Wednesday, January 27, 2016 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 // The Statement 
 
5B

I

n an era where you can have a banana slicer, 
glow in the dark toilet paper, sugar-free 
gummi bears, pajamas and the textbook 

you need for class dropped on your doorstep 
in two days via Amazon, it’s hard to believe 
that the company started as a warehouse only 
able to hold a couple hundred books at a time. 
Considering that book sales currently make 
up only 7 percent of the company’s revenue 
annually, how is it possible that a business that 
can only in a small part identify as a “bookseller” 
has, for many people, replaced the need for 
physical bookstores? 

The answer may life in the fact that, although 

the origins of Amazon were in book distribution, 
CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos’ initiative was 
never a seed planted by belief in the inherent 
value of the written word.

In an article for The New Yorker, George 

Packer writes that Bezos “quit his job at a 
Manhattan Hedge fund and moved to Seattle to 
found a company that could ride the exponential 
growth of the early commercial internet.”

I’ve never been a stranger to the independent 

bookstore. As the daughter of two writers 
and a Brooklyn, N.Y. native it was a seemingly 
unavoidable encounter. From pulling “Cat in 
the Hat” and “The Snowy Day” off the bottom 
shelves of Book Court in Carroll Gardens to 
spending hours tucked away in the cozy back 
corner, or in the backyard garden of Park Slope’s 
Community Book Store inhaling anything from 
“Captain Underpants” to “The Princess Diaries” 
— these were sure signs of early literary promise.

My teen angst led me to the better-known 

Strand bookstore. My twin brother Jack and 
I would narrowly avoid Union Square in mid-
December and slip into Strand in pursuit of 
reasonably priced and thoughtful holiday gifts 
for our bookworm family members. We’d end up 

splitting off to our respective sections — he into 
music biographies or world records books, and 
I into the poetry section or scrounging through 
the hodge-podge of $1 gently used gems. 
Although I spend very little time in New York 
these days, I’ll still return to Strand to stumble 
upon a secondhand copy of some classic that still 
smells the way books should.

This is not to say, I, as a 21-year-old on a 

college-student budget, with a deep love for the 
written word, buy all my books at cute mom n’ 
pop shops that carry the best writers you’ve 
never heard of without ever lurking into the 
behemoth that is the world of Amazon or Barnes 
& Noble.

I spent a good portion of my childhood in 

Barnes & Noble, too, but in retrospect these 
moments were different. There weren’t really 
any comfy chairs, and every B & N I’d been to had 
the same aesthetic of light colored wood, dark 
green and neutral-colored woodland animals 
painted onto the walls of the kids’ section. 
Barnes & Noble was where I’d pull out a stack 
of teen magazines that I wasn’t really supposed 
to be reading, or wonder why it seemed that so 
many of the books on display bore the same titles 
as the multiplex cinema marquees with images 
of their conventionally attractive protagonists 
gracing the covers. In my humble opinion, 
the covers had looked just as good the way the 
illustrators had first printed them.

I will still, shamefully, admit that I bought or 

rented all of my books on Amazon this semester 
and last semester even purchased a book for 
$2.99 that I needed for class as an e-book. 
Amid the threats I hear about the perishing of 
the physical book and the worldwide takeover 
of Amazon and e-readers galore, I decided to 
investigate a successful independent bookstore 
in my current stomping grounds.

Ann Arbor’s own Literati, located on East 

Washington Street, has come to characterize 
this phase of my life the way Book Court did my 
toddlerhood and Strand my adolescence. I can 
often be found studying in The Espresso Bar, 
a café that rests above the bookstore. Studying 
might mean nursing a latte and choosing to read 
what my roommate has lovingly coined “one of 
those skinny poetry books” pulled from a shelf 
downstairs while I use my PSYCH 240 textbook 
as a glorified paperweight/armrest.

Literati is one of those bookstores that feels 

alive. From the steady stream of readings to the 
corner location with a big window to let light 
in to the handwritten book recommendations 
punctuating the shelves to the click-clack of 
the available typewriter downstairs, the nearly 
3-year-old book haven buzzes.

I chatted over coffee with Hilary Lowe 

Gustafson and Michael Gustafson, the young 
married couple who own Literati. I asked them 
to look back and reflect on the bookstore’s origin 
story.

