Bookstores and Local Power with BLP’s New Host, Danny Caine

Reggie Rucker:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your host, Reggie Rucker, for the first time, without my cohost Luke Gannon. Miss you, Luke! But as the saying goes, the show must go and it will. And we’re excited for what’s to come in the land of Building Local Power. Today, I am joined by the next host of the Building Local Power podcast, Danny Caine. You may recognize Danny from ILSR events and webinars in recent years. He’s been a fierce champion of all things local, especially local bookstores, which we’ll get into a bit, including how he won Publisher Weekly’s 2022 Bookstore of the Year award.

But with that advocacy, he has been an outspoken critic, also, of the ways Amazon, in particular, has been detrimental to small businesses and local communities. His book, How to Resist Amazon and Why is a must read for anyone in this space. And I was just thinking, maybe even more importantly, those just on the periphery of this space who may not be listening to this podcast every two weeks, but should be. Let’s bring them all into the circle.

Danny followed up that book, in 2023, with How to Protect Bookstores and Why, which we’ll touch on in a bit in today’s conversation. And he also has a number of poetry collections to his name. I could go on, but that’s what Danny’s here for. So he’s patiently waiting, let’s just get to him. Poet, bookseller, and a pretty good bowler, from what I hear, Danny Caine. Welcome to the show and welcome to ILSR.

Danny Caine:

Thanks, Reggie. I am so thrilled to be here, both on the podcast and in the org.

Reggie Rucker:

Certainly, we want to learn a lot more about you and give the listeners a sense of who’s going to be taking over this podcast. But where we’re going to start is where we like to start with a lot of our guests, which is tell us about who you are, but we want to go back, go back into the origin story. So tell us a little bit about your childhood, the neighborhood that you grew up in, and as you’re thinking about this, I mean, can you think about where you are now and look back to a moment or two where it sort of foreshadowed the life that you would eventually end up living? So give us some insight into your upbringing.

Danny Caine:

Sure. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland called Solon, kind of in the outer ring of the suburbs, land of the interstate and the strip mall and big chain restaurant and chain retail. And so, a lot what led me to here, to his moment right now, goes through bookstores and reading. When I was a kid, I had a beloved Aunt Pat who really shared the love of reading with me. She lived in Chicago, but she would come visit all the time, and when she came to visit, we would go to the Border’s books and music in Solon. This was in the late ’90s and early aughts, so we’re near the peak of the mega chains of bookstores. I don’t remember when Border’s opened in Solon, maybe around ’99.

And really, honestly, that’s the first bookstore I fell in love with and I’m come to learn a lot more about the impact of the big chains on the book market, but for me, as a kid, it was just a really big building filled with lots of books and Aunt Pat would buy us whatever we wanted. For a long time, the consciousness of the small business wasn’t really implanted in my brain, because my hometown is not a place that, at the time, had really internalized that or advocated for it. And the same thing about Cleveland proper. I mean, we would go downtown, we would drive, we would park in a parking garage, we would go to the baseball game, and then we would leave, and that was our entire interaction with downtown. So even downtown Cleveland, at least to us, wasn’t viewed as a place where you could go and support local businesses and kind of interact with the local community.

Then, I went to college at The College of Wooster, which is in a small town, a farming city around 30,000 people, just an hour south of Cleveland, but they had this bookstore called Books in Stock that sold used books, a small indie bookstore. I would just spend hours in there getting lost, finding treasures. I really kind of became a fixture there, and that was the first time I fell in love with an indie bookstore and kind of realized what an indie bookstore could bring to a community and a main street, and that got me thinking about where I bought my books, small businesses, and community. So I think if there was one moment that set me on the indie bookstore small business path it was just falling in love with and spending so many hours on a Saturday in Books in Stock in Wooster, Ohio. It’s still there. I still go from time to time. Great little store.

Reggie Rucker:

What did you study in college?

Danny Caine:

I was an English major, and so it was all about reading and writing and books. I’d be in a class with some heavy postcolonial theory stuff, say, which is interesting and really important, but I would want a novel to read on the weekends as kind of a breather. I’ve always tried to keep up with the reading for pleasure and the further I got into my life, the more that also involved going to bookstores for pleasure.

Reggie Rucker:

You went to college, you were doing the English thing. What was the plan for you? Where did you think you were going, and then where’d you end up?

Danny Caine:

I was going to be a teacher. And actually, right after I graduated, I taught high school English for three years in a very small town right outside of Wooster. That job didn’t end up working out, so I just went to grad school, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. Eventually, the grad school path led me to Lawrence, Kansas to get an MFA in poetry from The University of Kansas and the first thing we did when we went to Lawrence to shop for an apartment was to find the local bookstores and go and shop and meet the people, and that’s where I went to The Raven, and that’s when my life really changed.

