memories are mostly sweet. One of our favorite customer encounters on opening day was with Shirley Shreidell, a retired Detroit high school teacher of English, and reading addict.
Bookstores have a personality. They are a mixture of ideas shaped from the books in stock (and the ones they don’t stock). Bookstores are nearly always in motion, from conversations with the community, news media, and imput from customers, owners, and staff. Suggestions, discussion, browsing, serendipity, and chance are the currency of bookstores. They are constructed over time, a creation always in flux. A bookstore is an anachronism today, and a positive one. A placeholder for thought and humanity, unfit for speed or online illusions. Author Nicole Krauss wrote, “To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.”
Our focus from the beginning has remained on the youngest of readers, quality lit, multi-culturalism, and books on the arts. We believe that reading aloud from the earliest age and having books in the home is important for literacy, and a lifetime of learning. Public libraries are equally important, and they need our support. Make sure you have a library card!
We’ve been lucky and blessed to have a unique, talented, and diverse group of co-workers, and former co-workers who’ve left their trace on the bookstore. We recently asked some former booksellers to recall a memory or anecdote to share with us. Here are a few Staff Memories of Book Beat.
Tom Bowden once again writes up interesting small press reviews. Read more at: I arrogantly recommend… This month Bowden speaks with local author Lynn Crawford about her book Paula Regossy, a book with close ties to the art of Detroit. Crawford will be signing her books here next Sunday.
Our reading group was postponed in August and will meet on September 27, for a discussion of Gustav Flaubert’s Three Tales. Our reading group is open to the public. Please let us know if you’d like to receive updates and links to the discussion.
We hope to see you next Sunday, and if not possible—sometime in the future. Thanks for reading and have a great week!
Kind regards,
~Cary, Colleen and the Book Beat staff
BOOKSTORE HOURS & ORDERING INFO
• Our hours are: Mon – Sat 10 AM-6 PM, Sun: 12-5 PM, Subscribe to our newsletter here.
• Order Direct: for books or questions, call us at (248) 968-1190 or email BookBeatOrders@gmail.com.
• Book Beat Backroom is our store central with News Events and all things Book Beat.
•Order almost any book in print from our affiliate page at Bookshop.org.
• Order out-of-print and rare books at Biblio.com.
• Our webpage for local authors, signed books, and collector’s items: Book Beat Gallery
• For fans of Audio Books; most titles are $14.99 and your purchases will support Book Beat at: Libro FM, Thank you!
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighbourhoods.
– John Updike
Book Beat marchers in the Juy 4th, Oak Park parade, 2015.