Feminist Bookstore News
Feminist Bookstore News (FBN) published from 1976-2000.
More information about Feminist Bookstore News and its publishing work is available here.
Explore Feminist Bookstore News through the "Descriptive Database of Articles in Feminist Bookstore News 1976-2000 (including Author, Category, Graphics, and Descriptive Notes)" generated by Sinister Wisdom volunteers. This data visualization was completed by Salome "Sam" Grasland and Nayeli Jaime at The Information Lab.
*Note: Best performance for the searchable database is through Mozilla's Firefox.
Issues
Chloe Berger digitized volumes 1 through 6, Vol. 7 No. 1, Vol. 20 No. 3, Vol. 22 No. 2, Vol. 22 No. 5, and Vol 23. No. 1 of FBN, as well as the FBN Catalogs and BTWOF issues for the Lesbian Poetry Archive.
More about Feminist Bookstore News
Feminist Bookstore News published from 1976 through 2000. A complete archive of all issues are available at the Lesbian Poetry Archive here.
Explore Feminist Bookstore News through the "Descriptive Database of Articles in Feminist Bookstore News 1976-2000 (including Author, Category, Graphics, and Descriptive Notes)" generated by Sinister Wisdom volunteers. This data visualization was completed by Salome "Sam" Grasland and Nayeli Jaime at The Information Lab.
*Note: Best performance for the searchable database is through Mozilla's Firefox.
During some of the early years there were "Lavender Pages" which were folded into existing issues and numbered separately with letters. These "Lavender pages" were distributed only to the subscribers who were feminist/women's bookstores.
Feminist Bookstore News published five catalogues. These are archived separately on this page.
Seajay continued Feminist Bookstore News with Books to Watch Out For. There is a separate archive page for BTWOF here.
Archives from Feminist Bookstore News are at the San Francisco Public Library. The finding aid is here.
FBN Database
Sinister Wisdom is doing a multi-year research project to create two databases from Feminist Bookstore News.
The report from Phase One of the project is here.
The "Descriptive Database of Articles in Feminist Bookstore News 1976-2000" is available to download here and at the bottom of this page. A list of issues of
Click here to get involved with Phase Two.
This dashboard lets users search for articles by author, title, and subject. The dashboard also is embedded below.
*Note: Best performance for the searchable database is through Mozilla's Firefox.
FBN Catalogs
Issues
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 A Room of One's Own.pdf | 154.58 MB |
| A Woman's Prerogative.pdf | 192.23 MB |
| A Woman's Prerogative Fall.pdf | 178.44 MB |
| Feminist Bookstore Network.pdf | 217.35 MB |
| Herland.pdf | 183.67 MB |
Books To Watch Out For
WHY are there three versions of each issue of Books To Watch Out For?
In early 2000 as Feminist Bookstore News (FBN) was beginning its twenty-fourth year, Carol Seajay, the mastermind behind FBN and the driving force throughout its lifespan, was alternately contemplating and ignoring the writing on the wall about the impact of the dramatic changes in the worlds of bookselling, the entire book publishing industry, and consumer commerce in general on FBN’s financial future. The writing on the wall was not hopeful and so she was also contemplating what might come next for her. A woman has to support herself, after all, and that meant finding new work and maybe a new direction after twenty-five years of movement work at movement wages in feminist bookselling and writing and publishing and networking about feminist bookstores.
The answer to that was also in the writing on the wall. San Francisco, California, and, it seemed, the entire world was being swept up and changed by the dot com explosion. That’s where the jobs were, jobs with generous salaries and benefits (paid health insurance! 401k plans!), jobs that offered challenges in a new direction, a chance to pay off FBN’s debts and to set aside money for an old age that loomed in an increasingly close future. The ex-girlfriend of the dyke next door scored a place in a three-month training program designed to bring women and people of color into the dot com job stream. When the font of the writing on the wall expanded to the point where it could no longer be ignored, Seajay applied for the training program and was accepted.
Thus began a three-year round of training programs, jobs followed by lay-offs, followed by more training programs: HTML and web site design supplemented by PHP, SQL, online data-base design and management, technical writing classes, and lots of certificates. Then, the dot com bomb. In 2003, Seajay had to ask who would hire her—a fifty-year-old dyke with beginner-level skills and an activist history—in the midst of the biggest recession since World War II.
