New Initiative: ‘Bookselling Without Borders’
On Thursday, five independent US-based presses launched a new initiative, “Bookselling without Borders”:
According to their Kickstarter page:
Bookselling Without Borders is a collaboration involving five American independent presses: Europa Editions, Graywolf Press, Other Press, The New Press, and Catapult. Each of us has strong ties to the bookselling community as well as the world of international literature, and is eager to bring these worlds closer together in ways that benefit American readers, writers, and the culture at large.
The indie-bookseller coalition points to the problem of US readers’ insularity, and suggests “the answer lies in empowering one of our of greatest cultural assets: independent bookstores and the booksellers that run them.”
The group is seeking an initial $30,000 to take three separate delegations, each of 4-5 booksellers from all over the country, to three book fairs: the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Turin Book Fair in Italy, and the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico.
For the most part, this project to bring together US-based booksellers and international literature seems focused on languages and regions that are already fairly well represented. Yet it’s certainly a start at broadening the appetites of US book-buyers.
September 16, 2017 @ 9:25 pm
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
September 18, 2017 @ 6:15 pm
Thank you very much for picking up this story and helping to spread the word. And rest assured, this is only a beginning and the program’s ultimate goals is indeed to create bridges to markets that are currently less represented in the anglo-american markets.
September 18, 2017 @ 6:48 pm
Wonderful to hear! Hope to see your booksellers in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Cairo, etc. book fairs… all the way to… Zagazig? Hm, not sure they have a fair.