Saving Shaman Drum

Saving Shaman Drum:

A Call for a Campus-Community Alliance

One block from the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor's premier community humanities center is dying. Can we protect our local cultural landscape so that our civic ecology flourishes? Can we re-imagine Shaman Drum as a thriving independent bookstore, a sustainable center of learning, pleasure, and commerce?

At Shaman Drum, sales of trade books are up but textbook sales have plummeted catastrophically in the last six months. This reveals the contradictory effects of U-M's commitment to digital culture. Given the financial pressures on students and the absurdly high prices of textbooks, the university's policy that favors Internet shopping by students--implemented in Fall 2008--is entirely understandable. Owner Karl Pohrt wrote in his recent open letter to the community, "It is impossible for local textbook stores to compete under these circumstances."

Pohrt also said, "I don't think there are any villains here." Nor do we. We are writing in a pragmatic 'let's solve this problem together' spirit.

A Tradition of Commitment

We have a strong tradition of university commitment here in Ann Arbor. U-M's financial office has policies that favor local vendors. U-M's research office invests in regional economic development, seeding new knowledge enterprises.

We've got a university that supports its own 'public goods' and their contribution to the community at large: the arboretum, botanical gardens, museums, the University of Michigan Press, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. U-M partners significantly with a major arts presenter, the University Musical Society. The University Libraries help support the Ann Arbor Book Festival. And we have all of this at a time when we are facing a state cut on funding for the arts, making the university's public and community commitments more important than ever.

The University's public mission is also embodied in its academic programs. These include a renowned cluster of scholarly and creative programs, along with living-learning communities such as Lloyd Hall Scholars, which sponsors Festifools on April 1, the Residential College, which has launched the Semester in Detroit, and the Michigan Community Scholars Program.

So the University has a history of support for community enterprise and good models to build on.

The Ann Arbor News cared enough to put the news of Shaman Drum's imminent closing on the front page, with a supportive editorial. George Wild, Shaman Drum's landlord, has already stepped up to the plate, encouraging the bookstore to stay open and to consolidate its two-story operation on the ground floor.

We call on our university colleagues--administrators, faculty, and students--as well as our colleagues in the city--philanthropists, business people, and the local community of teachers, writers, and readers--to join in an ongoing, spirited effort on Shaman Drum's behalf.

We need a lively, strategic conversation that leads to realistic action. Here are some ideas that have surfaced so far:

· The U-M Institute for the Humanities makes space available for Great Lakes Literary Arts Center classes when the Institute's space is lightly used.

· U-M's textbook policy includes a statement on the benefits of the local purchase of books for course use.

· Individuals in the Ann Arbor community purchase shares or memberships in the Great Lakes Literary Center.

· U-M launches a center for the study of "the local" within an existing institute or program. With a joint board of advisors, drawing on leaders from higher ed and other sectors, this center could support research collaborations on communities of writing, reading, and publishing. It could also investigate other areas of community cultural development. Drawing on Professor Roy Strickland's model of the "city of learning" design and planning strategy used by cities around the country, the center could imagine Ann Arbor as a thriving "city of literacy."

· Shaman Drum, located around the corner from the new LSA North Quad, becomes a site for teaching and learning for U-M students. Students have few chances to reflect on their consumer behavior as purchasers of books or to weigh the effects of digital culture in a specific locality. Shaman Drum and U-M can provide that opportunity.

· Students and faculty in U-M's Nonprofit and Public Management Center and the School of Information work with Shaman Drum on developing a new business model and writing grants to support it.

Rebuilding the Commons

We know that there are other ideas that we have not yet thought of, and that is why we need a diversity of talents and perspectives. Indeed, we need a community-wide effort to rebuild the commons.

The 2008 election revealed American’s deep hunger for a restored commons--for a robust public life. Shaman Drum, along with a few other key locations in Ann Arbor—the Neutral Zone, Nicola's Books, the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti District Libraries, and the Kerrytown Bookfest among them—is a humanities commons, a place where our public and personal stories can be written, told, read, and talked about. It is a place for making, studying, buying and selling the stuff of print culture. It is where we can test the civics of literacy.

