In Washington Heights, N.Y., Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria has created a pop-up bookstore called Recirculation, founder Veronica Liu reported. Located in a 3,700-square-foot space at 876 Riverside Dr., the pop-up primarily contains the collection of Tom Burgess, a former Word Up collective member who died from Covid last June.
In addition to the thousands of books and records Burgess accumulated over his lifetime, Recirculation also contains some of the collection of Steve Hahn, a sidewalk bookseller who also died last year, along with some new books from Word Up's main store, which remains closed for both browsing and pick-ups as it operates as a Covid testing site. The new titles at Recirculation, Liu noted, include children's, middle-grade and YA titles, and Spanish-language books.
"As we found when building Word Up the first time around, those sections have particular needs that aren't adequately met by most donations of used books," she explained.
Customers can browse at Recirculation, which is open three days per week and has plenty of windows that can be opened (none of the windows at Word Up's main storefront open). Word Up customers can also do web order pick-ups at Recirculation by request. Liu added that Word Up has the pop-up space until the end of May, and there are a lot of books to clear before then.
On the subject of the Covid testing, Liu said five Word Up collective members received training through NYC Health + Hospitals to administer Covid self-tests at the shop. Initially the bookstore was operating as a testing site only on Tuesdays, but after Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested on March 1 that the New York City variant came from Washington Heights, NYC Health + Hospitals set up their own testers at the store for expanded hours. Throughout March and April, testing has been available four days per week.
With more people getting vaccinated, there is some resistance to testing, but because "people can still potentially pass along the virus even when vaccinated," Word Up is trying to incentivize community members to get tested. They can take home a Word Up tote bag containing a free book, masks, hand sanitizer and sometimes galleys donated by publishers. During testing days, the Word Up team also sets up the pay-what-you-can outdoor book carts. If someone comes to the door and asks for a specific new or used book, a bookseller will sell it to them at the door, but shoppers still cannot browse freely.
And even with the storefront closed to browsing, the collective has kept very busy with online sales, virtual events (including the five-bookstore El Gran Combo), virtual book clubs and virtual after-school programs for first and second graders and middle schoolers. Looking ahead, they are working on outdoor events for the spring and summer, hybrid school book fairs and Word Up's 10th anniversary in June.
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James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, Calif., reported that the bookstore made more in the second half of 2020 than it did in all of 2019. In early June, as protests swept the country in response to the murder of George Floyd, the bookstore received an incredible surge of support and started receiving more than a thousand orders per day. The surge was so overwhelming, in fact, that Fugate and store co-owner Tom Hamilton decided to shut down web orders temporarily.
Using Ingram's direct-to-home distribution "really helped us," Fugate recalled, though the rest of June and July remained "incredibly busy." In the months since, things have slowed considerably from that peak, although the store routinely sees around 40-80 orders per day. Fugate noted that specific books, such as The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity by Justin Baldoni and A Promised Land by Barack Obama, have caused significant spikes in orders.
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| President Barack Obama visited with Tom Hamilton and James Fugate last week. | |
When the store first reopened to browsing last summer, Eso Won was open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. In September, Fugate and Hamilton decided to cut hours to 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., which gives them time in the morning to work on online orders. Only four customers are allowed inside at at once, and when the front doors are open there is "always a steady flow of people."
Fugate said that he has had both vaccine doses at this point, and Hamilton will be fully vaccinated in a couple of weeks. They might gradually expand to allowing six people in at a time, but they both still want to be very careful about inviting more shoppers inside. He added, too, that they've been very reluctant to hire anyone new, but additional staff would certainly help them expand operations. --Alex Mutter