Interview with a Bookstore: Bluestockings

Located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Bluestockings is a collectively owned and operated bookstore with a long history.

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What’s your bookstore’s origin story?
Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore was founded in 1999 by Kathryn Welsh. In 2003, it was sold to Brooke Lehman, who reopened it as a collectively-owned-and-operated bookstore, with a more intersectional and radical focus. Now it is twice the original size, hosts events almost every night, and is celebrating its 20th year in the same space in the Lower East Side.

What would you say is your bookstore’s specialty?
We have a huge selection of radical, intersectional, and feminist texts. Most people come looking for essay collections and feminist theory, but we also have a wide selection of feminist fiction and books on racial justice and gender and sexuality.

How do you use the bookstore to build community?
There aren’t many spaces in NYC you can hang out in for free these days. Bluestockings provides a free community event space, as well as hosting free book clubs, support groups, and performance nights. We are one of the few safe spaces left in Manhattan where radical and marginalized people can meet, organize, and enjoy themselves.

What’s your favorite section of the store?
The Zines, Sex Work, and Accessibility sections are my personal favorites. Even discovering that we had an accessibility section when I was a volunteer was an incredibly validating experience as someone who is disabled. I think that one of the reasons our store has stayed alive for 20 years is because people feel seen and understood here, and that has a lot to do with the book selection.

What’s your favorite book to hand-sell?
Autonomous: A Novel by Annalee Newitz is my top recommendation for when people don’t know what they want or are just looking for something new. It follows Jack, a pharmaceutical pirate who travels around a late-late stage capitalist dystopia in a submarine. This book has everything! Pirates! Bisexuals! Robots! Hacktivism! Gender queer AI! It is everything I could ask for in a feminist sci-fi novel. I am so excited anytime someone buys it.

If you had infinite space what would you add (other than a bar/restaurant)? Be specific.
A bigger zine wall! Zines are a time-honored part of activist and DIY culture, and a great way to create and share knowledge at a relatively low cost and in a fairly unsurveiled way. With the Internet and social media being censored more and more, zines are becoming an increasingly important form of expression.

What’s your favorite display? Do you have pictures?
One of my favorite displays is the Hex the Patriarchy table. One of our long-time customers, who runs La Brujas Club (often hosted at Bluestockings), came to us and asked why we didn’t have more books on witchcraft, and the Hex the Patriarchy table was born. The cool thing about this table is the variety that it encompasses. We have books on the history of witchcraft, analysis on the relation between feminism, midwives, and witches, as well as many books on learning modern witchcraft practices. I think it’s really cool to watch people, mostly femmes, connecting with history and spirituality this way.

What’s the book you want to bring back into print? Your most-requested out of print book?
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is a LGBT and gender-non-conforming classic that has been out of print for a while. I get people asking for it about once a month, usually more. It’s free as a PDF on the author’s website, but I still wish I had a copy I could give them.

What’s your favorite thing to sell at the bookstore that’s not a book?
We have a deck of tarot cards designed by Cristy C. Road that is one of my favorite non-book things. It is a huge and beautifully illustrated deck called Next World Tarot, and I love it because it depicts fat, disabled, femmes as divine figures.

What’s the craziest situation you’ve ever had to deal with in the store?
At the Pleasure Activism event for adrienne maree brown, there were so many people that, in order for adrienne to get into the store, people had to leave and then come back in so she had space.

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Shelf Talkers
Written by the Bluestockings Staff and Community

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Care Work explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes

In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith. . .[discuss the] growing global sex worker rights movement, and—situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy—they make clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work.

Becky Chambers, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn’t expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that’s seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past. But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer.

Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities.

Erica Lagalisse, Occult Features of Anarchism

In the nineteenth century, anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century, various “conspiracy theories” suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments.

Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson, Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns

Archie, a snarky genderqueer artist, is tired of people not understanding gender-neutral pronouns. Tristan, a cisgender dude, is looking for an easy way to introduce gender-neutral pronouns to his increasingly diverse workplace. The longtime best friends team up in this short and fun comic guide that explains what pronouns are, why they matter, and how to use them.

Noelle Stevenson, Nimona

Nimona is an impulsive young shape-shifter with a knack for villainy. Lord Ballister Blackheart is a villain with a vendetta. As sidekick and supervillain, Nimona and Lord Blackheart are about to wreak some serious havoc.

Tobi Hill-Meyer (editor), Nerve Endings: Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic 

A trans woman watches her sleeping lover and contemplates the moment of his departure. A genderqueer sissy fantasizes alone about connection in their hotel room. . . .A bodiless AI announces its gender, takes a lover, and works to revolutionize the world. Presented here are thirty stories that offer revolutionary erotic fantasies by trans people, about trans people, and for trans people at the crossroads of history, biology, anxiety, and love.