In 2008, Geoff Eley, the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, convened a national symposium on "Writing in Public." Speaking from deep personal experience, he summoned up the power of the cultural commons as embodied in Shaman Drum's project. This commons is defined by a belief in

the importance of...'deep literacy'...the necessity of finding the ways to sustain...conversations among scholars, writers of all kinds, booksellers, publishers and readers, if a culture is to retain not only its confidence, generosity, and vitality, but also its forms of optimism about the future.

Shaman Drum, Eley continued, has sponsored a

continuous conversation...about the possible ways in which the life of the mind and the exchange of ideas inside the University and the community can be helped to mutually enrich each other.

This effort forms part of a larger public mission that includes "all the arduous and inventive work that becomes necessary to bring the University and the community together."

Richard Howorth is the former mayor of Oxford, Mississippi and owner of Square Books, a famous independent bookstore. He spoke at a 2002 national conference at the University of Michigan about "Liberal Arts Communities." He addressed the role of independent bookstores, literary festivals, and partnerships with campus programs in fostering significant economic revival and cultural tourism in his university town.

"Obviously," Howorth said, "a university functions just as any industry does, by creating jobs." But then he went on to make a more specific argument about liberal arts communities. He was using 2002 data, but his argument, even with the current downturn in housing prices, is still compelling. He concluded that "universities that are strong in the arts and humanities"--here he cites U-M, the University of Mississippi, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Virginia-- "tend to create communities with lively cultural development and thus strong economic development."

Howorth joined economic logic to and to civic logic in imagining "an America I believe in because I have seen it happen, where it now exists, in my hometown." How do we get there? It takes a village, Howorth says.

Academic institutions need to work with economic developers to devise projects that are mutually beneficial, and the people employed by universities need to reach beyond the classroom to the public to promote the value of liberal arts.

It will need the ongoing and concerted efforts of campus and community to keep this ideal alive. It will take all of our talents to keep Shaman Drum and the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center among us. If, together, we can make this work, we will all have become partners in civic problem solving at a time of profound paradigm shifts in how knowledge is made, marketed, and debated.

Julie Ellison

Signers:

Robert Hass, Berkeley CA

Richard Howorth, Oxford MS

Thomas Lynch, Milford MI

Robert Pinsky, Boston, MA

For a complete list of signers, click here.

If you would like to add your name to this letter, please email us here.

Repost from the Ann Arbor Chronicle Article

Open Letter 2: A Nicaraguan Interlude
"Faith begins when what you've given your life to betrays you."

In the midst of all the sturm und drang surrounding the future of Shaman Drum Bookshop, I went to Nicaragua.

Dianne, my wife, had been teaching for the last month in Catarina, a town in the mountains south of Managua. She volunteered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, a small congregation in Ann Arbor of which we are both members. ECI is collaborating with the Iglesia Bautista Remanente, a Baptist church in Catarina, on projects that “will bridge the divide between wealth and impoverished countries by providing capital, employment and opportunities for cultural exchange.”

Joe Summers, our minister, is an old friend of mine – we worked together in the bookshop years ago – and ECI is an openhearted, diverse community that is serious about creating a better world. Although I’ve been mostly engaged with Buddhism in my adult life, I was attracted to this church because of the willingness of Joe and the congregation to struggle together around difficult issues. And I still enjoy a good sermon.

I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with Dianne about the state of the bookshop given that our telephone and internet connections were short and infrequent. The experience teaching in Catarina was transformative and very positive for her, but living conditions were difficult. She asked me to come. I traded my frequent flyer miles for a ticket to Nicaragua.

I traveled to Nicaragua with a delegation of eight members from the church. There were many moments during the trip when these good people made me feel that it might still be possible to fix (or at least patch up) this broken world. The delegation came to Catarina to celebrate the wedding anniversary and the ministry of Bayardo Lopez Garcia, Padre of the Church of the Remnant.

After Haiti, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere, according to Joe. The U.S. State Department says it is “prone to a wide variety of natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.” The country, situated on two converging tectonic plates, is a “Belt of Fire.”

Nicaraguan history has been every bit as volatile as its geography. From 1853 until the Great Depression, the U.S. Marines landed there seven times and occupied the country for twenty one years. In 1937, General Anastasio Somoza seized control of Nicaragua. He and two subsequent Somozas robbed and thugged the country blind until 1979, when Tachito Somoza was overthrown by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional), named after Augusto Sandino who led an armed insurrection against U.S. interests in 1937.

