By Brett Essler
New York City is the literary capital of the world, but many of its neighborhoods are still without a community bookstore.
As the big box book retailers shutter (Borders) or contract (Barnes and Noble), the health of community bookshops is more important than ever. They provide access to harder-to-find small press material and, perhaps more crucially, a meeting place for neighborhood residents and artists.
The Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, despite its population and geographic size, has long been without an independent bookstore that provides a venue for author readings and performance.
This past summer, a group of local book lovers, activists, and a neighborhood landlord established Word Up, a temporary pop-up bookstore in a vacant retail space formerly occupied by a drug store. Located on Broadway near 176th Street, Word Up stocks books on activism and political theory (Seven Stories Press, whose managing editor Veronica Liu is an organizer, is heavily featured), zines, and poetry chap books. They have also acted as a community performance space, hosting everything from free-jazz concerts to schoolchildren performing Howard Zinn’s People's History of the United States.
Word Up was conceived as a one-month pop-up, but its organizers are now trying to establish the shop as a permanent fixture in Washington Heights. Friend of Go Metric Karen the Small Press Librarian alerted us to an online petition supporting a permanent space for Word Up.
We encourage Go Metric readers to support this effort (or others like it in your area) and to visit Word Up if you find yourself in Washington Heights.
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