Meeting Minutes 120621

Annual Community Meeting
Seminary Co-op Bookstore
December 6, 2021
MINUTES

I. Introduction: Clancey D’Isa, Marketing Director

II. Remarks: Katie Parsons, President

Thank you so much Clancey. Hi Everybody. Good Evening. I can’t believe we’re here again. Another year away. I have the easy and pleasant task of expressing some gratitude and talking a little bit about the future, but really leaving that to Jeff. First and foremost, I really just want to thank all of you. It’s a Monday evening. If you’re in Chicago it’s incredibly windy and pretty cold. It’s already dark, and you’re on Zoom at 6pm to talk about a bookstore. So I’m just so grateful to you for joining. And of course that’s just a small slice of what you’ve been doing for the whole year. And for the long history of the bookstores as a supporter, as a patron, as a customer, as a member, all of these different things that we use to describe how you participate. You know it’s been a really hard year, and none of this could happen if you weren’t coming into the stores, donating money when we have the Non-Gala Gala and other times of the year. And really last but obviously not least is buying books, which is the thing we all love and share in common. So thank you. Thanks for being such dedicated supporters of the stores.

The other thing I get to do, because mostly Jeff will talk after this, but I get to say thank you to Jeff, who is, as many of you know, probably all of you know if you’re listening in tonight, just a really heroic leader, in an incredibly difficult time. It seems like we come through one challenge, and we find ourselves in another. It’s really through Jeff’s leadership that we’re all still here and loving these stores today. It’s been a tough year. We thought maybe last year that it would be the last year of the pandemic. I’m sure some of the people here didn’t think that that was going to happen, but I thought it would be over quickly. Jeff and the staff have managed to continue sending us books, even the post office stopped working, we’ve got supply chain problems that are affecting every part of our lives, and that’s just as true for the bookstores, and through all of that, through Jeff’s leadership, and through the hard work of the staff, we’re all still up and running. So I’m just so grateful, Jeff, for your leadership.

Very quickly too, I’m so grateful to the whole board, who have been so supportive and engaged this year and in the past, expressing gratitude to you. I know that saw Stu and Julie here - two of our board members who are leaving this year, and really leaving two board members who have completed their terms of service and will be leaving a big hole - big shoes to fill, as they have both really had an outsized impact on the stores over the last couple of years. For the last year for me personally, they have just been such an incredible counsel to me. I’m so grateful to you and your service. With those seats being emptied, we’ve got new members who are joining who I’m so excited to introduce.

1. Andrew Davis - a leading expert on education finance. He is President and Founder of The Education Equity Fund.
2. Aledia Evans - a Senior Director working on Corporate Engagement at Catalyst (and former bookstores employee, like me, so a warm place in my heart!)
3. Aziz Huq - the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the UChicago Law School

So welcome to the three of you. We are so excited to have you join the board this year. The future is bright - and Jeff is going to give us the details about that. Thank you again for joining tonight.

III. Report: Jeff Deutsch, Director

A. Overview

Thank you Katie, and thank you to the Board. I’m so excited about the new directors who will be joining. Indeed the future is bright.

I, too, must begin with gratitude in general - and really for our community and to our community. Thank you for your support, engagement, and well-wishes. We survived this year for two reasons. The first is you. Without your business and your financial contributions, we would not have had the resources to fulfill our work.

And the second is our exceptional team of booksellers, without whom we would have been lost. I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the work of our booksellers, with special thanks to Adam Stern, Alena Jones, Alex Houston, Amélie, Artemie Chang, Bryce Lucas, Clancey D’Isa, Jessica, Kaitlynn Cassady, Marina Malzoniya, Mark Loeffler, Meghana Kandlur, Nik, Rob Fuller, Sonja Coates, Stéphanie D’Hubert, Talia Wright, Thulasi Seshan, and Willie James. Excellent work.

It has been an incredibly special year with quite a bit to celebrate, despite the difficulties, but also quite a bit of loss. I’d like to pause for a remembrance of some of our most engaged community members whom we’ve lost this past year.

