Raven Book Store
Image courtesy of Jeffrey McKee.
Along the side of Liberty Hall—a 120-year-old opera house in downtown Lawrence, Kansas—right off bar and restaurant-lined Massachusetts Street, lives Raven Book Store. A brick and mortar (literally) general interest shop, Raven Book Store sells a mix of bestsellers and oft-forgotten titles across genres, plus collegiate-inspired merch as a nod to their proximity to the University of Kansas. It’s been beloved by locals for nearly twenty-five years. However, during the last twelve months, the Raven’s doors have been shut to customers in order to keep everyone safe. Where there used to be tables of new releases, there’s now a giant shipping desk taking up much of the sales floor, allowing staff to process orders for pick-up, delivery, and USPS shipping.
“If anyone walked in right now, they would see kind of a mess, but it’s organized,” says owner Danny Caine. “The store is 1,000 square feet. We’ve got 13,000 books and five booksellers at a time. There’s just not room for much anything else.”
The Raven was first conceived in 1987 by Mary Lou Wright and Pat Kedhe, friends looking to open a store specializing in mystery and local books — but they had trouble getting a business loan, at first. “The banks treated it as a hobby as opposed to a viable business,” Caine says, adding that they relied instead on money from remortgaging one of their homes and funding from friends. The two spent the next decade growing the reputation and community presence of the store, both locally and in mystery circles.
Then, in late 1997, Borders opened across the street. “The owners were outspoken about it even before it opened,” Caine says. “They were in the newspapers all the time talking about how downtown Lawrence is a great Main Street district. It’s really animated and populated by a bunch of great small businesses, and to bring a big corporate store like that was a risk to the town’s character. I don’t think they saw it as business competition so much as trying to keep big corporation out of our downtown.” Ultimately, the entire Borders chain went out of business in 2011, and the Raven has lived on evermore.
Local, long-time customer Heidi Raak purchased the Raven in 2008, modernizing it with computers, as well as expanding its offerings beyond the mystery genre. Caine began working at the store in 2015 when he moved to Lawrence from Cleveland to complete an MFA in Poetry from the University of Kansas. “I thought I was going to be a teacher,” Caine says, “but I fell out of love with teaching and in love with bookselling. By the time that I was done with my degree, Heidi was looking at retiring and I was looking for a job. We just figured out a way to make it work.”
In the spirit of the Raven’s owners before him, Caine has continued to expand the store’s digital presence while advocating for the importance of small businesses. In 2019, the Raven had a tweet go viral explaining what exactly bookstores can provide for communities that Amazon cannot. After bookstore owners around the country began reaching out to Caine asking if he could turn the information into something they could sell to customers, he made a zine. This year, he expanded that even further with a book: How to Resist Amazon and Why.
Image courtesy of Jeffrey McKee.
“I don’t think we’d make it if we tried to be the kind of old-fashioned book store with the single grumpy bookseller sitting behind the desk reading books all day,” Caine says. “There’s much more you need to do to advocate and make a place for small businesses in 2021 America. Every decision we make at the Raven, and at any small book store, has the shadow of Amazon lurking over it. I think Amazon is much bigger and scarier than Borders ever was.”
The pandemic has only presented more challenges for indie booksellers, including the Raven. “The hard part was trying to figure out how exactly we were going to do this and keep everyone safe,” Caine says. “For a while, we were trying a new thing every week. But once we figured out our new business model, everybody adapted really well.”
There have even been some unexpected upsides to the changes, such as the positive feedback from local delivery, something Caine intends to keep even after the Raven’s doors reopen to the public. “In developing our online ordering and our social media voice, expanding into free delivery in town, we’re accessible to a broader range of people,” Caine says. “Someone who might not have been willing or able to come downtown and navigate parallel parking, we can now still serve and get them books through the phone or through our website, and we can deliver them to their door.” An increase in sales the past year has also given the Raven the opportunity to soon move into a larger, wheelchair-accessible space on Massachusetts Street where they will be able to have browsing, as well as maintain an online store.
Caine has also continued making zines with the help of the Raven community, a relic skill from his time in graduate school, where he would sell his own work at readings to have weekly beer and food money. “The idea of zine making; it’s immediate, kind of old school or punk. There aren’t many other bookstores making them,” Caine says.
Image courtesy of Jeffrey McKee.
In addition to the one on Amazon, the Raven also published a zine about the importance of the Post Office, but sometimes they’re just for fun, such as The Sound and the Purry, a “novel” written by bookstore cat Dashiell after he fell asleep on the store’s keyboard and a bookseller decided to open a Word document. (“We had someone buy ten of them and return them all because they were like, ‘This isn’t what we expected,’” Caine laughs.) Most recently, after Caine posted a tweet featuring a customer who had left a detailed recipe for pumpkin pie in their order comments section, other customers were inspired to do the same, resulting in the culmination of a small cookbook, Recipes from the Order Comments. “I think there’s something Midwestern about the church cookbook,” Caine notes. “It’s such a fascinating, funny, and quirky genre.”
As the Raven continues to navigate its impending move and the uncertain days that lie ahead, Caine remains committed to advocating for his community of Lawrence. “People like to walk down the Main Street and see storefronts that aren’t empty,” he says. “Small businesses contribute to the vibrancy of communities by being places to go and places that pay taxes, places that team up and build communities in lots of intangible ways.” To other bookstore owners, he says, “You have the opportunity to tell your story and talk about your importance to the community. Who’s going to sponsor Little League teams or team up with the public library to do programming, or bring authors to town? Who’s going to push and advocate for local authors or overlooked voices from your region?” The answer certainly isn’t Amazon. “The 3-4 extra dollars you’re spending on that book from our store,” Caine adds, “that’s all the extra stuff you’re getting from it.”
Recommendations from the Booksellers
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song Edited by Kevin Young
Edited by the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library (and a native of Topeka), this collection gathers the work of 250 poets from the colonial period to the present, and explores the genre’s powerful history: from giving enslaved people a platform to express themselves, to influencing the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. “It’s the kind of book everyone should have in their library,” says Caine.
The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
Caine discovered this book through a tweet thread where people were discussing the best Midwest novel. The deadpan comedy takes place in the fictitious Grouse County, Iowa, and introduces readers to a cast of funny, very flawed characters. “It’s from 1994, so it’s kind of fallen out of popularity,” he says, “but I couldn’t stop thinking about when I read it last year.”
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The National Book Award Winner was the last in-person author event that the bookstore hosted before stay-at-home orders took effect. “It was very nerve-wracking at the time,” Caine says, remembering all of the questions still up in the air a year earlier. “But as far as I know, no one got sick, and it was very inspiring.” This book—Caine’s pick for the best Midwestern novel—tells the story of a boy on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota seeking justice following a crime that upended his family.
Image courtesy of Jeffrey McKee.
