thank you for your support

In San Francisco, we’re used to hearing certain turns of phrase, perhaps to a point of weariness.  “Local-sustainable-organic” gets bandied about so much that a candle I just purchased advertises the appeal on its (post-consumerist) packaging.  But as fickle as we are, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and sometimes we simply tire of plotting out our every civic-minded detail.

But there’s one point on which I won’t budge, especially given the alarming content of this article in the Guardian UK.

Many people forget that the Museum Store is also an independent bookstore.  We sell everything from postcards on up to Qing-era architectural carvings, with a lot of curious objects in between.  I’ll likely be writing about felted wool Tibetan Snow Lions and our squishy Ganesha later this week, but a goodly amount of our square footage is given over to bookshelves which I painstakingly try to keep in OCD/Library of Congress-style order.

We can’t carry every book, and we can’t carry so many volumes as to always have 1400-plus titles in stock.  However, we have a fairly representative sampling of books in print that are in some manner or other related to Asian art and culture.

I’d love to have bigger literature sections so that I could feel guilty about how little I get to read nowadays; I’d like to have more of those impossible-to-find books that trigger looks of wonder on people’s faces; I’d definitely make up for this city’s sorry magazine stand situation by carrying more periodicals.  Currently we stock the two major “collector” mags Arts of Asia and Orientations, and we seem to be the only U.S. West Coast source of the Contemporary Chinese art journal, Yishu.

My wish list is actually longer, and includes the fervent hope that we get called a Museum Store and not a gift shop (the joke is that the latter sells batteries and Buddha shotglasses).

But my biggest and most feasible wish?  That I don’t hear anyone say “you can get it online for less.”  At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly bookseller (not a redundancy), I might mention that instead of buying online, patrons can return to access the Museum Store without paying admission.  If they’re from out of town, I will encourage them to visit their local bookstore.  I’m afraid to mention how many times I hear them reply that where they come from, there are no bookstores–as chilling a phrase as any.  A quick search on the Indiebound website shows that the Bay Area isn’t faring too badly, but showing your local bookstore a little extra love might be in order given the latest economic trends.

At the risk of making you consider yet one more way to stay local, think about what people who run bookstores do.  The books don’t show up on their own: there’s a lot of work that goes into researching and sourcing books.  There are three of us who, every book season, pore over hundreds of catalogs, sometimes finding only one book per massive catalog.  This is not to say the least of actually processing them.  I don’t recommend that you challenge booksellers to arm-wrestling matches: we may seem a gentle and intelligent lot, but lifting books on Mughal architecture can give one a powerful physique.  I’d never use my powers for anything but good, and I do that by making sure that I’m around for you to talk books: while I haven’t read every book, I’ve read a few of them, and it’s my job to know what we have and where to find it.

The other detail I’ll remind you about is that the proceeds from the store’s sales go right back to the museum to pay for our public programs and exhibitions.  We have a ridiculously small staff, so we’re giving as much as we can.  At the risk of sounding like member drives on PBS, take a minute and think about what museums mean to you.  And if you don’t buy from us, please, please, please, find a little bookstore near you that you’d like to be around in ten years’ time.  Tell them I said hello.

Thanks for forgiving my polite rant.  I’ll go back to prattling on about politics, arts, and crafts soon enough.