It’s currently estimated that about 20 feminist bookstores are now standing in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Two decades ago, over 100 feminist bookstores were up and running across the U.S. alone—but the corporatization of publishing, the emergence of superstores like Books a Million and Barnes and Noble, and the advent of online sales, have since decimated those numbers.
Lodestar Books served the local feminist community in Birmingham, Alabama for almost 20 years—from 1983 to 2002. Willis and Lyle are now honoring its legacy, and crafting their own, with the pop-up Burdock Book Collective. “Burdock and other medicinal plants are often viewed as weeds, when in fact they are healing and curative,” Willis explained. ” We see the people we want to serve—queers, trans folks, poor folks, immigrants, disabled folks, sex workers, single mothers, witches, homeless people and other marginalized groups—like we see medicinal plants.
Burdock’s scheduled and impromptu pop-up sales have been pretty well attended, with dozens filing in over the course of a few hours. They had an especially big crowd, of about a hundred, when Jaime Harker came through Birmingham to promote her bookand at their August 2018 launch party, which featured readings by local poet Ashley Jones Still, Willis and Lyle dream of having that physical space.
Yessssss!!!