The answer came: she would. She would, once again, hire herself and use her new tech skills to retool her FBN skills and connections to create a new publication, a reader-oriented online book review magazine, Books To Watch Out For (BTWOF), that would bring the news about new lesbian and gay and feminist books directly to readers, especially those readers who were left bereft when their local feminist and gay bookstores had closed. And so BTWOF was launched.
The BTWOF umbrella hosted three distinct editions:
• The Lesbian Edition,
• The Gay Men’s Edition, which Richard Labonté agreed to write
• More Books for Women, which focused feminist-but-not-specifically-lesbian books
Carol Seajay notes of Richard Labonté: I loved his love of gay lit: men’s, women’s, everything in between and on both extremes. He knew so much, and reviewed so generously and kindly, and like me, sustained his community on what we both called “bookseller’s reviews:” the idea being that “best” wasn’t a useful concept, that dividing books into “literary” and “less than literary” and five-star and three-star rankings were not useful. The point, our purpose as booksellers, was to connect whoever walked into the store with the book that was right for them at that exact moment in their life. To hand them what they wanted and needed. If that was great literary fiction, great. If it was “trash,” that was perfect too. Our community was sustained by books. I also hoped that having Richard’s writing and reviews and insights would garner more attention and advertising for BTWOF. And it did. Richard generously reviewed everything. And all the queer writers, men and women, basked in the way he saw and honored their work.
In addition, given the technology of the time, there were also three versions of every issue of all three editions.
The first version was built in HTML and was sent to all the email subscribers.
The second version was for people with AOL email addresses. AOL had a lot of filters designed to screen out anything any of their users might consider offensive. So we had to do a lot of special additional coding and formatting to get BTWOF issues through AOL’s screens and to work around other AOL quirks.
The third version was printed on paper and sent through the mail to subscribers who didn’t have access to computers or email addresses.
It was a PDF of the HTML version.
Carol notes, This was a time when some people had access to computers and computer training but many didn’t. Email wasn’t yet ubiquitous. But many people who didn’t have computers or email access cared deeply about lesbian and gay and feminist books. And I wasn’t willing to exclude any of them. So, in addition to doing the flashy computer-based, “high tech” versions we did a PDF version that we then photocopied and sent via snail-mail to those readers.
These three versions ensured accessibility so that lesbians and gay men who didn’t have access to learning computers and/or who couldn’t afford to buy one were not excluded from news and information about lesbian, feminist, and queer literature.
Carol reflects, In hindsight it’s easy to see that BTWOF might have survived longer if we/I had only done one version. But postage and printing would have killed it if we did only a paper version. And we couldn’t leave the non-tech lesbians and feminists and gay men behind. Transition times are difficult. And expensive, even when they supposedly save money.
Advice from FBN for Feminist Bookstores
Advice from FBN for feminist bookstores.
- Vol 1 No 8 p 3 Doing Used Books
- Vol 1 No 9/10 p 14-15 Doing Remainders
- Vol 2 No 1 p 11 Used Books. . . Recycled Again
- Vol 2 No 2 p 9-11 (responses 12-14) Basis of Unity: Developing a Coalition Policy, Success and Process
- Vol 2 No 3 p 7-8 Revenge (I mean “returns.”)