From 1981 to 1990, the C.I.A. ran a secret operation to topple the government, mining harbors and financing the Contras, who fought a vicious civil war against the Sandinistas.

The current government is led by Daniel Ortega and is a coalition of the Sandinistas and the Liberal Party. Ortega is widely believed to have stolen the last election, and his leftist posture is seen as a rhetorical cover to rob the country. I’m told he requires his staff to address him as El Commandante.

Catarina is a windy town of eight thousand souls perched on the lip of an extinct volcano, which is now a lake. During a recent earthquake, people reported that the water in the lake sloshed around like it was boiling. The town is paved with flagstones and you can still see men on small, fast horses galloping up the steep streets.

Just inside the cemetery at the edge of Catarina is the grave of Benjamin Zeledon, leader of a 1912 uprising against a puppet government installed by the United States. He was killed by government troops, who then dragged his body through town. Augusto Sandino, a teenager at the time, witnessed the desecration of Zeledon’s body, which led to his radicalization.

I stayed at the Hotel Jaaris. Rooms there rent for ten dollars a night. Water was only sporadically available, and there has been a serious shortage in the area, which set off a noisy protest demonstration in Catarina a week before I arrived. The hotel did not have hot water.
The walls in our room didn’t meet the corrugated metal ceiling, so you could hear what was going on in the other rooms. The metal roof created an almost perfect interior acoustic bounce. Some nights it was difficult to sleep.

No matter. The vibe was positive. The hotel had a pet bird and a barking dog. There were lots of clucking chickens and crowing roosters in the next building. And the people of Catarina were extraordinary. Near the end of our stay a number of them said they would pray for us. I’m not used to having people speak to me this way. I always felt it was my responsibility to cultivate Great Doubt – as the Buddhists say – around religious claims, but it became increasingly obvious to me during this trip that people living in such impermanent economic, political and geographical circumstances just might know some things I didn’t.

I replied gracias when people said they would keep me in their prayers.

I had the good luck during the trip to meet the poet-activist Ernesto Cardenal. One morning we drove to the Galeria casa de los Mundos in Managua to look at Nicaraguan folk paintings from the Primitive Painting School. The building is also Cardenal’s residence, and he was in his office. At eighty four he is still very active and spry. He greeted us warmly, signed autographs and posed for pictures.

Cardenal was Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government following the revolution, but he has dissociated himself from Daniel Ortega. Ortega has countered by freezing all of Cardenal’s assets. Although he is obviously beleaguered, he seems at peace with his situation.

Cardenal’s poetry is direct and accessible, and it is clear that North American Beat poets influenced him stylistically. His books have been widely translated and are available in the U.S. from City Lights Publishers, New Directions and Curbstone Press. He is the most important living poet in Nicaragua, which is a country that values its poets. The great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario’s picture graces the Nicaraguan currency.

Cardenal is also a Catholic priest and was a friend of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In the early 1970s he founded a lay religious community on one of the islands in the Solentiname archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. Among various other community projects, he read the Bible with a small group of campesinos. Cardenal asked them to respond from their own lived experience. He recorded the conversations and eventually published them as “The Gospel in Solentiname” in four volumes. They are among my favorite books. They were published in the U.S. by Orbis Books, and I’m afraid are now out of print.

At the Church of the Incarnation in Ann Arbor the congregation is invited to reflect on the sermon immediately after it is given. This is modeled on base communities like Cardenal’s that were developed by Latin American Liberation Theologians in the 1970s. They exemplify a radically democratic hermeneutic.

Joe told me, paraphrasing Martin Luther, that “the scriptures become the Word of God in the hearing of the believer. This is a wonderfully nuanced view; very different from saying the scriptures are the Word of God. It becomes an active, dynamic process – it’s what is meant when we say this is the living Word of God.”

Christianity offers its adherents a rich and vibrant set of symbols and stories – as do all the major religions – and it provides a context in which people can structure their experience and give meaning to their lives. At its best, it is a powerful force for social change, a counter-cultural critique of the dominant society. Cardenal represents this form of religious culture.

And politics are another context. We spent a remarkable evening talking with five Catarinians about local and national politics in Nicaragua. Four of them were former Sandinista companeros. (Joe told me he preferred companeros to comrades because its etymology implies “to break bread with.”) These men, now middle aged, had all been active in the 1979 revolution.

