Book Post Partnership
We are so pleased to have been chosen as a partner for the book-reviewing newsletter Book Post!
Book Post is a by-subscription book review newsletter that sends bite-sized book reviews, by distinguished and engaging writers, direct to readers' in-boxes.
Book Post links its book reviews to a different independent bookseller every few months, to encourage readers to shop independent and to spread the news of the nation's vital book cultures. Recently, Book Post has partnered with Astoria Bookshop in Queens, New York, and Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina.
In addition to subscriber-only reviews by writers like Joy Williams, John Banville, Caleb Crain, and Emily Bernard, founder Ann Kjellberg also posts for the public about book making and bookselling in her Notebooks, and invites writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Ian Frazier, Lucy Ellmann, and others to contribute their reading Diaries.
Ann founded Book Post after working for thirty-five years as a book review editor at the New York Review of Books. She wanted to import the NYRB's founding premise - that books are the most powerful medium we have for engaging with ideas - to a new medium and a new moment, in which the very nature of facts and analysis is called into question and readers are profoundly divided about fundamental values. Book reviewing itself, the vital tissue connecting readers critically with books, is under threat, as local journalism shrinks and click-driven media prioritizes mass messaging. You can hear Ann on a recent episode of our podcast Open Stacks.
Book Post aspires to revitalize book reviewing in a new form, to grow the audience for reading, to nourish the informed conversation, and to make ideas-based journalism sustainable by paying writers, providing an alternative to click-bait and ad-based revenue models, and advocating for independent bookselling and other mechanisms for nourishing writers and writing.
Book Post announced our partnership today, writing, "Let’s think for a moment about browsing. The word “browse,” it transpires, comes from a fifteenth-century ancestor, brousen, that means to “feed on buds, eat leaves or twigs” from trees or bushes, from Old French broster, “to sprout, bud.” Browsing turns out to be like grazing—moving about oneself searching out nourishing new things—a bit higher up. It takes a while to get the payoff from browsing, it can’t be rushed. You can’t send someone else out to do it for you, or make a map for the effective browsing of your glade or dell. Who knows what might have sprouted yesterday during that warm rain? One thinks of the relationship between ruminate and ruminant.
Book Post’s fall partnership, one I have long been looking forward to, is an almost Brigadoonish physical manifestation of the nature of browsing when it comes to food for the mind. The Seminary Co-op bookstore was founded by actual seminarians in Chicago in 1961. They each put $10 into a collective scheme to reduce their outlay for scholarly books. Driven by the reading interests of its growing membership, the co-operative branched out into a legendary warreny space in the Chicago Theological Seminary’s basement, its layout so convoluted that visitors needed lines on the floor to find their way from dramaturgy to linguistics." Read the rest of Book Post's announcement here.
They are offering a free three-month subscription with your order of $100+ from our stores! Send receipt of purchase from Seminary Co-op or 57th Street to info@bookpostusa.com.
Book Post recently shared a video tour of the Seminary Co-op, hosted by our Buying and Content Director Alena Jones. Watch below.