- Vol 4 No 1 p 7 Amazon Bookstore Celebrates Her Tenth Year
- Vol 4 No 2 p 4-6 The Women’s Bookstore letter
- Vol 4 No 3 p 1-3 Organizing for Survival
- Vol 4 No 3 p 10 Women’s Bookstores Workshop
- Vol 4 No 5 p 5-6 Charis letter/Statement of Purpose
- Vol 4 No 6 p 7-8 Overstock Sale vs Returns
- Vol 5 No 1 p 8 Training and Skills Sharing
- Vol 5 No 4 p 5 Staffing
- Vol 5 No 4 p 7-8 Burn-Out
- Vol 6 No 1 p 14 Conference & Workshop Sales
- Vol 6 No 2 p 8 Womanbooks Work Evaluation
- Vol 7 No 1 p 17-23 Economics for Health and Survival (reprinted in Vol 9 No 6/Vol 10 No 1, the article most often requested for reprint by booksellers)
- Vol 7 No 2 p 17-23 Report from Feminist Bookstore Meeting
- Vol 7 No 2 p 25-26 Notes on Marketing
- Vol 8 No 2/3 p 26-28 Selling Remainders Ideas and Experience
- Vol 9 No 6/Vol 10 No 1 p 30-31 But What Do You Do All Day Dear? (reprinted from Vol 3 No 4)
- Vol 9 No 6/Vol 10 No 1 p 35-51 Bookstore Profile A Room of One’s Own Sandi Torkildson Interview
- Vol 10 No 2 p 19-20 Alaska Women’s Bookstore
- Vol 10 No 2 p 39-42 Moving Cards: A Dynamic Part of Bookstore Sales
- Vol 10 No 3 p 6-15, 80 Touring Western Canadian Feminist Bookstores
- Vol 10 No 4 p 14-18, 88 Marketing Women’s Studies Books
- Vol 10 No 4 p 34-39 Food For Thought A Bookstore Profile
- Vol 11 No 1 p 15-16 Selling Poetry in Feminist Bookstores
- Vol 11 No 1 p 18-30 Red & Black Books: Flourishing at Last
- Vol 11 No 2 p 13 Selling Sidelines
- Vol 11 No 5 p 9-10 Artemys: Running the Feminist Bookstore in Belgium
- Vol 11 No 5 p 34 On the Move: A Mobile Bookstore
- Vol 12 No 2 p 26 Staff Action to Improve Sales
- Vol 12 No 4 p 23-24, 94 Buying from the University Presses
- Vol 12 No 5 p 19-22 Stocking & Selling Periodicals
- Vol 12 No 5 p 34, 51 Sisterspirit
- Vol 12 No 5 p 39-45 Saga Librería de la mujer Interview Susana Sommer
- Vol 13 No 1 p 19-25 Some Beginnings: An Interview with Judy Grahn
- Vol 13 No 1 p 45-46 Common Woman Books Becoming Strong
- Vol 13 No 2 p 27-33 The Feminist Bookstores Day ABA Las Vegas
- 1990 Summer Supplement p 5-6 Selling Sidelines: Jewelry Adds Interest and Income
- 1990 Summer Supplement p 52 On Being A Feminist Employer
- 1990 Summer Supplement p 53-61 Some Beginnings: An Interview with Judy Grahn Part 2
- Vol 13 No 3 p 21 Taking Care of Business: Inventory
- Vol 13 No 3 p 35-43 Some Beginnings: An Interview with Judy Grahn Part 3
- Vol 13 No 4 p 25-26 Bookstore Profile: The Woman’s Word
- Vol 13 No 4 p 57-65 Past and Present: Running the Feminist Bookstores in Spain
- Vol 13 No 5 p 23-24, 75 Taking Care of Business: Honoring Our Work, Honoring Ourselves
- Vol 13 No 6 p 19-21 Paradigm Women’s Bookstore
- Vol 13 No 6 p 25-29 Taking Care of Business: Memberships
- Vol 14 No 1 p 15-21 Anatomy of A Bankruptcy
- Vol 14 No 1 p 23-36 Bookstore Profile: Doing It In Wyoming
- Vol 14 No 2 p 19 Taking Care of Business: Store Security
- Vol 14 No 2 p 27-29 Ideas, Innovations and Thorny Problems; Highlights from Financial Workshop
- Vol 14 No 3 p 19-20 Taking Care of Business: Bookseller Burnout and Beyond
- Vol 14 No 4 p 18, 40 Taking Care of Business: Why Did I Start It?
- Vol 14 No 5 p 29-30 Setting Up a Lesbian and Gay Section in a University Bookstore
- Vol 14 No 5 p 35-37 Buying University Press Books for Your Store
- Vol 14 No 5 p 55, 58 Going with the Cash Flow
- Vol 14 No 6 p 27-28 Novel Promotions
- Vol 15 No 1 p 35-36, 122 Meristem Bookstore
- Vol 15 No 1 p 37-39 Store Newsletters: Do They Really Work?
