Beginning Saturday morning, under Gov. Tim Walz's stay-at-home mandate, Minnesota bookstores will no longer be open to customers. But they will remain open to online orders and hope that internet commerce will keep them afloat until they can reopen their doors.
After the COVID-19 pandemic began, some bookstores immediately closed to customers. Others continued to allow browsing but strictly limited the number of customers inside at any one time. But when the governor's mandate to close all but essential businesses goes into effect there will be no more in-store browsing.
Are bookstores not essential businesses? Not like hospitals or pharmacies, it's true, but certainly they are essential to our souls and our humanity in the way that museums, art galleries, libraries, theaters and concert halls are essential.
If we don't support these endeavors during this fraught time, our world will be deeply, deeply changed when we come out the other side of this pandemic.
And clearly the governor agrees; late Thursday, Holly Weinkauf, owner of Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, reported that some bookstores, including hers, had been granted "critical worker status."
This allows the stores to have more than one employee in the store at a time, filling orders by phone and online, packaging books for delivery, and doing local deliveries. (This situation is fluid; check the website of your favorite bookstore for updates.)
So let us make sure that they have a lot of orders to fill. Here is how you can help keep bookstores going during the shutdown:
1. Most, if not all, local bookstores have websites and you can continue to place orders online for books. You can browse their stock online, or place special orders for books they don't have on hand. Many will also have staff on hand to take orders by phone.
2. Many local booksellers have said that buying gift certificates is the single most valuable step you can take during this time — buy the gift certificates now, online, and redeem them later after they reopen.
3. Many local bookstores partner with the website bookshop.org, a nonprofit website where you can order books and designate which bookstore should receive the profits.
4. Many local bookstores also partner with libro.fm, a website that sells audiobooks and splits the profits with an independent bookstore of your choosing. Libro.fm has announced that through March 31 they will send 100% of the profits to the bookstore you choose.
5. Come back. When the cautions are lifted, be sure to come back. Bookstores operate on a thin margin in the best of times. When stores are allowed to open their doors again — at 5 p.m. on April 10, or whenever the governor decides it is safe — wouldn't it be lovely to see a line of customers waiting? And maybe they won't even have to be 6 feet apart.
Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune senior editor for books. On Facebook: www.facebook.com/startribunebooks.
