Community Corner

The Bookstore Owner

Adam Tobin talks about the history and future of Unnameable Books.

Prospect Heights is by no means a bustling commercial district, but thousands of people still make their living in our small, welcoming community. Policemen protect our streets. Dentists check our teeth. Garbagemen remove our trash.

In "Working," a new feature inspired by the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Studs Terkel, we will give people who work in Prospect Heights a chance to tell their story in their own words.

This week, we spoke with Adam Tobin, the 35-year-old owner of , a bookstore on Vanderbilt Avenue.

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When did you first start working in a bookstore, and when did you open your own bookstore?

I worked in bookstores at various times in my life. I worked for two or three years for a book store in Berkeley, California. Before that I was working at a book distributor in Berkeley. So I've been in the book business since about 1999, and opened my own store in 2006.

That was originally not where Unnameable was.

It was on Bergen Street when I first opened. Three years there, and when the lease ran out...

Was it known as Unnameable books?


When I first opened it, I called it Adam's Books. Then I was threatened with a lawsuit by a textbook distributor called the Adams Books Company. It's sort of an interesting story, I guess, but maybe I shouldn't tell the whole thing on the record.

They threatened me. I changed the name.

Your store, it's certainly not a typical bookstore in the sense that there are a lot of popular titles that are not very prominent. But there's a lot of -- I wouldn't call it obscure -- but there are a lot of slightly lesser known philosophic or poetic works. For instance, you've got a pretty extensive collection of Maurice Blanchot. Not exactly every Barnes & Noble is going to have that. What was your thought process in terms of the books and authors you like to carry? Is there some kind of guiding principle?

The guiding principle is: I am trying to make my idea of a good bookstore. A lot of that does have to do with carrying things that are not carried at other bookstores, that I think should be available, that should be as available to the casual browser as is it is to people who go out looking for it. And I am very engaged in the smaller press world, and I am very interested in independent media, and stuff that is not a part of giant businesses that run most of the media, including most of the publishers.

So I like to think I am putting up some kind of resistance, even though I do obviously carry stuff published by HarperCollins. A lot of bookstores, the size of my bookstore, I think are essentially merely parts of a distribution network for these media conglomerates. I'm very much not interested in being that.

To some extent, it's books that I think are important, or people who work for me think are important. And to some extent it's books that form some sort of alternative canon. But largely it's more haphazard.

Do you have a favorite aspect of your work? And is there something that you find to be challenging? A continual frustration?

The things that I most love are the very basic everyday things. Dealing with people, dealing with my neighbors and people who read. Interesting people. Weird people. People who have particular interests who come to me for books, who come to me and talk about books. I enjoy that, although it is very frustrating some times. Some days I am more gracious towards people than other days.

The other thing is the books themselves. I really love going through piles of books and picking out the ones that I want. I really enjoy trafficking in them, moving them from the hands of one person into the hands of another person. And just coming across surprising things all the time.

What are you reading right now?

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 I tend to read a lot of different things at once. Right now I'm sort of making my way through a couple of big collected works. I have this very nice Grove edition of Samuel Beckett. I'm just reading that in the order it is, which is this four volume set, so right now I'm going through the novels in the order he wrote them in. I've read most of them before, but it's nice to read them all at once.

Is the name of the store a reference to the third novel in [Beckett's] trilogy?

It's somewhat that. It's also a reference to the fact that I couldn't call it Adam's Books and it's kind of a joke. I didn't really want to give it a name more complicated than Adam's Books because I didn't want to brand it with any particular thing. I want there to be some indeterminacy to what the store is or is going to be, so it was kind of a refusal to name it. But it was also a reference to Beckett, cause I happen to love Beckett.

What would you say to people who say that, as writing moves off of the printed page into the online context, that something like a small bookstore isn't sustainable?

 I think there will always be a need for books. It already is no longer the major way information gets dispersed. Certainly there will always be a market for used books, Even if nobody can make enough money printing massive quantities of new books because it's more efficient to release E-books.

Just because the logic of capitalism goes in that direction doesn't mean that there's… There will always be a use for books. There will always be people who want to own books, because you can own them, unlike an E-book. You are basically renting it in order to read it. If you want to read it again in, say, longer than two or three years, you're going to need some kind of specialty software.

The Kindles, as are many things, are made with a sort of planned obsolescence. You'll need to get a Kindle every couple of years. The nice thing about a book is that you can take a book that is a hundred or a couple hundred years old and read it.

With E-books, we haven't started to see the problems with it yet, but give it a few years and you'll find that the copy of Jonathan Franzen you buy this year -- if you want to read it in five years – it won't be an easy thing to do. Maybe Jonathan Franzen is a bad example. Because he will stay in print as E-books but there are ones that will presumably go out of print as E-books, books by authors with smaller publishers.

Why do people continue to come into your store than, say, just get on Amazon?

The possibility of browsing is a big one. The possibility of seeing things you don't intend to see, that you're not looking for. That's the reason that I got to bookstores, especially used bookstores. I think with shopping online, if you are very directed in your reading and you know what you intend to read, it's easier to search for it online and UPS will deliver it to you.

But I think there is still a value to having bookstores around even if that is the only way you read. I think there is value in going and looking at the actual books. I think part of the value is that you can exam them entirely before you buy them.

People mistake that kind of thing for democracy. It's a terrible, terrible, tragic mistake that Amazon equals democracy to the consumer in any way. It's just a more efficient way of being marketed to individually, and I think that extends to the Internet as a whole.

Do you think the locally owned bookstore has a political role to play?

 I like to think that my bookstore is an important part of neighborhood culture and an important part of certain segments of New York culture. I think that the kind of culture and thinking that gets propagated at the bookstore, and the kind of thinking that people do when they read books – it's definitely not apolitical thinking.

I'm not selling my politics. I don't think of my bookstore as an evangelical site where I can convert people to my way of thinking and one thing I refuse to do is advertise the bookstore as a radical bookstore because that seems to be putting the cart before the horse, and using my politics as a marketing technique.


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