The minute I stepped in there, I was like, “I got to figure out a way to work here. This place is amazing.” It took many, many months to convince the owner to hire me, but then I got a part-time job to kind of supplement my grad school income. Three years later, I was the owner of that store.

Reggie Rucker:

So actually, I want to come back to The Raven story, which is a really fascinating one I know our listeners will dig. But I’m actually going to fast-forward to the How to Protect Bookstores and Why. And so, we won’t spend time here talking about the How to Protect Bookstores, we’ll have the link in our show notes. Go buy the book. You can read about that part of it, but you clearly have this affinity for bookstores, it’s existed throughout your upbringing, your life.

Can you talk about that why portion? What was it that drew you to bookstores so much that made the local bookstore in Lawrence the first thing you wanted to find when you moved there? What is it about the bookstore that you find so compelling that’s been necessary to you and you feel is necessary to communities?

Danny Caine:

Yeah. I think for a long time it was intangible. I mean, bookstores are a cool place. They’re really well-beloved. People really love to go visit and kind of be part of those communities and they’ll talk about the fact that it’s a comfortable place to be or that the books smell really good. In writing the book, my goal was to really kind of articulate what exactly a bookstore does in a community and give a really meaty argument about why exactly bookstores are important in their communities, without resorting to fluffy or cliché arguments, base it really in theory and action. I found a couple things, the book has 13 different profiles of bookstores in it, and in a way, it’s not about one bookstore, because every bookstore adds something unique to its unique community. At best, every community is unique and that means every bookstore that serves that community is unique.

There’s not really one single answer, but there a couple kind of trends or overarching themes I pulled. One is that bookstore kind of naturally fits into this idea of being a political organ for change, and there are a couple theoretically bases to that. First, every decision you make in arranging and curating a bookstore is political, whether you like it or not. You can really effectively make an argument or push for a certain cause with a bookstore. Certainly, that informed our approach at The Raven for its entire history and that’s called shelf making. That’s an idea that comes from the feminist bookstore movement of the ’70s and ’80s.

And then, second, as an activist space, a bookstore is really permanent in a way that a protest or an occupation or a meeting is not. A protest lasts a couple hours, occupation, if you’re lucky, might last a couple days before it gets cleared out, but a bookstore, it’s always there. It has hours. There’s a safe, indoor place where you can reliably go interact with people and materials who want to make the world a better place. That’s invaluable in activist spaces.

And then, when you take that potential for creating change and make it hyper local it’s like everything a bookstore does can really make the community a better place, whether it’s making these materials available, creating these jobs, keeping money in the local economy, even something like donating a basket to the silent auction for the nonprofit or sponsoring the baseball team. The more you look at it, the more the best bookstores are just ingrained in their communities in so many different ways and committed to the work of making that community a better place.

Reggie Rucker:

When you walk into the local bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, is all of this going through your mind, like, “Okay, I’m going to make this a revolutionary space”? Tell me about that journey from you find the bookstore in Kansas that is cool, you want to spend some time there, to three years, four years later, it’s a thing.

Danny Caine:

One of the ways that bookstores are revolutionary is they just provide a third space, which is important and disappearing. In the post-COVID world, there are so few places to serve as community hubs and gathering places, much to the detriment of the mental health of society, I think. So it’s not necessarily that every customer that walks in is like, “Okay, what systems are we going to set on fire today, and how can this bookstore help me?” But some people do, and that’s cool, but it’s not necessarily everybody. But with The Raven, in particular, the more I learned about that story, the more I realized how ingrained it was into both The Raven itself and Lawrence.

One of the founding elements of The Raven’s myth is that a Border’s operated across the street from 1997 until 2011, when the whole chain shut down. I mean, that’s literally David and Goliath. You’ve got the tiny 1,000 square foot bookstore across the street from the 100,000 square foot mega store, which somehow survived. A lot of bookstores in Lawrence didn’t survive the Border’s era and somehow The Raven did. And just in learning about how that happened and how The Raven was able to last, I realized, man, this advocacy stuff, this standing up for small businesses and communities is so deeply baked into what this store is and it was really inspiring to me and I wanted to help shepherd that legacy into the future.

Reggie Rucker:

So you started there working the floor, working the register, things of that nature, and then at what point did the idea, the opportunity of ownership come about? One of the ways that we came across your profile is you write this tweet thread about Amazon, they’re selling books for cheaper, and you’re trying to sustain a community. So talk about that story and how those things we’ve together.

