Fri 9/4 @ 7PM
A voice, space and home for the marginalized is basically what Guide to Kulchur Bookstore provides Cleveland.
In recent years, the Gordon Square venue at 1386 W. 65th Street, which was conceived by Lyz Bly and RA Washington, has acted as a book, magazine and periodical shop that doubled as a co-op workshop for fanzines, handmade books, small publications, chap books and other printed material. Furthermore, its physical space has hosted writers, artists, public and academic intellectuals discussing a wide array of topics.
Under the umbrella of Guide to Kulchur Bookstore, it operates Cleveland Books 2 Prisoners, GTK Press, the Cleveland Zine Archive and the Sally Tatnall Black Box. Now the cooperative has announced the opening of an additional space in Gordon Square. A 9/4 celebration is scheduled at the new location (5900 Detroit Ave.). The free affair includes music and live readings.
Cool Cleveland talked to Guide to Kulchur community liaison Christina Keegan about the recent news.
Congrats on the new location. What’s up with this major move?
It’s very exciting. We’ve been talking about our expansion plan for about a year. We are starting a new location that will be the retail bookstore, our expanded print shop and press operation. So we’re expanding Guide to Kulchur Press, which publishes works of nonfiction and fiction. We’ll also have our events at the new space. We have a new front deck and back patio. So we’ll be having music and art, weather permitting.
What’s the plan for the old location?
We’ll be turning the old space into a community center that will have an expanded Books 2 Prisoners library. We’ve been running a program that sends out books to prisoners around Ohio who don’t have access to libraries. And at this point, we have more donations than we were able to fit in the old space so we’ll be taking over the entire old space for that library. We’ll continue to send out books for prisoners but also make all of those books available to any group in the city.
Regarding the Guide To Kulchur Press, it’s amazing in the digital age we live in that a print shop and press operation is flourishing.
Originally it was kind of an experiment. We wanted to see if we could train our staff in the art of binding books and that took off. I don’t know if I can explain exactly why what we’re doing works. I think RA and the other staff members here have, through their own reputations as artists, really spread the word about what we’re doing. It’s probably not that there’s a huge market overall for independent publications but we’ve really found that niche and offer kind of a quality of service that no one else offers.
Are there any Guide to Kulchur initiatives that didn’t work out?
I think we started out the store with a very carefully curated selection of books with specific genres. What we found is we do best when we manage our selection of books around local and national lesser-known artists and authors. That’s really the creative energy in our space, in our specialized areas of interest, to select works that people will want to discover. The other thing that has been a big struggle is figuring out how to financially support the arts and community programs we do. Once we started doing publishing, we found we can make a profit that feels important and use that profit to fund our community and new programs, which are all free. We try to stay away from grants and city funding to maintain autonomy.
What does Guide to Kulchur provide Northeast Ohio?
Really it’s about our art programs and community outreach programs where we’re teaching kids how to make their own books or comics, hosting music and theater events here. We have a space for people to share ideas and share their art on a small scale that’s not really available anywhere else. These are folks that generally aren’t getting the huge arts grants, but still produce incredible quality of work. So we provide that space for new and emerging artists to share what they do, whether that’s in print or live or theater or music.
Finally, what else is planned for Guide to Kulchur Bookstore?
In a broader sense, even more direct involvement in the community through programs that target direct needs such as food and housing. There will be an extension of our publishing, and we’ll be bringing in national artists to continue our events. Also, this is huge the next year: We’re transitioning to be a worker-owned cooperative. Right now RA is the only owner on paper but we’ve been going through the process to where he’s just one of 15 worker-owners.
[Written by John Benson]