Conservative Bookseller

Fantasy/sci-fi author Ursula LeGuin (The Telling, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dispossessed) spoke on censorship at the Eugene (Oregon) library in March of this year. She made the comment that “Any belief, any unbelief, is dangerous if it is adopted, enforced, accepted as the only acceptable ideology” (Register Guard, March 25, 2012, p. B4). I appreciate her acknowledgement (as a sometimes object of conservative censorship) that “theism and atheism can be equally dangerous.” But I have a slightly different perspective on the reason that censorship is a risky undertaking.

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Rebel Bookseller and The King’s English

Betsy Burton, author of The King’s English, has been a co-owner of The King’s English (TKE) in Salt Lake City since the 1970s. The author of Rebel Bookseller, Andrew Laties, has been at the helm of  The Children’s Bookstore and The Children’s Museum Store, both in Chicago, and, lastly, a bookstore attached to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts. In these two quasi-memoirs, both authors closely interweave their professional experiences with insights and advice for novice and prospective booksellers, while promoting independent bookstores as guardians of free speech, free enterprise, and local community.