Inside the Bookstore (The "Second Shelf"_ That Wants to Gender-Balance Our Bookshelves

Inside the Bookstore That Wants to Gender-Balance Our Bookshelves

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A.N. Devers, an American writer and rare bookdealer, sells works by women at her London store The Second Shelf.


A.N. Devers has always had a fondness for unwanted things. As a child, her family moved around the U.S. a lot, following her father’s postings in the Air Force. In each new town, they’d go to yard sales, where Devers would dig through other people’s cast-offs and come up with interesting items to take home. A few decades later, that talent for spotting the overlooked is the driving force behind her unusual new bookstore, The Second Shelf. Tucked away in a peaceful courtyard off the busy streets of London’s Soho, the store almost exclusively offers rare books by women authors – a group that has rarely enjoyed the attention, or the price tag, afforded to male writers. Devers, a writer and book dealer, became obsessed with the discrepancy when, at a book fair in 2015, she saw (mostly male) traders relegating titles by renowned female authors like Joan Didion to the lower shelves and, tellingly, selling them for a tiny fraction of the cost of books by their male counterparts. “We don’t value women’s work the same way we do men’s,” Devers says. “It’s depressing. But it’s also exciting, because I can do something about it.”

After Devers, 42, moved from New York to London – “a great town for people interested in rare books” – in 2016, she started meeting other women in the trade. The idea for The Second Shelf began to take shape. A prolific user of social media, Devers marshalled her thousands-strong following into powerful online attention for her project, which she initially intended as an online store. She raised over $40,000 on Kickstarter and garnered interest from high-profile figures in the book world. The Second Shelf opened its reddish pink doors in November. Inside, the walls are papered with the kind of patterned end pages you find in beautiful old books, thousands of which are crammed into tall shelves and dark cabinets. Most are first editions, and many are signed and almost all are by women (a handful of male-authored books about women have made it in). The focus is modern fiction – Elizabeth Bowen novels, romances by Rosamunde Pilcher, poetry by Ntozake Shange. But there’s also travel writing, essays, guidebooks and more. Next year Devers’ first book, Train — a non-fiction exploration of trains in American culture published by Bloomsbury — will surely join them.

In collecting these works and promoting them in the Second Shelf’s biannual review, Devers is hoping to correct a historical imbalance in the book trade that has left women authors forgotten over the years. In the U.K., early bookmen (the term for rare book dealers) were “country gentleman who ran estates, and amassed libraries of books to show their wealth and intelligence,” Devers says. There have been some famous bookwomen, she adds, citing Belle da Costa Greene, who built the famous Morgan Library in New York. But for the most part, it has typically been men who decide which books are worth collecting, preserving and passing down to future generations. As in other male-led creative industries of television, film, and the news media, “they focus on themselves,” Devers says.

The effect is a stark absence of women’s work among what society considers to be the most valuable cultural artefacts. In January, the Second Shelf went viral on Twitter after Devers pointed out that only eight books by women appeared in a list, compiled by a trade website, of the 500 biggest sales at auction in the books and paper field in 2018. Even among more recently published works, a 2018 study found that books by women are sold for on average 45% less than books by men. “In a capitalist society, where we put our money shows where we see value. We’ve been taught to find value in something really narrow,” Devers says. “It’s time to explore something different.”

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Many of the women-authored books in The Second Shelf are signed, and most are first editions.
Sarah K. Marr

http://time.com/5543750/soho-second-shelf-women-bookstore/