When I was a bookseller in Chicago, I got a series of emails from a man named Keith Botsford about his magazine, News from the Republic of Letters. He’d founded the broadsheet with the Nobel-, Pulitizer-, and every-other-prize- winning Saul Bellow in 1997, and Botsford wanted to make sure that my store, which had been Bellow’s local shop for a time, still stocked it. I was just barely twenty-two years old, and the name of the magazine was an exciting one that conjured up a nation and a lineage, spread out across continents and time, but unified by something I was only beginning to wrap my head around: the community of books.

In the summer of 2019, I got to experience the breadth of that community anew. With my coworkers from House of SpeakEasy and Rob Spillman from Narrative 4, I rolled through Floyd County, Kentucky, then Nashville and Jackson; we visited Lafayette, Arnaudville, and New Orleans; made stops in Atlanta, Montgomery, Spartanburg, and Durham. And everywhere we stopped, people came out to meet us and receive the books we were there to give away. We called it Poetry to the People and I’m entirely certain that we changed a few lives here and there. I’d been to regional shows like SIBA, to Winter Institute and BookExpo, and every other kind of gathering of book people. I’ve hosted dinners and rep nights in a dozen cities and read books from all over the world. Working as I did in this community of books, I saw myself as a permanent resident of the Republic of Letters. But this was something better, something free that excluded no one. In the streets of the South, I got to recover something of the novelty and excitement of sharing a book for the first time, the moment when you get to press a book into the hands of a person who, suspecting nothing, is going to read and love that book for a lifetime, take it with them from house to house, lend it to friends and family, internalize it and make it a part of who they will become. It’s a thing booksellers get to do every day, and the reason why I’ll always say that working in a bookstore is the happiest I’ve ever been. And why I got involved with Open Borders Books and The Bookstore at the End of the World.

I’m in a new role now, handselling to the handsellers, but I’m coming to you with a great deal of affection for the South and its readers, and bringing some very good books. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, and if there’s something you need from IPG to get independently-published books into the hands of eager readers at independent shops. As the more corporate parts of this industry contract, you and I are very much in this Independent Republic of Letters together. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

Jeff Waxman
East Coast Trade Sales Rep
Independent Publishers Group
814 N. Franklin Street | Chicago, IL 60610
312-568-5443
jwaxman@ipgbook.com