In 2011, before opening Literati, they were 

living in Brooklyn where Hilary worked at 
Simon & Schuster Publishing house and part-
time at independent Green Light Bookstore. 
Michael was working as a video artist and 
freelance writer, and the two bonded over a love 
of literary culture, which included independent 
bookstores as a cornerstone of their social lives 
and courtship. 

Hilary and Michael saw Green Light as one of 

their inspirations for opening Literati.

“They started in 2009, after the Kindle and 

after all that and still thrived regardless, so 
they were kind of our model community center 
bookstore,” Hilary said.

Both owners are Michigan natives. Hilary 

is from Ann Arbor and Michael from Lowell, 

Michigan. When Borders closed both in 
Ann Arbor and nationally in 2011, the couple 
saw an opportunity to fill the gap in Ann 
Arbor’s independent bookselling community, 
specializing in new books.

“As part of our social life in New York, we 

would go to bookstores,” Hilary said. “It just 
seemed like a good community space … we 
always talked about what it would be like to own 
a store ourselves.”

When asked about the place of independent 

booksellers in the wake of retailers like Amazon 
and the advent of e-readers, Hilary and Michael 
shared insight into the integrity and unparalleled 
experience of independent bookstores.

“There are more bookstores in the last three 

years opening than closing so we view that as a 
trend, a return to independent bookstores after 
many closed throughout the 2000s,” Michael 
said, identifying the notion that the indie 
bookstore is on the decline as something of a 
fallacy.

The 
owners 
defended 
their 
bookstore 

wholeheartedly, standing by the integrity of 
books, suggesting that a megastore like Amazon 
is unable to recognize the inherent value of 
a book the way an independent business that 
carefully handpicks its contents and creates a 
holistic book-buying experience does.

“We don’t view Amazon as a competitor 

because the product they’re offering is different,” 
Hilary said. “Yeah, they offer a book, but they 
don’t offer a space to explore and browse and 
have whimsy in the same way you have in our 
store.”

“I think that people purchase things online 

that they know that they want, but bookstores 
allow customers to browse and find things 
they didn’t necessarily know that they wanted 
and allow customers a chance to surprise 

themselves,” Michael said.

Whimsy, surprise, chance — the owners spoke almost as if 

the bookstore is an enchanted forest or arcade of sorts. What I 
think they were getting at is a space that engages actively with the 
community, that it’s part of something that Hilary doesn’t believe 
larger booksellers get the opportunity to do.

“You can read reviews of a million people you don’t know, or 

you can come to a bookstore and get to know the staff and find 
someone on the staff that you really love the reading tastes of and 
have a dialogue about that,” Hilary said.

I silently admited that reading the handwritten staff 

recommendations in the store is less daunting than scanning 
through the seemingly infinite reviews on Amazon — it doesn’t 
seem like too many internet trolls frequent the store, but I could 
be mistaken.

Hilary and Michael also highlighted the longevity and novelty 

of the physical book, speaking with a reverence that is not 
necessarily felt toward multi-decade-old e-readers or laptops. We 
discussed the value of electronics when compared to books.

“They (electronics) lose their value and their purpose in a way 

that a book doesn’t over time,” Hilary said. 

“Yet they’re so expensive,” Michael added.
Michael also touched on the bookstore’s logo — a typewriter.
“Our logo is a typewriter that was based on a model my 

grandmother gave me and it was my grandfather’s typewriter 
from the 1930s; it still works,” he said. “I inherently don’t believe 
that many of the e-reading devices in 80 years from now will 
work. I can browse her bookshelves and find books from 100 years 
ago and still read them. I inherently believe in physical paper 
books being long-lasting, durable products that will be around for 
hundreds of years.”

Keeping with the typewriter anecdote, it’s important to note 

that in the basement section of Literati, where nonfiction books 
are housed, there is a maroon Olympia typewriter available for 
anyone to use. It wears a typewritten sign that says, “Please be 
gentle with me. I’m old.”

It’s clear that there are emotional values and family histories 

tied up in the business. Belief in the book is sustained with fervor.

“I have a book that was given to me on my 21st birthday and 

the little inscriptions are handwritten in there,” Michael said. 
“That’s meaningful to me, more than receiving a gift certificate 
to Amazon. I think it’s just inherently believing in the future of 
that, that made us both want to start the store and made us want 
to keep going.”