I do want to acknowledge that there were many people whom we lost, and that the lives we have lost have all made a tremendous impact on the stores, and I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you and to reflect those lives and legacies.

We have so many accomplishments to be proud of – not just our survival, which is its own profound accomplishment – but accomplishments we would have celebrated as extraordinary even in a more ordinary year.

I’d like to describe a bit of the work brought on by the pandemic. We re-opened the Seminary Co-op on June 12th and 57th Street Books on August 28th. While it might seem like we could open the doors as easily and swiftly as we closed them well over 400 days prior to re-opening, I can assure you re-opening the stores – especially in the midst of a still evolving global pandemic and while continuing to fulfill thousands of online orders – was as complex and challenging a project as I have worked on in over 25 years of bookselling.

In addition to reopening both stores, serving a newly reopened campus this fall, all while continuing to fulfill online orders, we had to figure out new systems to navigate the extreme challenges posed by our already highly compromised business model now compromised even further by rising costs, supply chain issues, and new and massive administrative burdens. We rethought and built systems for every single aspect of our operation. We Picked, packed, shipped well over 50k orders for well over 100k books, Hand-delivering packages to you and engaging our customers at curbside. Thank you so much for the business and staying with us. As part of it, we responded to tens of thousands of emails - and if I may, responded with grace, measure, candor, commitment, and kindness.

Clancey D’Isa, our director of marketing and events, created the idea of our Front Table catalog and, along with her incredible team, produced 16 issues which have helped create “armchair browsing for the socially distant.”

The one accomplishment - I’d like to pause - that I’m most proud of, and know you will be too, is how our staff took care of each other through it all. No one on staff contracted COVID while the doors were closed and we were doing physical work in an enclosed space. There has been a tremendous amount of sickness among staff of course, as there has been throughout, and an abundance of caution, which, in addition to the supply chain issues, and the slowness of everything, has made our work a bit more challenging, but we remain steadfast in providing a safe working environment for our staff and a safe bookstore for our community.

I cannot overstate how special this volume of booksellers is and how hard they are working on your behalf. It is awe-inspiring. Next time you are in the store or place an online order, please take a moment to thank them for their tremendous commitment. None of us take it for granted.

Sales were down 47% to last year and the only way we can get through the short term and even the mid-term is by keeping our inventory costs down, which means that our world-class browsing experience, while still world-class, will be a bit compromised. You have been so patient with us in so many ways and we can’t thank you enough. Many of you have already shared your gratitude and your support. That too is not to be taken for granted. And your continued patience will make a tremendous difference in our ability to get through the exceedingly difficult work yet ahead. Thank you.

We turned 60 on October 18th and began a year-long celebration of the stores’ history. We are clear on our goals – we are not interested in celebrating what was, but in creating what will be – and so our goal is to endure for another 60 years! To do so, we must be as creative, committed, inclusive, idiosyncratic, thoughtful, and visionary as we were in our first 60 years.

B. Outlook and Strategic Plan

So what is the outlook for our stores? As Katie said, there is definitely brightness ahead. There’s bad news and good news, and I believe too that the good news will prevail. We can only sustain our work without additional revenue streams and continued commitment from our community. As I mentioned, we were down significantly and we expect to see double-digit growth from these rock bottom results, but we won’t return to pre-pandemic levels. Even if we did, book sales would not provide enough revenue to sustain us in the long term, regardless of the volume. However, book sales are our core
business. On some level, the pandemic and the effects of it on our sales and on our business has merely accelerated the trends we were seeing pre-pandemic -- and we were already planning for it.

This past year, we have also focused on creating a five-year strategic plan to deliberately and thoughtfully move us closer to our vision of a not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. Our board, our leadership team, our booksellers, and
many of you have helped both form and inform the plan.

I’d like to take the rest of my time to share more about our strategy for the next five years and to invite you to help us realize this vision for long-term sustainability.

We begin with two observations about bookselling in the 21st century:

We have also identified four goals:

1. We want to ensure the bookstores endure for generations to come.
2. We want to professionalize bookselling, which includes, first and foremost, valuing the services we provide and the labor it takes to fulfill those services. In other words, proper remuneration for the work of bookselling to booksellers.
3. We want to do both of the above without compromising our mission, bookselling.
4. We want to persuade publishers, cultural and educational institutions, municipalities, and donors of our value and of the wisdom of our model.

