The Head and The Hand
Image courtesy of the store.
Pinewood and book glue. This is what you smell upon entering The Head and the Hand, a community bookshop in the Fishtown/East Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. “We actually had someone come in from the neighborhood who does candles and she would love to make a bookstore candle that smells like that combination of those things,” says Project Director Linda Gallant, “which was really wonderful.”
The Head and the Hand opened as a bookstore in May of 2019 as an extension of the nonprofit, independent craft publishing company and writers’ workshop of the same name, which started in 2013. “The aim of our organization is being a launch pad for writers in the area, the start of their journey,” says Creative Director Claire Moncla. “We focused a lot on doing partnerships and classes and write nights, things that were just bringing the community together. We really wanted a community space that could be the hub of all of our activities, that other people can use, that really just cements our place in the neighborhood.”
In February 2019, Board President Nic Esposito then brought forward the idea of using the storefront space in a new building acquired by Fireball Printing, which prints The Head and The Hand’s chapbooks. Gallant jumped on this, recruiting her artisan family members to help get things ready in three months: her sister hand-painted all of their signage, her carpenter father built the impression-making shelves, and her mother helped outfit the children’s section with old pieces from her career in set design. “We were able to sort of build out a raw space that was empty and make it into a small, functional pop-up bookstore in the first days of our existence,” Gallant says. “It’s just funny when those ideas are actually manifested because it’s a dreamy thing to say, ‘Let’s have a bookstore,’ and we had no idea how hard it is, not just during a pandemic but to actually build a bookstore out of what was basically nothing.”
Image courtesy of the store.
The Head and the Hand is proud of its hybridized, unique spot in Philadelphia, down the street from Amalgon Comics & Coffeehouse and a mile or so from Harriett’s Bookshop, both Black-owned businesses. Gallant hopes visitors take particular notice of the store’s local lit shelf, which celebrates writers from Fishtown/East Kensington. “That’s been a place that’s evolved a lot since we started,” she says. “We have an opportunity there to showcase relationships with not only local publishers that we really respect, but also writers.” One of her favorite examples of this is Liz Moore, whose novel Long Bright River was a New York Times bestseller as well as a Good Morning America book club pick — and, it takes place in Kensington. Gallant mentions that The Head and the Hand was “lucky enough” to publish Moore in an anthology, at the very beginning of their journey. “We got to put [her novel] on the shelf ourselves in a physical form,” Gallant adds. “That was a really special, full-circle experience.”
Image courtesy of the store.
However, the pandemic has taken a toll on The Head and the Hand’s ability to function as a community center. “I really do think people are craving some more tangible experiences and interaction with education and resources, and there’s a lot of internet fatigue, especially now but even pre-pandemic, a desire to interact with something beautiful and tangible,” says Moncla. “Bookstores are bringing that back to the forefront and reinvigorating something that’s always existed, but that people are kind of getting reacquainted with again.”
In pre-COVID times, The Head and the Hand was able to use their space for open houses, writing classes, and children’s story hours to help the community feel that they had ownership of the space, something that was important to the team. “It’s really hard to just be a bookstore,” Moncla says. “A lot of the time you really have to be doing other things to really be applicable in this day and age.” Gallant adds, “Bookstores are traditionally a place where people gather, and it’s part of what we loved about it, but now we’ve had to adapt.”
One of their innovative ideas has been date nights, where area couples or pods can privately rent out the entire store, bringing in takeout from a local restaurant for dinner with a curated playlist and selection of personalized reading materials. It’s so popular, reservations have to be made months ahead, and other shops around the country have reached out to Moncla to see how they can implement it themselves. “People can take this and run with it and it will be its own thing wherever someone decides to implement the model, and that’s incredible,” Gallant says. “It’s proof of concept.”
A practical innovation coming out of the pandemic is that The Head and the Hand was able to upload and correct both their online and in-store inventories on their website, a resource that loyal customers used and the booksellers appreciated. “We had a lot of core people who live within five minutes of the store who would come every week or every month, and they were able to buy online during the pandemic,” Moncla says. “Being able to go to their house and deliver the books and wave from the street was good for us, good for our hearts.” For the store’s first birthday, they delivered packages with balloons attached, as a thank you to the community for their continued support. “That was really nice,” Moncla adds, “a way of trying to connect when connection is so hard right now.”
Image courtesy of the store.
“The community kind of defines what you are,” Gallant says regarding the store’s future. “It’s really amazing to see how organic the growth is if we’re just paying attention and listening. It’s always tough financially. We didn’t get into this to make a ton of money or anything like that, but you have to strike that balance of being a retail space and also a place where people can find some sort of creative expression. It changes so rapidly and it’s really a privilege to watch it change over not even two years yet. I can’t wait to see — if we’re lucky enough to keep existing — what it’s going to be like down the road.”
Image courtesy of the store.
Recommendations from the Booksellers
When You Look Up by Decur
“It’s one of the most bizarre and profoundly sad and beautiful stories about how, if you have an artistic flair, just follow that as much as you can, because it will continue to surprise you until the very last days of your life,” says Gallant of the Spanish graphic novel for children. “You can read it to your kid and it just makes you feel better about humanity. The illustrations are so unique and so strange. I’d never seen anything like it before.”
Nine Moons by Gabriella Weiner
Moncla discovered this title while working on a podcast. From the Peruvian essayist behind Sexographies (where she explored her sexuality and sexual history as a sex beat reporter), this book finds her older and wanting to have a child. “She goes into this very personal, emotional, and also social and cultural study of what pregnancy is, how we talk about it, what it actually means to people, what you actually go through,” Moncla says. “The prose is punctuated and beautiful in a way that really drew me in.”
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
This 1994 novel does an alarmingly accurate job of presupposing 21st-century life in California. “It’s not a rosy picture at all,” says Gallant, “but it’s one that’s insanely consumable. I couldn’t stop reading it. It was beautifully written, plot-driven, and also grounded in really tough questions of social justice, where we are as a society and where we could go.”
Weather by Jenny Offill
“It’s dark content, but also was something where the first-person style narrator handled lots of different topics,” says Moncla of Offill’s most recent book, which she read at the start of quarantine. “The author is really talking about what she experienced after Trump became President and how she was thinking of that being a dystopian world, which is funny because with the pandemic we’re really in a dystopian world, so I felt like it was speaking to my experience.”
Image courtesy of the store.
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