Announcing Our Fall 2025 Partner Bookstore: (2) The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky!
Bookselling is like a farm
Read Part One of this post here
As Leah Bayens’s invocation of hardware stores and banks in her Wendell Berry Lecture last year suggests, Wendell Berry’s message of “cultivation” has a consequence for towns and neighborhoods, places of shared purpose, common work, and mutual obligation. Wendell Berry writes, “a part of the health of a farm is the farmer’s wish to remain there,” and “the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and realized a particular value in living there.” Mary Berry sees the work of the Berry Center as, in part “to encourage more pride in this country place.” As the work of the Burley Cooperative and Home Place Meat illustrates, farming societies rest on on cooperation and mutual support. As Wendell Berry puts it, community life places “high value on neighborly love, marital fidelity, local loyalty, the integrity and continuity of family life, respect for the old, and instruction of the young.” Many diagnoses of our current ills—here I often invoke the ideologically paired books Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg and Alienated America by Tim Carney, and their grandparent, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone—point to the deterioration of shared civic life as a source, which brings us back to the cultivation of our little garden here at Book Post.
It is fitting that Wendell Berry’s legacy comes refracted to us through a bookshop. We advocate for bookshops because they are places where considered ideas meet people in their daily lives, on their local streets, hand to hand. Just as Wendell Berry enjoins people to know where their food comes from, to eat in ways that support healthy ways of life and secure communities, local bookselling returns value to neighborhoods, nurtures togetherness, and feeds an intellectual culture that meets people in the specific, where they are, rather than as faceless participants in mass phenomena. Reading Wendell Berry’s work calls to mind so many ways in which ideas are suffering a similar fate to food: conglomeration of suppliers is reducing our available diet to a monoculture, easily susceptible to blight; digital distribution is severing producers (writers) from income and destroying writing as a way of life; the prevailing commercial structures disincentivize slow, careful, responsible work and promote cheap and easy product without regard for their consequences. And Wendell Berry’s answers point to the virtues of bookselling: it embraces diversity and eclecticism, not monoculture; it promotes attentive listening; it values outcomes (books) that are the result of long work and care and commmitment; it addresses each person as a whole, potentially practically informed, ennobled, and delighted by the full breadth of culture. Bookselling does not advocate for one path; it is committed to “honest, informed, open discourse” which carries “the truth’s heavy responsibilities and great risks,” as Wendell Berry wrote of honest politics. Wendell Berry’s advocacy for the farm applies to all places where we dwell and make together, and reminds us of the sources of polity and dangers to it. Many of these places, like the family farm and the bookshop, are on the thin edge of survival under our current arrangements.
Now artificial intelligence, like the industrialization of agriculture and the exportation of manufacturing, threatens a new wave of the kind of local alienation and dispossession described by Eric Klinenberg and Tim Carney as having been visited on our communities by mass dis-employment. So many of Wendell Berry’s thoughts about technology seem to anticipate AI: “the supposition, in a time of great technological power, that humans either know enough already, or can learn enough soon enough, to foresee and forestall any bad consequences of the use of that power”; “the machine is out of control by definition. From the beginning of the history of machine-developed energy we have been able to harness more power than we could use responsibly”; “the present problems of the world are the result, not of human stupidity, but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls”; “the prophets of the technological paradise have always assured us that once we have turned all our work over to machines we will become a nation of artists,” not be “saved from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely in order to be put to work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly”; “risk, like everything else, has an appropriate scale,” and “without the propriety of scale, and the acceptance of limits which that implies … power necessarily becomes inordinate and destructive.”
If [the culture] fails to bring the small disciplines of each man’s work within the purview of those larger disciplines implied by the conditions of our life in the world—then the result is a profound disorder in which men release into their community and dwelling place powerful forces the consequences of which are unknown.
He asks, pertinently: “Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do?”
What Wendell Berry offers us as a way forward is not sweeping answers to big problems, but answers on the scale of living. “The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way … one must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.” “I think the great problems call for many small solutions,” a “person who will undertake to help without doing harm is going to be a person of some complexity, not easily pleased, probably not a hero, probably not a billionaire.” The benefits to us of an encounter with the wild, he notes, is that it reminds us that we “move in the landscape as one of its details,” that “we are traveling through the workplace of a great creative force” and in it we can hope to find “a decent, open, generous relation between ourselves and the world.” This is precisely how we try to operate here at Book Post. The bookshop, the library, the small publisher, the writer, the reader—even the book review!—these are points of generosity and relation in which to begin to build a constructive civility. I am so grateful to have this opportunity to think with you in the months ahead about what this work has to show us about what we all might do.
This post quotes from The Unsettling of America and the essays “The Way of Ignorance,” “The Long-Legged House,” “Quantity vs. Form,” “Economy and Pleasure,” “The Pleasures of Eating,” “Compromise, Hell!,” “An Entrance into the Woods,” “The Unforeseen Wilderness,” and lots from “The Discipline of Hope.” Many of these are in the Library of America edition What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017 and the newish anthology, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. You can find the early essays “An Entrance into the Woods and “The Unforeseen Wilderness” in Recollected Essays: 1965-1980 and The Unforeseen Wilderness. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the latest novel in Wendell Berry’s Port William series, which includes eight previous novels and a number of short stories, will be published this October.
Become a member of The Berry Center to support its work.
Book Post editor Ann Kjellberg an advisor on a project that includes The Berry Center, developing nonprofit models for supporting bookshops in their work of community building. If your local bookshop has a fundraising arm, please give them your support and help us collectively to nurture a welcoming shared polity of ideas. Read our other portraits of partner booksellers to learn more about how bookshops serve as downtown anchors, nurturers of writing and ideas, and places of community.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her Notebooks on books and the reading life here.
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The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, is Book Post’s Fall 2025 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
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A screed so eloquent.
Marvelous reminder of Berry's deep wisdoms for these times. Thank you.