I particularly liked this quote from the Strib:
"If America hadn't gone totally junk culture, totally commercial, bookstores like Ruminator wouldn't have any trouble at all," Bly added. "David would have done just fine at the tail end of the 19th century. You can't sell Shakespeare to someone who comes in looking for a discount paperback copy of 'Reagan's OK, You're OK.' "

If this doesn't sum up why the place went under, I don't know what does. The whole attitutde reeks of "What? You don't want that popular fun to read crap! You want this obscure guilt inducing crap!"

Great idea, Mitch. But we already have that here in the Twin Cities:

http://www.twincitiesfreemarket.org/

Flash

Donavan--

1. Even though Carol Bly is an obvious bigot who is much smarter than the hoi polloi she fears and hates, I note her books are sold on Amazon along with everyone else's. Surely she could have written books to be sold only by independent dealers. Any evidence that she did?

2. Further, Bly is quite wrong about what can be sold to people. Every Borders in the Twin Cities has a bigger selection of both Shakespeare and self-help books than Ruminator/HM ever did. I reckon that the back catalogs of highbrow publishers are in way better shape in the era of Amazon and the superstores than they ever were when City Lights and 8th St were the leading bookstores--during that time, if you were from the suburbs or a small town or from a non-reading family, you were pretty much SOL. