Radical Booksellers Do More Than Just Retail

CHICAGO —A wooden ladder leans against a wall of shelves before a carpenter fits it onto a metal track. Erik Wallenberg, one of the worker-owners of Pilsen Community Books (PCB), passes him tools. It’s the day before the store will reopen in its new space.

When I arrive, floor-to-ceiling bookcases are filled and a few titles are faced out on the lower displays. Others sit in loose stacks, waiting for a home.

“We’ll see if we’re actually done setting up before the opening tomorrow,” Mandy Medley, another worker-owner, jokes.

Last year, she tells me, PCB’s landlord hit them with a 50% rent increase.

“We tried to work with him, but he was like, ​‘Welp, that’s the rent,’” Medley says. ​“We were like, ​‘We’ve been here 10 years, we’re a community institution.’ He did not care.”

Located on the South Side in a predominantly Latino neighborhood, PCB is the only cooperatively owned bookstore in Chicago. It also happens to be an explicitly anti-capitalist, radical leftist institution, with sections on such topics as Marxism and anti-colonialism. The store also functions as an organizing hub, classroom and neighborhood meeting spot.

Wallenberg recalls wrestling with the possibility of closing: ​“We really did feel like, if we closed, it would [leave] a bit of a hole. Then where would people go? We would lose something valuable.”

So the five worker-owners began looking around the neighborhood. Much larger, the new store will allow them to scale up community programming, expand their book selection and host bigger events with higher-profile speakers. The new event space, in the back, will double as a banner library, where people can take signs for protests.

“It’s really just a glorified attached garage,” Medley says, grinning, ​“But we’re going to make it very cool.”

When asked how they curate their books, Medley says they follow current events and take requests — rather than just tracking sales trends: ​“A lot of times people come in from the neighborhood, they’re like, ​‘I’ve read this. Have you heard of this book? I think you should have it.’ And we’re like, ​‘Oh no, oh shit. We’ll put it on order.’ So it’s a community project in that way.” 

For its first event in the new space, PCB hosted a book club in February for Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, partnering with Pilsen Unidos por Nuestro Orgullo (PUÑO), a local rapid response and immigrant rights group. The discussion connected readers with those organizing against ICE raids in Chicago.

“They’ve offered their space to us for panels, for meetings, for trainings,” says Diego Morales, a lead for PUÑO. ​“So it only just made sense to use the space to do a book club.”

For decades, radical bookstores have been places not just to browse, but to meet, debate and plan. In Baltimore, John Duda — co-founder of the co-op bookstore Red Emma’s — has seen book clubs evolve into ​“a major organizing force in the city.” He specifically cites one on prisons and policing that spawned an ​“anti-police, anti-prison, direct action formation that was active in the city for years.”

Red Emma’s also has a history of hosting jail support work and supporting imprisoned activists, such as Baltimore Black Panther Marshall ​“Eddie” Conway, by hosting call-ins from jail and book events for Conway’s writing in the early 2000s.

“We were one of the few places that was still talking about this guy who had been set up, framed and incarcerated for the rest of his life because of the organizing work he had been doing,” Duda tells In These Times.

While incarcerated, Conway continued organizing and set up prison libraries — work Red Emma’s supported. When Conway was released in 2014, the store hosted an event with him.

“A lot of people come in really, really hungry,” says Megan Berkobien, another Red Emma’s worker-owner. ​“Some people want to start something new. And part of our job is just to be like, ​‘Here’s all the work that’s happening. Here’s how you plug in.’ ” In her book The Radical Bookstore, urban planning scholar Kimberley Kinder explains how radical bookstores function as ​“counterspaces” for this type of community building. ​“Activist entrepreneurship is not about finding ethical ways to do business,” Kinder writes. ​“Instead, it’s about finding affordable ways to do politics.”

Doing those politics also carries political risk. Booksellers have historically been targets of surveillance and political repression, in part because of their status as places for political ideas. In one sting operation against a communist bookstore in Oklahoma City, officers purchased Marxist texts and then raided the store, charging organizers with ​“criminal syndicalism.”

That was in 1940, but political print culture still draws negative attention, decades after the first Red Scare and McCarthyism.

In the ongoing prosecution of Stop Cop City organizers, for example, prosecutors have cited zines and activist publications as evidence in sweeping indictments. After hosting a talk by activists opposing Cop City, PCB was included in an FBI investigation into ​“anarchist extremism.”

“When we found out that we were being surveilled by the FBI, it didn’t change the kind of programming we have,” Medley says. ​“If they want to surveil us, that’s fine. We’re selling books.”

“Our job as a radical bookstore is to just not care,” Duda says. ​“Our job is to be the place that’s unapologetically like, ​‘No, this is wrong.’ And we’re going to read books that tell you why it’s wrong, and we’re going to invite people to talk about them.”