In late October, Praveen Madan of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA, launched a two-day online gathering of booksellers, publishers, and other industry and community members. We were one of 20 or so sponsoring stores and Clancey and I both led conversations about the future of bookselling. We left humbled and gratified by what seems to be a nascent movement to reimagine bookstores. After completing the two-day retreat, our fourth goal of persuading the community - including publishers, cultural and educational institutions, municipalities, and donors - of our value and the wisdom of our model seemed almost in reach.

As the country’s first and currently only not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling, we have the responsibility of defining and establishing this particular model of bookselling. As we established our strategic goal, we began by defining the work of the bookseller. What does a good bookseller do? What is their value?

We recognize that there is a rhetorical problem here. If a bookstore is a retail operation, then the difference between what we pay our vendors and the price at which we sell the book is our profit, and, perhaps, symbolic of the value we provide. Great retailers buy cheap and sell dear. But our argument, and the argument we made by incorporating as a not-for-profit in 2019, and also tacitly, by not making a profit since the mid-90s – and determinedly persevering in our mission despite that – is that a bookstore in the 21 st century is a cultural institution, not a retailer, and thus its value shouldn’t be measured by its profit margins. Its value is in the work of bookselling: filtration, selection, assemblage, and enthusiasm. How might we shift the conversation so that our value might be understood and appreciated? And how might we then monetize the work we have been doing, without remuneration, for decades?

Let’s begin with two initiatives that are about rhetoric first, although they might too, eventually, be monetized: our publishing imprints.

In partnership with Northwestern University Press, Seminary Co-op Offsets will be a showcase for outstanding work in literature and the humanities, focusing on new translations, lost classics, out-of-print gems, and works highlighting the rich literary history of the South Side of Chicago.

And Ode Books, which is an imprint of Prickly Paradigm Press, an extension of the late Marshall Sahlins' work, will celebrate book spaces and the book industry, publishing reflections on the cultural value of the book, and ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading.

We expect our first Seminary Co-op Offset book to be announced early next year and our first Ode Books – volumes by two book industry legends: Donna Seaman of Booklist and the American Library Association, and Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Booksellers - to publish in 2023.

For years, we've put our curatorial expertise and publishing knowledge to work building book collections and providing author programming expertise for organizations such as the Chicago Humanities Festival and the University of Chicago’s International House. Our consultancy services will build on this work and the unique skills involved, formalizing and monetizing our offerings to provide solutions that serve our community with both efficiency and thoughtfulness, while adequately compensating us for their time and knowledge.

Our Podcast Open Stacks again was relaunched. While previous seasons made available in-store event recordings or author interviews—everyone from Ocean Vuong to Hanif Abdurraqib to Eve Ewing and more—our new season, brought you into conversations about the role of the bookstore in the twenty-first century, the pleasures of reading, the challenges facing the book industry as a whole, and, of course, the books themselves. Again, 123 counties have had listeners download Open Stacks.

Our Front Table Subscription is monetizing selection, filtration, and assemblage. The talent and curatorial strength of our buyers has lent to a program that furthers our goals to support books of enduring value, bring attention to diverse and nuanced titles worthy of distinction, and support our University Press and small press partners in the process.

We have built community and have established a reputation for delivering news about literary, scholarly, and small-press books, many by under-represented authors and under-resourced publishers. We have a tremendous reach, including through our newsletters, our social media platforms, our digital catalogues, printed catalogues, the podcast, and our blog posts.

In addition to exploring paid content for individuals via platforms like Patreon, which might include exclusive content, we also realize the opportunity to monetize some of the work we are already doing. Now, before I go on, I must say unequivocally, we will only work with advertisers whose values align with our own.