Near the end of the night I asked what it was like to participate in a revolution and then see its ideals eroded, compromised and betrayed. Perhaps it was impertinent of me to ask this question because it implied assumptions I had no right to make, but they welcomed the opportunity to reflect on their experience.

Ariel Perez Olivas, a former Sandinista political analyst, said, “It makes me homesick when I think of the ideals and goals of the revolution in the early days. All our resources were used up in the war with the Contras. Now we have to deal with the problem of an entrenched political class that is focused on its own interests.”

Sandy Iran Canales, who still carries fragments of a bullet in his chest from a wound he received in 1979, told us, “When I was young I was moved to fight against the National Guards. All the people were so excited by the revolution, but then lands were stolen and money was misused.”
One of the men said, “Our revolution has become a rob-olution.”

Erving Sanchez, the former mayor of Catarina, said, “The government wants to politicize everything. They show favoritism. When I was mayor, we sat down together to support the people who really needed it. We need to form a culture of resistance against the national leadership. To me, Sandinista means simply to find a way to help the poor.”

Joe ended the evening with a riff on Kierkegaard. “We begin in the land of the aesthetic, which is a place of endless choices. Then we grow into the ethical life. We make commitments. At a certain point we fail at them. This will lead you to the life of faith or you can chose to return to the aesthetic life. Faith begins when what you’ve given your life to betrays you.”
____________________________
On the drive back to Catarina following a visit to a Spanish School I start to nod off, but it is difficult because I’m sitting between Joe and Bayardo, who are having a spirited discussion in Spanish with Sandy, our driver. After a few minutes Joe translates.

He says Bayardo and Sandy are talking about the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in 1981 when High School seniors went into the countryside to teach the campesinos to read.

In two years illiteracy was cut in half in Nicaragua, despite the murder and rape of many students by the Contras.

Bayardo tells us he hid books underneath his poncho as he moved on horseback around the countryside.

“We carried lanterns with us so we could teach people at night. I was teaching in a relatively sparsely populated area filled with Contra soldiers. There were spies all around and I had to move from house to house fairly quickly or I would be betrayed.”

“I was very frightened,” he says and then laughs.

Then he and Sandy break into song. They sing the anthem of the Sandinista Literacy Campaign:

Avancemos brigadistas
Muchos siglos de incultura caerán
Levantemos barricadas
De cuadernos y pizarras
Vamos a la insurrección cultural.

-Jennifer Reyes Rosales translated the lyrics:Let's advance brigadistas

Many centuries of illiteracy will fall
Let's build up barricades
Of notebooks and blackboards
All the people to the Cultural Revolution.

-So there you have it. I’m riding down the road with two men who are laughing and singing together after they recall risking their lives thirty years ago to teach people to read.

These men speak about what happened with … a great lightness. To speak any other way about these things would not be appropriate, but what they are saying is simply so far outside of my own experience that it is unimaginable to me.

It strikes me that this is why I came to Nicaragua. I was meant to hear this shocking and moving testimony.

If these men were willing to risk their lives to teach people to read, the least I can do is to try to keep the bookshop going. Despite the downturn in the economy and all the trash talk about the “death of the book,” I intend to do just that.

Life is very strange. When I left Ann Arbor I felt it was the most inappropriate time in my life to leave town. By the end of the trip my opinion had changed. It was the perfect moment.

-Karl Pohrt

Repost from the Emerging Writer's Network Website

February 23, 2009

Just back from . . .

. . . Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor. There have been some recent posts about independent bookstores at various blogs and the need, or lack thereof, to support them. Personally, my own thoughts lend toward taking each case store by store. I've been to many fantastic indie stores over the past ten years. I've also been in stores where I was positive the person behind the counter couldn't wait until I got the hell out of the store so he/she could get back on the phone, or online, or back to the magazine they he/she was reading.

Shaman Drum is not doing well these days. There have been articles in the Ann Arbor papers recently and owner, Karl Pohrt, just sent out an open letter trying to explain, to those questioning the articles, just how the store has fallen into financial difficulties.

Having had the pleasure of getting to know Karl a bit over the past year and a half, I can say that his open letter didn't contain much surprising material - he's known where things were headed and has been trying to combat it in various ways. He, along with his lawyer, financial team, and others in the Ann Arbor area are pretty desperately trying to figure out the means to make the store still be a viable part of Ann Arbor's just off-campus business district.

