IndyOnly Dream

Abed one morning this week and half in/half out of sleep, generated my ideal bookstore. Two rules to get your book on the shelf: (1) It has to be self-published, and (2) you have to live within a 50-mile radius of the Capitol Building downtown. So Petersburg’s okay. Charlottesville, Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, nope. Only works that are self-published. Other than that, anything goes. If you have a book in the store, you volunteer a couple days a month (or however much you’re needed, maybe less) to run the register. An AI agent manages the books. There's a table in the back that just has coffee making equipment. An Aeropress, a pour over cone, a drip maker. If you want coffee, you bring it and make it yourself. I buy a dozen Krispy Kremes a day and when that dozen is gone, that’s it. An enticement to come and come early.

There’s a copy machine, where you can print your new work, staple it together, and put it on the racks, and everybody is encouraged to review and discuss new stuff. Capsule reviews can be scribbled on index cards and taped on the shelf beneath a book, but the rule is that the reviews have to be absurdly scathing (“a rougher toilet paper, this, though will suffice in a pinch”). A whole wall of poetry chapbooks, of course.

Some nights a little corner stage where people can try out their new songs or show their short film reels or read their poems aloud to hoots and hollers. A craft display space, too, a bare spot on the wall for one painting at a time, rotated whenever a new one arrives. But in every case, just self-published work. If your work wins a publishing contract, a whole ritual of being booted from the store. Vuvuzelas and bicycle horns.

The store might be named Indy Only or IndyOnly. Set up in a low-rent strip mall, but next to an ice cream shop, of course. Wouldn’t that be fun?