At last weekend’s Victorian Writers Festival three authors – two of them also bookshop owners and one of them an author and enthusiastic supporter of bookshops – talked about books and the threat to reading.
Ann Patchett and her husband own Parnassus Books in Nashville Tennessee. Lauren Groff, another novelist and her husband Clay Kallman, own a Tampa Bay Florida bookshop, The Lynx, which proudly stocks all the books Florida’s Governor Ron De Santis and Florida schools and libraries have banned.
Groff told the Tampa Bay Times: “We did this because of the book bans. We want to fight back against the chill of authoritarianism that is creeping across Florida.”
First Nations author, Tony Birch, who can regularly be seen around Readings in Carlton and has a full shop window devoted to his books in the shop as they come out completed the trio.
Patchett and Groff shared their thoughts on one issue of concern to all US shops – guns. Both said they could put a sign in the window saying guns were not welcome here but that such a sign would probably provoke someone with an AK47 to burst in.
Groff is obviously on a bit of a winner with banned books because De Santis, while running for the Republican Presidential nomination touched every right-wing Republican button he could think of – abortion, book bans, wokeness, immigration.
Now he is no longer running for President – and the Florida legislature is trying to effectively ban all abortions – he is thinking more about voters in the gubernatorial election.
According to The New Republic (16/2) he told a press conference that accusations that he has enabled Florida book bans were ‘a fraud’ and........