Introduction
Hello Reader!
We thought we might give folks curious about Book Post a few sample reviews to enjoy and a bit of a guide through the Notebooks we publish on books, publishing, and ideas, which by now one might say (gulp) pretty much add up to a book!
Each week we offer subscribers a little straight-to-you book review by a distinguished and engaging writer. Here are a few if you would like to have a look.
Christian Caryl among the Amur tigers
James Fallows on William F. Buckley
April Bernard on Colette
Padgett Powell on Wildcat, a film about Flannery O’Connor
Àlvaro Enrigue on Cristina Rivera Garza
Each review comes with a little editor’s note straight to paying subscribers from Ann, on recent news in books, publishing, and ideas. Here’s a recent example.
And our Notebooks dive a little more deeply into some of these subjects. For those looking for some navigation into our Notebooks, below is a reader’s guide.
We are also always partnered with an independent bookseller, to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. Read about our current partner, Baldwin and Co, here.
We do hope you enjoy Book Post and subscribe to support our project of maintaining a thriving books culture in a divided world.
With gratitude,
Ann Kjellberg
(learn more about us here and here)
A Reader’s Guide to Book Post Notebooks
On Publishing
Our Notebooks have tracked the consequences of consolidation in book publishing, its impact on what gets published, and what sort of ecosystems have grown up to publish work that falls outside its purview. We’ve looked at at some of the original publishers that came together to make today’s “Big Five” and the epic trial that turned the tide, preventing Simon & Schuster from merging with Random House in 2022. Also in 2022 we had a big Notebook on how romance pioneered self publishing, taking over for the vanishing drugstore paperback, and one on how the growth of self publishing has encouraged authors to build relationships directly with readers. We’ve considered the consequences of the reliance of American publishing on selling hardcovers to a small affluent audience and introduced some of the personalities (“gatekeepers”) who have shaped modern publishing and reflected on what gets lost when human choices are replaced by market forces. We’ve talked about the contracting market for nonfiction in a “low information” ideas economy and the consequences of consolidation in distribution, especially for small presses, some of whom we introduced in Meet the Small Presses. The pandemic supply chain disruptions brought into focus the off-shoring of book manufacturing and the effect of supply chains on book costs and availability, also the ways that books are made and how that determines whom they reach. We’ve covered the publishing labor movement and authors’ rights in the age of streaming. We considered the advent of the “sensitivity reader” and posthumously altered books. We’ve asked whether there is a route in the modern system for new work to come to the public, and looked at some efforts to create new avenues for work to be discovered. We’ve considered print on demand, the rise of audiobooks, and the forms of books that publishers send out ahead of publication, literary ceremonies, book clubs, mass read-a-longs, and the reality behind the recurrent lament that no one reads books anymore.
A visit to Spain got us thinking about the distribution of Spanish-language books in the US and serving the Spanish-speaking audience. Book-Neighbors looks at how European publishers benefit from mutual proximity and an interest in trans-nationalism, and Translation considers the economics of translation in the US. The government shutdown of 2019 got us thinking about government support for publishing and reading, and how different it looks in other countries, a subject we often return to.
Bookselling
Shopping local is a recurrent theme for us: one of our goals is to nourish local book cultures and supports for the reading life. In “Small Biz” we considered how “shop local” became a recognizable movement. We’ve looked at Amazon’s national “dating contest” to find headquarters, its malevolent effects on bookselling, and an innovative campaign to illustrate Amazon’s harms for book buyers, and how bookselling survived and thrived in and moved beyond the pandemic.
We’ve visited school book fairs, the history of bookmobiles, second-hand bookselling, bookstores in resort towns, English-language bookstores abroad, outfits that give books away, and the Scandinavian tradition of the Holiday Book Flood. A Bookstore Grows in the Bronx describes a quixotic effort to build a bookstore in the Bronx after the borough’s only bookstore, a Barnes and Noble, shut down.