If I follow my own thoughts above and go store by store? Shaman Drum would be near the top of my list for those to try to help. I wandered in there today, partially to do just that (which I hope I did by picking up Dan Chaon's novel, and Don Waters' story collection, Desert Gothic), and partially because there isn't a better store within my driving distance to browse for 30 to 60 minutes. The front shelf had an amazing NYRB display (they really are attractive books, especially when standing face out, side by side, over and across a six shelf bookshelf). The front table had a great selection of debut authors, books in translation and a couple of graphic novels.

It's a store that carries one or two copies of every book that Dzanc Books has published to date, because they both support independent publishers, but also because they support local publishing ventures. They've always stocked Hobart and Absinthe: New European Writing as well. When Orchid was coming out regularly, same deal for them.

The shelves had great selections from publishers like Dalkey Archive, Coffee House Press, Milkweed, probably more University of Iowa Press books outside of Prairie Lights, and the aforementioned wall of NYRB titles. They had a table displaying Open Letter Press titles. They had books in stock by Percival Everett, Steve Yarbrough, James Wilcox, and every Bolano that's been published. Full shelf of Cormac McCarthy (including the plays) and at least three Barry Hannah titles.

They also employ a great group of people. Ray McDaniel has no peer I've seen in regard to introducing authors that are reading in the store (plus he's a damn good poet himself). David McLendon, publisher of Unsaid, works in the store and is always great for a suggestion or two. At least one worker, Ryan, is a regular volunteer at 826Michigan. Today, even though I gave her the wrong title, AND the wrong publisher, the wonderful Emily figured out what book I was looking for, and even though it's not available, by the time I finished my browsing and returned to check out, she had taken the time to write out the title (correct version), author and publisher, along with the date I actually could purchase it. I'm embarassed to say that I only know Emily's name because she answered the phone while I was in the store today, even though I've seen her at countless readings and have chatted briefly at least a dozen times.

The store has readings this month alone by Jeff Kass, local poet (and soon to have a short story collection), translator Aliza Shevrin, Jesse Ball, Keith Taylor, Kyle Minor, Kathleen M. Rooney, Don Pollock, Karyna McGlynn, and Hillary Jordan. Each will be well attended as their Meagen Kujac does a fantastic job of garnering attention for their events (not to mention does a kick ass job of reading to kids one day a week or so around lunch time).

It's the type of store that the community (both local, AND literary) should have a vested interest in saving. Turns out that you can order books from them online. I don't think your shipping will be free, and you probably won't get that 20 to 40% discount you'll see at Amazon, but maybe, just maybe, you'll be keeping around this store, that is in the process of turning itself into a non-profit Literary Arts Center, that Karl is creating with the sole purpose of being able to leave something to the community when he is done, and helping it last long enough to figure out what steps to take to be able to continue thriving in these difficult times.

Open Letter from a Distressed Bookseller

By Karl Pohrt, owner of Shaman Drum:

This fall and winter Shaman Drum Bookshop went into a steep financial decline. Textbook sales declined $510K from last year. We managed to cut our payroll and other operating expenses by $80K, but that didn’t begin to cover our losses.

There was some good news. Our trade (general interest) book sales on the first floor were actually up in December from last year by 10%, which is extraordinary given what many other retailers were reporting. And trades sales in January were up 15%. Still, this hardly compensates for our losses in textbook sales.

The evaporation of our position has been astonishingly swift. We had been holding relatively even financially until September. Suddenly we’ve moved into the red.

I sort of saw this coming.

In July, 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published “Reading At Risk,” a report detailing the decline of literary reading in America. This was followed by a second report in November, 2007, "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” chronicling “recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.”

Around the same time the NEA reports came out, I audited a University of Michigan course on the History of the Book in which I learned that every 500 years a major technological shift occurs. Five centuries ago Gutenberg invented (or perfected) moveable type. Now, with the digitization of print, we find ourselves in the middle of another sea change. I recall wondering what the new business model for bookstores would look like, and I worried that our industry would suffer from the same chaos roiling the music world.

