Overview

From a golden age of bookselling to community-based publishing Working in the Commonwealth of Books lays out Keith Helmuth's cultural memoir encompassing the past six and half decades-a narrative seen through the lens of a bookseller, bookstore manager, college librarian, and publisher. Starting in the 1960s in Iowa City, Syracuse, and Manhattan, an account of an era unfolds as seen by an activist devoted to the culture of books and their role in illuminating the human condition in a time of accelerating ecological destruction and deepening social crisis. The journey continues at Friends World College on Long Island and in Kenya. The story is rounded out with a return to bookstore management in Philadelphia and community-based book publishing in Woodstock, New Brunswick.

Full Product Details

9781988299587

Table of Contents

Reviews

Working in the Commonwealth of Books is more than a bookseller's memoir, it is also a late 20th- and early 21st-century intellectual autobiography. A bookseller, librarian, or publisher can't simply ""like"" books but also has to know as much as possible about what in them might interest potential customers and readers. Bookstores, book buyers, libraries, students, and colleagues have benefited from what is more than Helmuth's ""career: "" universities and churches both used to know it as a calling. Dan Traister, Head Librarian (retired) Rare Book & Special Collections Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Keith Helmuth grew up with a mother who read to her children - A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, and The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a book she loved and read aloud to her whole family gathered for repeated winter evenings at the dining room table after supper. He learned to read by picking up the adventure novels his older brother and sister brought home from the bookmobile service that made regular stops at their school in Aurora, Ohio -Shadow in the Pines by Stephen W. Meader and Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey, for example. The opportunity for employment in the book business while still at university, led to a multi-faceted vocation: bookseller, bookstore manager, college librarian, college teacher, editor, and publisher, in addition to being a community development activist, small-scale farmer and market gardener. Keith Helmuth was the delegate representing the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Canada to the 1990 World Council of Churches' Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation in Seoul, Korea, where he served as a consultant to the drafting committee for the Convocation's final report. In 2003, he was instrumental in founding Quaker Institute for the Future. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where he and his wife, Ellen, maintain a big garden and a small greenhouse.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available