Prose to the People

In her foreword to Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores, the late poet Nikki Giovanni praises a life spent in pursuit of stories—from listening to her mother’s songs while in the womb to getting her first library card to driving straight to a bookstore after passing her driver’s exam. “Nothing was more important than the bookstores,” she writes, “except perhaps the churches.” It’s fitting, then, that Giovanni’s foreword acts as a kind of benediction to Katie Mitchell’s book, which is overflowing with photographs, oral histories, essays and interviews. Each of the shops profiled fit criteria laid out by bibliographer Rosemary M. Stevenson: They all specialize in Black publications, as opposed to being merely Black-owned. But far from narrowing the book’s scope, those parameters give Mitchell freedom to deeply explore an array of bookstores that are much more than storefronts. Organized by U.S. region, Prose to the People contains an expansive amount of scholarship and history. There’s a moving chapter about America’s first Black bookstore, D. Ruggles Books, which was opened by David Ruggles in 1830s New York. Along with a history of the shop, there is an 1883 lithograph of the bespectacled Ruggles, quotes from Frederick Douglass about his upstanding character (he called him a “whole-souled man”), and a copy of a newspaper advertisement that called the shop “Anti-Slavery Book Store.” Perhaps taking a cue from the Toni Morrison-edited The Black Book, this is as much a collage of information as it is a book. Prose to the People is an important addition to any library, but especially for book collectors interested in Black culture and the power and influence of independent bookstores.