And a few years ago the University Library held a conference on Digitization. I was invited to be a panelist and I defended the traditional book as still the most efficient technology for delivering information. I also said I was worried about collateral damage during our forward march into the joyous digitized future. I’m no Luddite, but everyone there seemed to me to be hypnotized by the new technology. Of course, it is dazzling.

In my own retail neighborhood I’ve watched the collapse of Schoolkids Records, an awesome independent record store, due largely to the impact of digitization, and it looks like I’ve got a front row seat on another sad decline. Borders Books, which I think at one time was the best general interest book chain in the English-speaking world, is a shadow of its former self and seems headed for oblivion.

Early this fall I told a group of booksellers that our industry (including the publishing sector) had a business model that didn’t work very well for any of us. A few of the booksellers said they didn’t think this was true, the others were silent.

Two weeks ago I met again with booksellers and publishers from around the country at the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute. Now everyone seems to agree that the book business is in trouble. The disintermediation resulting from customers migrating to the internet coupled with the frightening economic crisis makes it terribly difficult for us to see a way forward.

The crisis at Shaman Drum Bookshop is due to our loss of textbook sales. This fall the university introduced a program which allows professors to list their textbooks online, which effectively drives a significant number of students to the internet. It is impossible for local textbook stores to compete under these circumstances. I don’t think there are any villains here (well, maybe some greedy textbook publishers), but this is one of the consequences of the university’s policy.

The efficiencies of Amazon – even given the clever algorithms that bring us if you like this, you’ll like that – are no substitute for browsing in a bookshop.

In 1942 the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter said, “Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in….” This is our system and Schumpeter is undoubtedly correct, but there is a countervailing fact that is equally true: Stability is essential for a civilized society. The second truth is what I’ve learned selling books in this community for forty years, being married for thirty-seven years and raising two children.

It also seems to me that if we are witnessing the collapse of Big Capitalism, the way to revitalize the economy is through supporting locally owned businesses. If you agree, please lend your good energy to Think Local First, the movement supporting locally-owned independent businesses in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County (www.ThinkLocalFirst.net).

What Is To Be Done?

Shaman Drum Bookshop is around one hundred steps from the central campus of the University of Michigan, one of the top ten public universities in the world. I believe the university community and Ann Arbor citizens who love literature need a first-rate browsing store for books in the humanities in the university neighborhood. This is what we aspire to be.

However, as I mentioned earlier, it has been clear to me for a while now that the current model doesn’t work. In March 2008 I announced my wish to give the bookshop to the community. I hired Bob Hart, a recently retired Episcopal priest, to research the feasibility of forming a nonprofit bookshop. We wrote up a careful business plan, met with a good lawyer, filled out the IRS forms and submitted our papers in July. In November the IRS notified us that our application was still under consideration. The review is taking longer because a for-profit business is a component of the project.

The new entity is called the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, whose mission is “to develop excellence in the literary arts by nurturing creative writing, providing quality literature and fostering a literate public.” We’re already hosting two classes in the store. If we do not survive this downturn, I hope the Great Lakes Literary Art Center will continue under other auspices. It is a good idea.

Last week I consulted a lawyer and a financial advisor. They both felt the store could manage the debt load with some temporary help from our friends and a bit of luck. My landlord, who is a decent man, will allow us to keep our first floor space, vacating only the second floor of the building.

The issue now is this: After we scale back the store, do we still have a viable business? I asked my business manager to crunch the numbers based on our projected sales for the next two years. He reported back that we do not have a sustainable business model. Given our current sales projections, we will continue to lose money.

This means very simply that we would need additional revenue sources/streams to make the store viable.

For many booksellers – certainly including me – this is our darkest hour. I know this sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it feels to me in the middle of the night when I’m trying to figure out how I can possibly make this work.

If I can’t figure this out, the most realistic and responsible thing I can do is shut the store down and move on.

The question then becomes: What is the next version of a bookstore? This is something worth thinking about carefully. Like you, I want to live in a community that has many good bookshops. But then I’ve been spoiled living in Ann Arbor.

Whatever happens, I am filled with a sense of gratitude for having been able to sell books in this town for the past 29 years. It’s been absolutely wonderful.

Karl Pohrt is owner of Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, which opened in 1980. He is a former board member of the American Booksellers Association and a leader among the nation’s independent booksellers. The Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History is named in his honor, recognizing his work in fostering relationships between the community and the University of Michigan.