In fact, I’ll share one example that will, perhaps, illustrate our failures as businesspeople, even if it might speak to our success as booksellers. Harvard University Press, an incredibly well resourced publisher whose values align very well with our own, is responsible for publishing the Loeb Library, which many of you know and love, along with the absolutely incredible Murty Classical Library of India, a new series that will distinguish itself just as the Loebs have. We are well known for maintaining a complete collection of Loebs – in good times anyway. We have even built month-long promotions celebrating the Loeb Library and we keep a full case at the front of our store at all times. Would you believe me if I told you that we don’t charge Harvard University Press for the shelf space – a practice that Barnes & Noble has been implementing for decades – nor do we charge them for promotions – again, another common industry practice. But, even worse, every single Loeb book that we sell is sold at a loss. If they are sold to a member who receives a 10% rebate on the book, the loss is even greater.

Remember the rule of retail: Buy cheap and sell dear. So why shouldn’t Harvard University Press – who are wonderful partners – provide remuneration for stocking, promoting, and selling books that have a negative value as retail products?

You gave over $28,000 during our annual October fundraiser. We are doubling our efforts in community funding, as Katie mentioned at the outset. We have begun a more focused and determined fundraising effort, and we will continue it in 2022.

We have also established an avenue for recurring donations. We ask today to please consider signing up as a sustaining donor. at whatever level you are comfortable. You’ll see the link: semcoop.com/give on the presentation.

There are many ways to show your support. We appreciate anything you can and everything that you already do. But there are some things we want to call your attention to.

● We are a bookstore first. Buy books and be patient with us as we continue to fulfill your orders safely.
● Give a recurring financial gift. Please do so tonight.
● Buy gift cards, Front Table subscriptions, Children’s Starter Stacks, and bookstore merchandise.
● Listen to our Open Stacks podcast and subscribe through our Patreon account.
● Consider attending virtual events or in-person partnered event, and buy the book when you do!
● Help us find potential consulting clients or advertising clients.
● And finally, which all of you already do, and it’s part of the why you’re here: Act as ambassadors on our behalf within your communities.

Thank you for keeping us going, thank you for all the work that you do on behalf of these stores. They are community bookstores and they wouldn’t exist without you. As Katie said, the future is bright, and as part of the community meeting, we want to hear from you as well, so I will now turn the floor over to questions.

IV. Questions and answers

Q: Tell us more about the new imprints.

A: The first one that came through in the chat, “Tell us more about the new imprints,” I think that came through when I first mentioned them. But Mary Ann, if you are still interested, if there’s a specific question that I didn’t cover, please do let me know.

Q: I’ve noticed there are few books on the shelves. Why aren’t they fuller? When will the store return to its pre-pandemic fullness?

A: It’s a great question. I cannot wait until that day. To speak a little bit to the business of bookstores and bookselling and how things work, when you order books on our website during the pandemic, we don’t need to buy the book until you order it, and we buy the book with the money that you’re paying us to get that book. However, when we’re creating a great browsing experience, we need to stock 100,000 books on the shelf that may sell once every few years. In this space I’ve shared with you in the past that early 60% of the books that we sell in a given year are one copy to one person and that’s it.
Books sit on our shelves for nearly 300 days on average, which is more than twice the industry average for independent bookstores - good independent bookstores. So there’s a tremendous cost to that, and right now that cost we have over three quarters of a million dollars less in inventory than we did pre-pandemic, so if anyone wants to write us a check for that, we will have the stores stocked completely within six weeks. So feel free to send us that money. That said, we’re going to get there, and we’re determined to get there, and right now I spend a lot of time in bookstores, and I love most bookstores that I go to, I would still today, even in our compromised state, say that we are as good a bookstore, with as good a selection and a collection as exists. But it’s not the bookstore that many in our community know and love. So again I ask for your patience with it. But it is currently a financial question. We hope to have a completely restored collection - it will be dependent on fundraising - by next fall. Our hope is to start ramping up - well, we already started ramping up, we spent about $150,000 just in the last month to bring more books in. We continue that so that come April or May, when we hope there will be some degree of normalcy, whatever that will mean, that we can have a better browsing experience.

Q: Has your approach to the not-for-profit changed since the pandemic? Are other stores considering the model?

