Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Do you see any collective project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say, the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like right now?
I think Southerners are mostly concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we're talking about contemporary southern writers, let's discuss the Conference of the Book. How did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held every summer. I think it started in 1974. It's always drawn a crowd—people come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would come in the store and say, "I heard about that Faulkner conference and I'd love to come back here and go to that, but I don't think I want to do Faulkner for a whole week." These are people who aren't necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars, but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA [BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which typically were not available to the public. And I thought, "What if we had a conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a more general thing about books?"

So I talked to Ann Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann, who's been a good friend for a long time, "I've got this idea. Instead of just having the Faulkner conference, why don't we do another kind of literary conference? We can just talk about books and what's going on with The Book and how it's doing today. We'll invite editors and agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public." And Ann said, "Yeah, maybe soon." Then, after about three or four years, she said, "Let's do this book conference thing." And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that article in the New Yorker about the Kindle. You know, that's a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture, perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that's going on that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating table and cut into it and see what's going on.

With developments like the Kindle and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay relevant in the twenty-first century?
I think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments, which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than the way we've historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New Yorker article, digital transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive development.

But the question we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long? And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There's also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it's a perfect invention. I don't care what series number of Kindle you're on, it is never going to be better than this. [Holds up a book.] I don't see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can coexist is what I'm saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe, irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will change bookselling. Because there won't be as many of these [books], and therefore the cost will go up.