Ode
Ode Books is a publishing partnership between the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and Matthew Engelke, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University.
Under the guidance of the stores and Engelke, Ode Books celebrates book spaces and the book industry, publishing reflections on the cultural value of the book, analyses of the industry's challenges, and ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading. The short works appeal to denizens of the book world, as well as bookstore enthusiasts, serial browsers, and anyone interested in the flourishing of the literary arts within their communities.
As the country's first not-for-profit bookstores whose mission is the bookstores, the Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books illuminate the profound cultural value of bookselling, in turn encouraging stakeholders of all sorts to challenge accepted practices within the industry and in adjacent spheres. Their focus is the browsing experience, with both stores cultivating an inventory that encourages discovery and curiosity.
With Ode Books, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores nurture new conversations about the cultural worth of book spaces, opening up the forum to publishers, librarians, bookstore enthusiasts, authors, archivists, booksellers, and anyone with an interest in the flourishing of the literary arts within their own communities. These celebrations come in many forms, from personal reflections by life-long booksellers to critiques of financial models and proposals for radical approaches to inventory selection. Linking all of the works will be a celebration of the engaged, thoughtful reader who takes seriously the importance of spaces devoted solely to books.
Ode Books will publish its first volume, Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale, in 2024. Authors currently under contract include Donna Seaman and Sunny Fischer.
Donna Seaman is the Editor for Adult Books at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Seaman lives in Chicago.
Paul Yamazaki has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, the legendary San Francisco bookstore and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, for more than 50 years. A champion for national and global literature, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores, Yamazaki received the National Book Foundation's 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. He has mentored generations of booksellers across America. Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale is his first book.
The project is the next stage in the evolution of Prickly Paradigm Press, started in 2002 by Engelke and the late Marshall Sahlins, which focused on short, unconventional works in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, politics, and more. That press itself arose out of Prickly Pear, an imprint established in 1993 by the anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw.
Proposals can be sent to submissions@semcoop.com.
Related Titles
“All booksellers are the unsung heroes of American literature, but Paul Yamazaki is a superhero.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, Harlem Shuffle, and Crook Manifesto
If you love a bookstore, it’s whether you know it or not because you love a book buyer…and in the book world no book buyer is more legendary than Paul Yamazaki of City Lights. He has made the job into an art, an ethic, an adventure, and not infrequently an insurrectionary act.
—Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The incredible story of one of the greatest booksellers to ever live. …Like Yamazaki, I come from a non-traditional background as a reader. City Lights was a refuge and lightning rod for me as a bookstore, and Paul is a crucial part of that storied place which will always hold a place in my heart—and now Paul and his book will as well.
—Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars
A wry, stirring, profoundly uplifting ode to bookselling––complete with riffs on capitalism, San Francisco, jazz, even the meaning of life––from one of the underappreciated literary titans of our time.
—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True: A Memoir
Description: Reading the Room is Paul Yamazaki's love letter to the work of bookselling and an engaged life of the mind. Over twenty-four hours, Yamazaki leads us through the stacks of storied City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco; the care and prowess of his approach to book buying; his upbringing in a Japanese American family in Southern California and moving to San Francisco at the height of revolutionary foment; working with legendary figures in the book publishing industry like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sonny Mehta, and others; and his vision for the future of bookselling. Navigating building trust with readers and nurturing relationships across the literary industry, Yamazaki testifies to the value of generosity, sharing knowledge, and dialogue in a life devoted to books.
Paul Yamazaki has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, the legendary San Francisco bookstore and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, for more than 50 years. A champion for national and global literature, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores, Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. He has mentored generations of booksellers across America.
Read an excerpt from the book in the Paris Review or listen to NRP's Scott Simon's delightful reading of it. Check out the full US Tour schedule here and find an event in your city!