A: I think I spoke a little bit to that as well, as it related to the Reimagining Bookstores sessions. I want to pause on that just to say that we’ve acknowledged for years that the model for bookstores is broken. I’ve been speaking with you about this for years in these meetings. You can check the minutes from five years ago and nothing has changed. There are many booksellers, especially young booksellers, especially young creative booksellers, who are wanting to do the cultural work of bookselling that we already do, who want to devote their careers to bookselling. We have many on staff who want to devote their careers to bookselling, and there’s no viable way to do that. What we’ve known to be the case, certainly post-pandemic, it seems that there are a lot more fellow travelers, who are again up and coming booksellers, but also long standing book stores, legacy bookstores, who have been around for decades, who actually are recognizing now that they can only sell so many socks and cups of coffee and do so many other classes or to have a travel agency, as some bookstores do, or a wine bar, before their mission is so diluted that it’s just not worth it anymore, and frankly that they can’t actually make a living on the books. That was kind of the point about the Loeb library books. Of course many stores would want to carry them. There’s just no financial way to do it, or economic model to support it. And so this shift that the pandemic precipitated I think has
brought to the fore for many just how fragile our ecosystem is, and how we need to imagine new models. What was amazing about the Reimagining Bookstores sessions was that 600 people joined. More than half of them were bookstores, but there were also authors and publishers and agents and philanthropists and customers there to realize that this is about us. It’s about the world that we all want to live in. It’s not about booksellers trying to look out for themselves, it’s about community and civil discourse and what it means to build dialogue and what it means to have spaces that are devoted just to books. We need to pay for them. They’re not free. We need to invest in them. I remember when Amazon was trying to build their second headquarters, and Chicago was going to pay however many millions or billions of dollars to have them come as in many cities. We don’t need all that. We need 10 million dollars. A 10 million dollar gift would ensure that the next 60 years are taken care of. Why are we not investing more in, not just us, but these spaces - Women and Children First, Pilsen Community Books, Burst Into Books on the far South Side - there are so many amazing institutions. Why are we not doing more to put our money where our values are? And so I am optimistic that the Reimagining Bookstores model, or movement I should say, will help us get there.

Q: In prior years, I’ve been told that special orders are worthwhile for the Seminary Co-op. Is that still the case?

A: Thank you for the question, Chip. I should have said at the outset: If any of you have not purchased your gifts for the holidays, for Christmas, buy them now, or buy a gift card or a subscription or something like that because the chances of you getting anything right now - maybe there are some stores that can come through, but it’s difficult. So for you, if you have the patience, if you don’t need the book immediately, then yes: special orders are absolutely worthwhile for the Co-op. We strongly encourage them. But if you can’t wait, we understand. There are supply chain issues everywhere, so I don’t know
that you’ll get it quicker elsewhere. Certainly if you’re looking at an online behemoth that sells more than half the books that sell in this country, but is not a bookseller and does not care about the industry, or the ecosystem, or the communities that support it - think twice about how much time or money you might save. But we of course would understand if that made more sense.

Q: Question about the store’s status as a non-profit.

A: There’s a question that came through directly about the store’s status as a non-profit, and having the non-profit foundations on the Reimaging Bookstores call is important. I do want to reiterate - and most of you will know this because you’re devotees of the bookstore - that while we are a not-for-profit whose mission is bookselling, we are not a 501(c)(3). So we are established as a not-for-profit in the state of Illinois, and that means that we cannot take money in from many foundations, but not all. So there are foundations that we can take money in from, who don’t only support 501(c)(3) organizations, and we’re actually in conversation with one of them right now. We doubt that anything is going to come of it, but we think that that shift from seeing charitable giving as a wealth management strategy is potentially and hopefully becoming more of “How do we build the society that we want to live in? Tax breaks be damned, I’m going to give money to an organization that I care deeply about.” That’s our hope. We’re really determined to make it and raise the money that we need, in a way that is as candid and transparent as possible. I hope that answered the question

Q: What is the most useful way I can support the stores?

