Publishing is hard. Especially when you distribute your magazine for free. There’s a difficult balance you have to find: include enough talent to make it full of substance and variety, but not to the extent that it is so thick that you can only print three copies. We’d like to think that the time and passion that goes into a literary magazine makes it into a valuable object – in other words, a kind of commodity. And with that comes the need for money. If you want more pages, more physical objects, you need more money.
As Editor-in-Chief of the RC Review, a literary and art annual publication that features Residential College students, I knew that we needed to collect more doubloons for our purse in order to print enough for all of the RC and faculty. Poetry should be free for all, but unfortunately, printing is not. Therefore, the fundraiser was born!
A close friend who had recently graduated from the RC was a vital part of the fundraiser’s idea. She was moving to Ypsilanti and had boxes on boxes of old, hoarded books – at least 50 of them! We gladly took them, without a specific purpose in mind, mostly because they were yellowed and powdered with the ripe smell of love and time – the complete Dawn Treader treatment. Many of the books we had never heard of before, many we judged quickly and added to our Never-Going-to-Read list. The fact that we judged the cover so much, with haste, churned in our heads. True, judging a book by a cover is a thing. It has to be – the colors, the words, the font, it all compounds the aesthetic pleasure of a book. The door that enchants you to step inside.
But, what if that door was covered? What if that book called “Loving Your Child Is Not Enough” was wrapped in a brown Trader Joe Bag, its handle beckoning you to loop your hand through it, an alternative quote taken from deep within its rabbit hole written in big letters across the front? What if we gave that book a second chance? Would someone come to knock on this novel adventure?
So that’s exactly what we did. We covered all of the books, some novels, some historical anthologies, some parenting books, one Spanish novella, with identical Trader Joe’s bags and added quotes or goofy one-line synopses to the cover. And Tuesday afternoon, we laid out our goods on a grassy knoll in front of East Quad, predicting that we would walk away with 49 of the books and about 2 dollars in our pocket.
But, to our surprise, we were a magnet to the curious. Most people walked by with their chins hinged toward us, mouth agape, not quite understanding. And then, the curiosity, the thrill, the NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON, set in and they approached us. Their eyes scanned the quotes, some smiling, others already pulling out their wallets, struggling to make a choice between buying one or ten of them.
We encouraged people to touch them, pick them up, feel their heft, smell them (one book’s cover quote quite literally said, “I smell pretty.”) It was as much of a social experiment as it was a fundraiser. People were so generous, too, often giving up to 5 dollars extra, just because.
Don’t call it deception. Our Blind Date with a Book was instead a meditation of curiosity. Think back to your birthday or a holiday where gifts are exchanged. There’s an inborn pleasure in being surprised, of not quite knowing what is in your hand. In a way, we also did a service to the books themselves. If donated somewhere where they weren’t wrapped, there is quite a good chance that many of those books would never make it off the shelf, spend a lifetime without being opened, perhaps even be thrown away. We’ve breathed life into them again, to show that they are something of value, they are a useful commodity. Even if the story themselves are less than exciting, they help to create a connection between the humans engaging with them. And for that, they are indeed priceless.
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