Revolution Books: Conscience and Commitment

Seeing Red, Yes — But Not Angry

BY STEPHEN WOLF, December 15, 2010

Before New York City became (briefly) the capital of these newly United States of America, patriots convicted of treason to a mad and distant King George III were brutally and publicly tortured — then executed for beliefs and actions identical to those of George Washington, Ben Franklin Thomas Jefferson and many others who resisted tyranny and created the foundation of America.

This essential revolutionary spirit is as fragile as democracy — and easily lost. But for years now, it has been nurtured in a Chelsea bookstore dedicated to nothing less than revolution (for our nation and the world).

The revolution desired is not a social one. There are no books in the store on how to plan armed revolt or make a Molotov cocktail, nor is there even a sneer of anger at any single person, country or political persuasion. Instead, this bookstore is committed to a making of a more just world.

Revolution Books has been a crucial part of our city since 1979 — for a while on W. 16th, then W. 19th — and now for a year and a half just east of 7th Avenue at 146 W. 26th. It is, as its publicity card mission statement expresses, "alive with a defiant spirit that refuses to accept that the horrors of today's world have to be. People come into Revolution Books from all over the world to find the books and the deep engagement with each other about the possibility of a radically different way the world could be. This is a bookstore at the center of building a movement for revolution."

The storefront is beautifully designed. There's a large picture window, well-lit and inviting, and the space resembles an old railroad apartment — long and narrow yet stylishly, tastefully renovated. The wooden floors are polished and smooth, with thick wooden bookshelves stocked with treasures (more about this later). There are a few small, simple round tables with chairs, where we can sit and read "or discuss," reads the store's publicity, "the burning issues of our time," all the while listening to gentle music in the background.

Deeper in the store is a small raised platform with a podium and microphone for the constant, remarkable variety of events that regularly occur here. There are open-mic poetry readings, documentary film showings, lectures and panel discussions — all of them relating to the bookstore's humanitarian stand on sexism, racism, injustices of all sorts, homophobia, imperialism and the abuses of capitalism.

Here is just a quick salmagundi of all the treasures — and consequential matters — to be lifted from these shelves.

There's Jesse Larner's "Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered" — which provides another, deeper view of this national shrine chiseled into the Black Hills, the mountains most sacred to the Plains Indians who were promised them in the 1868 Treaty of Laramie provided they surrender everything else. The white man soon broke this treaty, too, and in time the mountain was carved into the likeness of four presidents: the great Sioux chief Crazy Horse once said that the white man made us many promises but kept only one: he promised to take all our lands, and he did.

There is the illuminating "A People's History of the United States" by scholar and civil rights activist Howard Zinn — a bombardier in World War II who returned home to New York after his discharge and placed his medals in an envelope on which he wrote, "Never Again." Although, as Churchill declared, "History is written by the victors," Zinn tells the story of this nation from the point of view of those not in power.

Books on New York's crucial events and influential ideas (my favorite section after poetry) has its own section as well. There are books on the great waves of immigration a century ago, the Harlem Renaissance, the rise of hip-hop, and Jane Jacob's important "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" — which denounced the destruction of neighborhoods replaced with the ugly, crime-infested projects that removed our citizens — mostly African-American — from the life and flow of the streets.

Yet however significant and consequential the store's primary purpose is, it also has a sense of play and humor. There's a table of souvenirs, gifts and amusements: finger-puppets of Einstein, Pavlov's dog, and one of Dorothy Parker (who loved the Hotel Chelsea — where she "could lay her hat and a few friends"). There's a T-shirt like those worn to play baseball, only this team is the "Atheists." There's also a wonderful shelf of donated first editions, both cloth and paperbacks (some signed by the authors themselves, and all for sale). Carefully, I held the first edition Signet paperback of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" — the same type of copy of the banned book I hid in my room and which I slipped inside the larger biology book so I could keep reading in class, where I was busted for laughing aloud when I read how "Edgar Marshalla laid this terrific fart."

Revolution Books is a "key repository of radical and revolutionary thought," said Andy Zee — a tall, trim, white-haired man with a youthful face and lively, penetrating eyes behind eyeglasses and who, along with Travis Morales, manage this not-for-profit store and, like all the store's helpers, take no money for their efforts and dedication. There is nothing pretentious, preachy or pressured about him or the bookstore despite how lofty is the dream: "At the core of Revolution Books," he said with a passionate calm, "is a center for building revolution in this country and emancipation the world over."

But Revolution Books is not a store that looks at the world through a single window. Everybody and everything any literature-loving reader wants is there. The Greeks, Shakespeare, shelves of the best poets and anthologies, English novels, the American masters, African-American fiction, Native American, Jewish-American and shelf after shelf of Latino literature, much of it in Spanish. There are plays, children's classics, religious studies, textbooks for classes held in the neighborhood, and you can buy them at Revolution Books every day from noon to 7.

"At Revolution Books," the store promises, "you can meet the movement that is changing our world."

We need to nurture this spirit of fair play, righteous anger and peaceful dissent — and Revolution Books needs us. All bookstores, especially the best of them, struggle to survive at a time when the number of us who love reading and owning and giving books is diminishing. "Eighty percent of American families don't buy books," Zee said with genuine concern, creases appearing between his eyes, for he fears that too many of us have "lost the experience of reading." So this holiday season, give books or a gift card from this marvelous store — to spread the love of books, to help the neighborhood's small business and to keep alive our country's founding spirit of revolution.