A: I think I spoke to that at the end and really one thing I want to say is that whatever you do is the right thing to do - whatever way you’re supporting the stores. It could be walking by the stores and coming in and saying thank you to every bookseller and walking out. That’s a great support. It doesn’t matter what you do. You could give us our 10 million dollar gift. Great. Whatever you do is what we need and is going to be the perfect thing. One of the things for us about being a 60 year old institution with well over 100,000 customers who have come through, is that we are a reflection of the community that we serve. This is why I think we’ll be successful. The institution predates everyone who works here. We all hope and expect that it will outlive all of us. It is established outside of all of us, and it’s established by all of us, and by all of you and by everyone who came before us. There’s something that’s really magical about that. There’s something that’s really inspiring about all of that. Because this thing exists outside of us, we expect that, whatever way we all tend to it and steward it, and give to it and take from it, that it just will continue to circulate.

Q: What are you reading and what is the Co-op reading?

A: Well, the Co-op doesn’t read. I don’t really know what that means; whoever sent that maybe can clarify it. What are the favorites of the Co-op? If you haven’t looked at our catalogues, they’re incredible, and they include a lot of staff recommendations. If you haven’t looked at our Notables list, which we put out every year, please do. There are books that have been overlooked, especially during the pandemic, and it’s a wonderful selection, so take a look at that.

I am in the middle of two books and just finished two books. I’m going to speak to all of them quickly, just because I’m a bookseller and I’m an enthusiast and I need to do that. The two books I just finished are both manuscripts, for books that are coming out, one in January and one in June. So mark your calendars. The one in January is a book called Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, about love and death and everything in between. It’s gorgeous, beautifully written, she’s a New Yorker writer who won a Puitzer for an article. It’s absolutely fantastic. The second book I read is coming out in June. It’s called Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun. It’s ostensibly a biography of Frank O’Hara, the poet, but it’s as much about her father, who was an art critic, and a biography, and what it means to live a life, and what we owe each other, what it means to bond over books or not, how we prioritize our relationships - it’s gorgeous.

And then I’m currently reading two books, I guess one of them is also about to come out. There’s a book by Sheila Heti, who’s a staff favorite, that was recommended to me highly by Kaitlynn Cassady, but many of her staff have read her and love her. I’m about halfway through it, it’s called Pure Color, and it’s about God inviting us in to be critics, and the three ways in which we’re critics, and how we then critique creation. It’s really well done. I love writing that can almost be precious but not quite. If you don’t love that, you’re not going to love this book, but if you do and you can love a gorgeous poetic few pages, then it’s amazing. And then the last book is called The Notes by Ludwig Hohl. It’s a book that Yale just put out that’s a collection of notebook jottings that are just fun, really fun.

Q: Would a wish list of titles or authors whose stock is sorely depleted or even disappeared help build morale or community? I just spent my first 3 and a half hours at the 57th Street location indoors since the pandemic. I had a wonderful conversation with Franny and bought 4 books, but left feeling sad, like I wanted to “feed” the shelves, if only prospectively.

A: Yes! Kathy! Three quarters of a million dollars. That’s no joke. Seriously. We know the books are missing. Like you, I walk through the bookstore, and I just see the ghosts of books that should be there, I see the emptiness. It is so depressing for those of us who know. Three quarters of a million will get us there. The lists, by all means send us your list, but my guess is that we already gave it on order, we just don’t have the money to buy it. Thank you for that. 10 million dollar check.

Any other questions, comments, do throw book recommendations in the chat. If we can, I would like to try and run that one minute video with Timuel Black and Lauren Berlant and Marshall Sahlins, because it was really beautiful. Then if there aren’t any further
questions, we can just close on that.

While we’re waiting on that, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for coming out. It's a really incredible showing. We can’t wait to have you back in the store next year. And hopefully we can do some in-store programming and all that, but to see so many of course come out - turn on your computers and zoom in - just to hear what we’re doing, it’s one of the reasons why I have so much hope for the future and why I think that our future is bright is that you all care so deeply about these stores. We, all of the staff and
the board, are putting so much effort into making these stores as special as they are, but without you it means nothing. With that I will close.

[Video - In Memoriam]

Thank you so much everyone. Have a good night.