Danny Caine:

I was just nearing the end of my program. I had my thesis, graduation was approaching, I was thinking about what to do, I was pretty sure I was done with teaching, and just the most miraculous coincidence of all time, my boss, the owner, Heidi Raak was thinking about retiring and moving onto the next thing. And she was generous enough to work out a deal in which a financially struggling poet could, nonetheless, take over as a business owner. And thanks to her generosity and support, I became an owner.

And the thing with the Amazon stuff, that happened pretty quickly, less than two years after I took over. Every bookseller in the world, especially in The United States, is ready to have the Amazon conversation. You have a customer that comes in. It’s like, “Why is this book $17.99 on Amazon and $28.99 here?” You have to explain that. Everything I put in that tweet thread is just stuff that good booksellers already know how to talk about. But, for whatever reason, I felt prompted that day to just put it out there on Twitter and it just exploded. I mean, it became really clear that there was a huge audience for this conversation.

And so, thanks to the encouragement of some other bookstore friends, they were like, “Man, this tweet thread is great. I would love to have this a resource I could share with my customers.” So I made a little zine, Microcosm out of Portland wanted to publish the zine, because they had heard about it and that zine it just sold so well that they were like, “Hey, I think you need to turn this into a book.” I had never meant to write How to Resist Amazon or really any nonfiction at all, but the opportunity to create a resource that booksellers could use in that conversation about Amazon and small businesses and local support. It just felt like too big and too important of an opportunity to pass up.

Reggie Rucker:

That’s great. So that happens, the thread blows up, you get recognized as a voice for the independent bookstore. How did the next year, couple years, play out for you? Tell us about your story that basically takes you to the front door of ILSR.

Danny Caine:

This was in between the zine and the book version in January of 2020 the American Booksellers Association holds their winter institute conference in Baltimore. And on the first day, there’s an optional bus trip to Washington D.C. You can go meet with your reps to talk about small business issues and there’s a symposium with leading antitrust thinkers and Stacy Mitchell is on that panel and so is David Dayen and other people who I’ve really come to think of as important inspirations. But to see Stacy talk about this, it’s like, “This is exactly what I’m talking about. ILSR seems amazing. They’ve got so many great resources.”

And so, eventually, the first step was to use these great reports and resources in writing the book version of the zine. And then, eventually, you just get plugged into the network like, “Hey, I can help with these events.” I’m on camera asking David Cicilline or Lina Khan a question and just being involved and supportive in any way I can, because you all did such great work supporting me as a bookseller, a thinker, as an author. In January 2022, all this thinking about economic justice and how Amazon is doing things wrong, we decided to bring on some employee owners at The Raven as an example of what to do right. I spent so much time thinking about Amazon as doing wrong. What’s it mean to be a good example? And it’s like, “Well, let’s let some employees take some shares of the profits that they’re generating.”

And then, my wife got a job in Cleveland. I moved to Cleveland. Long story short, those employee owners are going to take over full control of The Raven in January, leaving me looking for a job, and the ILSR job opened up and I was like, “Man, to work for this organization is a dream come true. I can keep doing the work of fighting monopolies, just in a different capacity and from Cleveland.” And so, again, the opportunity was too good to pass up, so I sent in my application and here we are.

Reggie Rucker:

Love it, love it. We’re so, so lucky to have you here. I want to pick up on the… you’re here now, what are you going to be doing, particularly on the podcast and things of that nature? But I want to spend a quick moment, we were in a team meeting a couple of days ago and we were talking about the favorite parts of where we live and I loved what you had to say about Cleveland. So you’re back in Cleveland now and our team got to spend a little bit of time there to welcome you to the organization. I could sense what you were talking about, but I love the way you say it. So tell us about Cleveland for the listeners out there who’ve never been, only know about it through the Browns or some other terrible sports history. Tell us about Cleveland and what people should know about that place, that city.

Danny Caine:

Cleveland has… this word is so overused, but I’m going to use it, because it’s actually accurate in this case, it’s incredibly diverse. Cleveland itself is a majority Black city, but it also has all of these amazing ethnic minorities. There’s a huge Irish community, a huge Polish community. We have an amazing AsiaTown, where you can get world-class Chinese, Korean food. And I just really love living in an environment like that. Not only are there so many different perspectives and experiences that you can have in Cleveland by learning about all of the different types of people who live here, but again, not to be just super on brand, but there’s so many amazing small business here, because of all of that. Just the restaurants and the stores and the neighborhoods, it’s just a deeply, incredibly interesting place.