- Vol 15 No 1 p 41-42 Buying & Selling Used Books
- Vol 15 No 2 p 24-25 Feminist Bookstores Day
- 1992 Sidelines p 13-15 10 Elements of Great Design
- Vol 15 No 3 p 31-33 Taking Care of Business: Stealing from the Bookstores
- Vol 15 No 4 p 29-33 Selling Textbooks
- Vol 15 No 4 p 49-51 Taking Care of Business: Press Releases
- Vol 15 No 4 p 53-54 Store Newsletters: Starting from Scratch
- Vol 15 No 4 p 55 Your Best Question for Interviewing Potential Staff
- Vol 15 No 4 p 56 Staff Evaluations
- Vol 15 No 5 p 27-29 Taking Care of Business: Maintaining a Successful Children’s Section
- Vol 15 No 5 p 56-58 Women’s Bookstores in the Netherlands
- Vol 15 No 5 p 59-62 Store Newsletters II: Getting the Word Out
- Vol 15 No 5 p 63-64 How to Use Your Local Newspaper to Promote Your Bookstore
- Vol 15 No 6 p 29-30 Bookstore Profile: Textures
- Vol 16 No 1 p 37-38 Traveling Sales: The Book Garden Bookmobile
- Vol 16 No 1 p 39-40 Strategic Planning
- Vol 16 No 1 p 43-44 Taking Care of Business: Confronting Unsafe Situations
- 1993 Sidelines Issue p 13-17 Marketing Strategies: Selling Women’s Music
- Vol 16 No 2 p 23-25 Taking Care of Business: Marketing to Young Feminists
- Vol 16 No 3 p 47-51 Time Management: Ideas from Experience
- Vol 16 No 3 p 57-59 The Alaska Women’s Bookstore
- Vol 16 No 6 p 29 Taking Care of Business: Advertising
- Vol 17 No 1 p 27-32 Charis Books
- Vol 17 No 2 p 27-30 The Feminist Bookstore Network Conference
- Vol 17 No 2 p 31-32 Taking Care of Business: Frugality Strategies
- Vol 17 No 2 p 35-36, 56 Organizing Book Groups
- 1994 Sidelines p 15-18 Selling Safe Sex Products and Sex Toys
- Vol 17 No 3 p 25-31 Touring Australian Feminist Bookstores
- Vol 17 No 4 p 27-29 What Really Makes a Good Book Signing?
- Vol 17 No 5 p 59-61 The Importance of Satisfying and Maintaining Your Customers
- Vol 17 No 6 p 37-39, 60 Taking Care of Business: Selling Sex Toys & Vibrators
- Vol 18 No 3 p 29 Taking Care of Business: Thriving Amazon
- Vol 18 No 4 p 25-30 Women: Amazon Turns 25!
- Vol 18 No 4 p 35-38 Sidelines: Holding the Integrity of Your Store
- Vol 18 No 5 p 17-22 Fem Books: The First Chinese-Language Feminist Bookstore
- Vol 18 No 5 p 55-56 Sidelines: Incense and Candles
- Vol 18 No 6 p 33-35 Recycling Women’s Books
- Vol 18 No 6 p 37-40 Taking Care of Business: Staying Solvent
- Vol 19 No 1 p 21-23 Amazon Bookstore: Literacy Skills for Women
- Vol 19 No 1 p 25-30 Profile: Mother Kali’s
- Vol 19 No 1 p 53-55 Sidelines: Greeting Cards
- Vol 19 No 2 p 55-57 Working with Local Craftswomen
- Vol 19 No 4 p 15-17 Africa’s First Feminist Bookstore: Binti Legacy
- Vol 20 No 5/6 p 5-6 Honoring Other Community Stores
- Vol 20 No 5/6 p 8-9 Sisterspace: An African American Women’s Bookstore
- Vol 21 No 2 p 55-58 The Little Zine That Could
- Vol 21 No 3 p 29-30 Bookstore Programs for Girls & Young Feminists
- Vol 21 No 3 p 31-32 Move Your Newsstand from the Mundane to the Extraordinary
- Vol 21 No 5 p 23-27 Profile: Shades of Sienna: African-American Children’s Books
Compiled by Chloe Berger. July 2023.
FBN Covers