Much of Literati’s success has depended on their engagement 

with other small businesses and nonprofit groups in the area, as 
well as their robust events calendar. For example, The Espresso 
Bar subleases the second floor of the building from Literati. It 
provides both businesses with larger space for people to read, 
chat and work. It also serves as a spot for the bookstore to seat 
audiences during readings and other literary events.

“They needed more space and we needed more space and 

we don’t know coffee,” Michael said. “We know books and we 
wanted a coffee shop but we didn’t have the expertise to do it so 
we partnered with some of the best coffee baristas in town. It’s 
been successful thus far.”

The coffee shop and bookstore work in healthy symbiosis. The 

relaxing atmosphere of browsing the shelves is well supplemented 
by a caffeine fix, and for coffee lovers who come to The Espresso 
Bar, the spattering of signed new releases upstairs might be a 
happy accident.

Hilary and Michael have also collaborated with organizations 

such as Wolverine Press, a printing press run out of the University, 
as well as other local and independent publishers, furthering a 
commitment to community involvement and building healthy 
relationships with local retailers. They also collaborate with 
the University’s English department through the Zell Fellows 
Reading Series.

“We try to work with a lot of University folks who have their 

own books out, especially in the poetry department,” Michael said.

Literati even collaborated with a group of Engineering students 

on a project, an example of one of the ways the store seeks to build 
a relationship with the University.

“We had a group of Engineering students use us for one of their 

projects to help us figure out ways to better make our store more 
efficient because as bookstore people we’re not the most efficient 
people sometimes. That was awesome because it allowed them to 
get some insight into how a small business works and we got the 
expertise of them as students,” Hilary said.

Hilary and Michael started Literati out of a love for the town 

and a desire to contribute to its ethos of successful independent 
businesses.

“We do it because we love this town and we want to make it 

more vibrant,” Hilary said. “By partnering with other people you 
reach a broader base. People can do something creative that may 
not have been done before.”

“It takes a village to raise a bookstore,” Michael added.
He continued this with an analogy that compares the 

cultivation of the Literati community to the experience of raising 
a child. It seems fitting, as the bookstore was born shortly before 
the owners got married.

“In the first six months, you’re just trying to make sure that 

the child survives,” he said. “It’s a lot of sleepless and long nights 
and worry and kinda freakin’ out and then it gets easier, and right 
now this bookstore is sort of walking and talking and it’s getting 
there and now instead of survival, we’re getting more into the 
personality stage, doing more with the community and becoming 
better community members.”

I left with an admiration for the ambition and integrity of the 

store, and believe in the magic and importance of independent 
bookstores, but I am still left with questions, reluctant to reduce 
my interest in the economics of the bookselling to a polarizing 
debate that pits the Amazons of the world against the Literatis.

Having a friendly and familiar local bookstore like Literati to 

linger and explore is a treasure, but what about communities that 
are limited in this respect and must rely on Amazon to read books 
they want to read?

Maybe putting books alongside video games or hard-to-find 

snack foods can draw in an audience that otherwise wouldn’t 
have much of an interest, but what does the commodification of a 
book do for writers who, as Packer puts it, are put “under pressure 
to prove that their work produced sales?”

Maybe the world of commercial book sales is not even in the 

same ballpark as the independent bookstore model. According 
to Business Insider, Amazone tends to pursue detail-oriented 
introverts who generally lacked well-developed interpersonal 
skills as employees, a personality type that would most likely not 
facilitate success in a social and community-based institution like 
Literati.

Navigating the book world is complicated. It can force readers, 

writers, business owners, artists, educators and editors to 
question the benefits or obstacles in the evolution of bookselling. 
It asks us to wonder what these changes suggest about the way we 
value the creation and production of books. I am grateful to attend 
school in a place where great literary culture is accessible. There 
are bookstores that have allowed me to feel like the excitement 
and spontaneity of discovering books and sharing that with other 
people is alive and well. It gives me hope for those who lead lives 
as artists, writers and educators who depend on the power of the 
printed word and know what I mean when I talk about that nice 
“old book” smell.

Literati 
and the 
renaissance 
of 
independent 
bookselling

By Maria Robins-

Somerville, Daily Arts 

Writer

PHOTOS BY ZOEY HOLMSTROM/Daily

LEFT: LSA sophomore Shannon Smith pulls “To Kill a Mockingbird” off the shelf at Literati Bookstore. RIGHT: LSA freshman Owen Hurley opens a pop-up book in the children’s section upstairs in Literati Bookstore.