Into the Heartland and Heartland Vistas record visits with the booksellers of the Midwest, building new audiences for reading, and Minneapolis was an real-time look at the George Floyd protests through the town’s booksellers. We considered the history of public-facing book fairs, beginning with the legendary Miami Book Fair, and visited two Southern book festivals,
Our portraits of our dozens of partner booksellers touch on a number of larger themes: bookstores as community anchors (Astoria Bookshop in Astoria, Queens, Browseabout Books in Rehoboth, Delaware, Community Bookstore and Terrace Books in Brooklyn, Gibson’s Bookstore in Manchester, New Hampshire,Greenlight in Brooklyn, Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Mac’s Backs in Cleveland, Ohio, Malaprop’s in Asheville, North Carolina, Northshire Books in Manchester, Vermont and Saratoga Springs, New York, Page & Palette in Fairview, Alabama, Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine, Raven Books in Lawrence, Kansas, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi); Black bookselling as a form of advocacy and community-building (Black Stone Bookstore and Cultural Center in Ypsilante, Michigan, Source Booksellers in Detroit, Baldwin & Co in New Orleans); influential models (City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books in Chicago, Tertulia), religious bookselling (Dragonfly and the Silver Birch in Decorah, Iowa), and bookstore-publishers (Deep Vellum Books in Dallas).
Libraries
We’ve visited librarians responding to community crisis, considered bookseller-library partnerships, and covered prison libraries and reading restrictions.
In a series of pieces we’ve considered libraries as a core national infrastructure of ideas: library broadband funding as a lifeline for reading and learning, the impact of the 2024 elections on the future of libraries, the dismantling of the federal Institute of Library Services as an attack on our cultural heritage, and the attacks on national libraries and musuems as a threat to the preservation of history. In many posts, including one on the mechanisms of “local control,” we’ve reviewed the expansion of content restrictions on library access.
Writing and Journalism
We also often return to the contraction of journalism, particularly local journalism, and its consequences for the state of reading. Bad News Day considered the collapse of traditional outlets. Making & Unmaking Magazines considers the implications for reading when articles are mostly read freestanding on the internet. We’ve looked into the state of large legacy media enterprises owned by tycoons, journalists threatened for their coverage; the advent of real time coverage in war; and the harms to journalists, writers, and academics in Gaza. We considered the idea of a revived Federal Writers Project.
And we’ve looked at book reviewing itself on the occasion of closure of Bookforum and the revival of the freestanding book section at The Washington Post. We’ve concidered the temptations of list-making. We asked whether social media “influencers” are taking the place of critics and what that would mean, and considered the conflation of person and “brand” that comes with the influencing “creator economy.”
Technology
In an early piece, The Writer of the Future, we considered how digital communications challenge the conditions of writing. The Facebook Files, Writing, and Journalism considers the testimony of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and the implications of her disclosures for journalism and writers. “Hived Mind” takes on the shift in social media toward platforms that do not “link out” to fuller sources (Instagram, TikTok). Thought Plutocrats considers Elon Musk’s interventions at Twitter and the role of autocratic decision-making in how we receive information. “Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” appraises Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for “the metaverse.” “A Notebook on Notes” considers how our own platform Substack is and is not like social media.
We’ve had several posts on content moderation and its implications for the distribution of journalism. “Mr. Smith and Goliath” considers politically motivated lawsuits against content moderation; “Immoderate” looks at the dismantling of efforts to curtail the spread of disinformation online; “Letting the Dogs Out” examines Mark Zuckerberg’s 2025 decision to suspend protections against disinformation on Meta.
In January of 2023 we considered the impact of the arrival of ChatGPT a few weeks before on writing and reading, and a year in we returned to examine how writing and publishing were addressing the emergence of AI. “Exercising Intjelligence” addresses the shake-up at OpenAI and the fragility of governance in AI development.
Education
We’ve looked at the state of higher education in the humanities, the fate of the classroom library, the persistence of segregation amidst increasingly localized education policy, and attacks on advanced placement curricula.
In two posts we considered efforts publicly to memorialize history and how we process historic culpability in thinking about culture.
Ann
I’ve spoken to our readers directly from time to time, once on the cusp of taking a pause to plan Book Post’s future, and then upon our return, once on editing during lockdown and once to announce our existence. I’ve also written about Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, Adam Zagajewski, grammar, the brat pack, and the dawning ephemeralist movement.
In our early days our Notebooks (2018–2020, see dated entries under me) were more eclectic, covering news of the week, and from January 20, 2020, to December 1, 2023 each review was accompanied by a short “Book Notes” section from me at the end.
And there you have it!