Porter Square Books co-owner publishes book on bookselling

Josh Cook has been slinging books at Porter Square Books for almost 20 years. He’s also an author and now a co-owner of the store, and his new book, “The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century” (Biblioasis), is a lively, clear-eyed, and provocative collection of essays on the art, business, and culture of bookselling. For book lovers, it’s a window into how decisions get made on what books get tabled and shelved in bookstores, why Amazon is the crushing, destructive behemoth it is, and how to be a savvier customer. For writers, it demystifies some of the important aspects of the process of a book going from printer to store. Cook (inset) explores bookselling’s relationship to white supremacy, showing bookstores’ place in a time of crisis, when “we do not have a journalistic ecosystem that can actively sort truth from [expletive], or honest disagreement from tactical rhetoric. There is the crisis of our Republican Party, which is itself a continuation of our crisis of white supremacy.” He looks at the “boggy limbo” the pandemic placed retail and service workers in, and how pedagogical underpinnings of MFA programs and, for example, the Paris Review’s links to the CIA, shape taste making and literary culture that has historically elevated white writers over others. With clarity, urgency, and good humor, Cook excavates what it is to write, read, buy, and sell books right now. “If we believe books are important . . . then how they are sold is also important.” Cook will read and discuss the book on Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 7 p.m. at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.