And I think the ethnic buildup of Cleveland is part of what contributes to this amazing kind of underdog mentality. There’s this toughness. It’s Cleveland against the world. We put it on t-shirts, and I love the pride and the toughness that comes from that, that Cleveland… and even the Browns contribute to it. The world may be making fun of Cleveland, but we know it’s amazing here and we’re going to live proudly because of that. And I think that attitude is kind of common across the Rust Belt, places like Detroit or Pittsburgh or Buffalo are the same way, and that’s kind of the ethos I grew up with. And so, it’s kind of amazing to come back to it and see it as an adult with a more refined perspective on communities and small businesses. It’s just really amazing to be back.

Reggie Rucker:

I love that. And so, I imagine your experience as a bookstore owner, this affinity for and connection to this grit and this ethos that comes out of Cleveland, it’s clear that that shows up in the way that you’ve approached your life and your work. Talk about how you’re going to bring all of that into the podcast that you are now taking the reins of and what you’re planning for for the foreseeable future.

Danny Caine:

That’s a great question. Thank you. I think booksellers play a special role in this world, in this story, because we were the first targets of Amazon. Back in ’97, Amazon was a bookstore, and so we felt it earliest and strongest, perhaps. And, in a way, we’ve been sounding the alarm for many years. And so, I think the bookstore community in general is really well-versed in talking about these issues and experiencing them firsthand.

And so, again, working for a decade as a bookseller has made me really attuned to not only the challenges, but the stories of people fighting back, and it has given me a good radar for the stories of folks who not only are feeling the pains of corporate consolidation and monopoly control, but also are finding creative and ingenious ways to deal with it and to succeed because of it. And I plan to really draw on that deep well of storytelling in this podcast and to find and highlight those stories of people who are figuring out these clever ways to fight back and spread the word.

And again, it kind of mirrors Cleveland, too, because these Rust Belt cities, I mean, there’s been a 50% population decline since the middle of the 20th century. And who knows better about the impacts of corporate misbehavior than the Rust Belt with the manufacturing abandoned town, the white flight to the suburbs. I mean, this kind of ethos of fighting back in a hostile corporate world is really built into people from the Rust Belt and also booksellers. And so, I feel really excited to find and highlight more stories that fit that mold.

Reggie Rucker:

The last question I want to ask you before we get out of here, are there ways in which you’re going to be looking for the audience to help? I mean, I alluded to it when we talked about the people who are listening right now who definitely should go pick up your books, but then the people who are just on the periphery that also should be in this circle. You have ways in which you’re thinking about broadening the circle of people who are paying attention to this stuff and really actively engaged in these conversations?

Danny Caine:

Oh, yeah. I think that was one of the goals of the book. The Amazon conversation happens so well and so frequently within the bookstore world, but I was really like, “This is a conversation that we need to have with our customers.” There are a lot of people working towards that. I’m not going to take anywhere close to full credit for that, but to play a small part in broadening that conversation has been really meaningful. And that’s been the thrill of it all for me, is to have conversations. Last week, I was in Brazil talking about this stuff at a literary festival. I’ve had conversations with people from Japan and England and France.

The best part is has not been selling a lot of copies, it’s been having a lot of conversations and I hope the podcast turns into a conversation, as well. I hope more people find it. I hope people point us in the direction of these great stories from their communities and I’m just really approaching all of this with a great sense of curiosity, eager to find those stories. So if you’re out there listening and you know of people who are doing ingenious things in the face of incredible odds and corporate consolidation, please let us know, because we want to hear those stories and share them with our audience.

Reggie Rucker:

I love it, Danny. That’s so great. Again, really excited to have you. Thank you for joining the team. Thank you for agreeing to take over this podcast and really look forward to being in the audience and seeing what you do with it. And I’ll be helping him bring some stories, too, I know some people.

Danny Caine:

Thanks. I can’t wait.

Reggie Rucker:

This has been really great. And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for tuning in. We’ll be back, or I should say, Danny will be back in a couple weeks with more inspiring stories of Building Local Power. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from this episode, which includes links to learn more about Danny and more about our work to resist Amazon, protect bookstores, and help Cleveland rock.

And if you want to send a welcome note to Danny and suggest anything for the show, you can do so by sending an email to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. The episode was produced by Danny Caine and me, Reggie Rucker. The episode was edited by Danny Caine and Tea Noelle. The music for the episode was also composed by Tea Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.

• Danny’s books: How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why
• Danny’s April 2019 Tweet thread that sparked a national conversation
• Books in Stock in Wooster, Ohio
• The Raven Book Store
• The Raven Book Store wins Publisher’s Weekly‘s 2022 Bookstore of the Year award