Masks still required at Bindlestiff

While all Bindlestiff volunteers are now vaccinated, for the safety of our customers and staff we will continue requiring customers and staff wear masks while in the bookstore for the next several weeks.

Bindlestiff Bestsellers

These are our best-selling titles for the last month:

Christine Kendall, The True Definition of Neva Beane

Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

Jericho Brown, The Tradition

Anna Malaika Tubbs, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

Carole Lindstrom, We Are Water Protectors (picture book)

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Brandon Taylor, Real Life: A Novel

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Colin Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

Barack Obama, A Promised Land

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Anna North, Outlawed

Gloria Anzaldula, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

50th anniversary of Media FBI burglary

Fifty years ago, activists raided the FBI office in Media, seizing thousands of documents on FBI spying and harassment of a wide range of activist movement. Now an official state historical marker marks the site where the citizens’ committee to investigate the FBI struck. As Inquirer columnist Will Bunch notes,

The suitcases of FBI files that the eight burglars, including the mastermind of the scheme, the late Haverford College professor William Davidon, made off with that night revealed stunning secrets about the lengths to which Hoover’s FBI not only spied upon, but sought to disrupt, legitimate dissent over the war as well as the movement for Black civil rights. The best-known discoveries exposed the existence of COINTELPRO, a massive, covert government operation to harass activists on the left, and efforts to surveil and harass the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., including the notorious 1964 letter in which a top FBI official sent MLK a tape of sexual liaison with an anonymous suggestion that he kill himself.

Could there be a better time to read Betty Medsger’s compelling book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.? We’re putting copies in our window to mark the occasion. It reads like a thriller, and it documents the criminality of an agency that continues to violate civil liberties to this day.

Bindlestiff Books featured in new book promo film

Bindlestiff Books plays a starring role in a short film promoting the debut novel by Philadelphian Elizabeth Green, Confessions of a Curious Bookseller. The book is set in a used bookstore in the “heart of West Philadelphia,” steps from Clark Park. In the film our store plays the part of the used bookstore (though of course we have never sold used books), and the author plays the part of the proprietor of said store. The novel itself is epistolary, told through email messages, journal entries and tweets that chronicle her battles to keep the store open and reboot her life. We have the book in stock, you can find the film here.

Holiday Hours

We are closed Dec. 25.

Saturday, Dec. 26: We will be open Noon – 7

Sunday, Dec. 27: Noon – 5

Closed Monday and Tuesday

Wednesday, Dec. 30: Noon – 7

Thursday, Dec. 31: Noon – 3:30 (and possibly later)

Friday, Jan. 1: Closed

Upcoming event celebrates Philly authors; notable books of 2020

Words of Revolution; Words of Solace Join Blue Stoop, a home for Philly writers, on Saturday, December 5 at 7pm for a very exciting event! Purchase your tax-deductible sliding scale ticket here.

Words of Revolution; Words of Solace, is a fully captioned innovative video program produced by award-winning Philadelphia cinematographer Aly Spengler and featuring readings from ten of the most exciting voices writing in and around Philadelphia today: Brittney Cooper, Myriam Gurba, Anne Ishii, Airea Matthews, Trapeta Mayson, Kiley Reid, Nikil Saval, Eric Smith, Amber Sparks, and Elissa Washuta. Featured writers will perform words written by their heroes relevant to the ideas of revolution and of solace. Sit back and settle in!

The National Book Foundation has announced its 2020 awards in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature: https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-2020/

The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020 can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html

2021 Calendars

We presently have in Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nikki McClure calendars, along with Slingshot and We’Moon organizers. The Solidarity Forever labor history calendar will be here by the end of October

Bindlestiff Bestsellers

These are our best-selling titles for the last month, in descending order of sales:

Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half: A Novel

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Bettina Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

Ibram Kendi, Antiracist Baby

Zetta Elliott, A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart (picture book)

NK Jemisin, The City We Became

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Making Worlds reopens

West Philly’s newest bookstore/community space, Making Worlds, is reopening Thursday, Sept. 24. They are at 210 S 45th Street, and are reopening on a limited basis from 3 to 7 pm, Thursday through Sunday.

Bindlestiff Bestsellers

These are our best-selling titles for the last month, in descending order of sales:

Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half: A Novel

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

Kelly Starling Lyons, Going Down Home with Daddy (picture book)

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Ibram Kendi, Antiracist Baby

Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel

Robin Diangelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Neil Gaiman, ed., Unnatural Creatures: Short Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman

Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Robert MacFarlane, The Lost Words (picture book)

Zetta Elliott, A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart (picture book)

NK Jemisin, The City We Became

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Duncan Tonatiuh, Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation (picture book)

Janet Hardy, The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love

Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Andrea D’Aquino, A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (picture book)

N.K. Jemisin, How Long ’til Black Future Month?: Stories