The Book of Inequality

The Word Up Community Bookshop I founded serves and supports a diverse and under-resourced population in New York City

BY VERONICA LIU’97

Ihead into Word Up after dropping off my kid at the school bus, well before the shop opens, to accomplish tasks easier done in person when no one else is around. But I should know by now—there is always someone around! As I approach, I see the front gate already up, and neighbours from the block starting to assemble, and when I walk into the store, I encounter the volunteers who operate the community fridge that we host outside the bookshop.

Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria is the multilingual, cooperatively run bookstore and arts space I founded in my neighbourhood of Washington Heights, New York City, which is at the northern tip of Manhattan just above Harlem and a 10-minute walk to several neighbourhoods in the Bronx. Three-quarters of the residents are of Latinx/Hispanic descent, and it’s a densely populated yet under-resourced area with a seemingly endless need for more gathering spaces. As a non-profit bookstore, our mission is rooted in access to books. But the longer we have been doing this work, the closer it gets to addressing the root social causes of why that access can be so limited: systemic racism, income inequality, food insecurity and more.

I catch up with the fridge volunteers as they portion out fresh produce and eggs next to our new-releases table, then I switch focus to gathering books for a school book fair, which will mean boxes scattered about for a couple of hours before customers come in. I pull books from shelves, aiming for a mix of Spanish, English and bilingual kids’ titles at a variety of price points, alongside copies I know we can heavily discount for pay-whatyou-wish/free tables.

Overseeing a physical space means I’m derailed often—by incoming book shipments, by customer phone calls, by neighbours walking in to propose events or partnerships, by mutual-aid volunteers picking up or dropping off supplies—but once the store is actually open and the collective members working the shift arrive, I manage to hole up in the office for a run of Zoom, phone and, increasingly again, in-person meetings. These could be with teaching artists to develop a new afterschool program, with publisher reps to review seasonal book orders or with other groups we build with, like uptown arts non-profits, independent bookstores and literary organizations. So many of our neighbours consider us a hyperlocal hub, but part of our strength is in knowing our context—how we fit in everywhere else too.

Word Up visitors punctuate the day, and I’m reminded often that much of what we do is facilitate sharing space. Indeed, once the main storefront closes for shopping at 6 p.m., a whole other set of evening activities gets underway: readings, concerts, book clubs, workshops. Our second location, Recirculation—which was founded after a collective member passed away from COVID-19 and left me in charge of his vast collections of books and records—opens starting at 6 p.m. most weeknights, and features thousands of pay-what-you-wish books and occasional events. Several nights a month, small crews of Word Up collective members are bookselling at off-site events elsewhere in the city. And some evenings may see a collective or subcommittee meeting—as evenings and weekends are when volunteers are most free. Somehow, even when our bookshop was closed for browsing during the first 18 months of the pandemic, neighbours said that it seemed like we were open the whole time. R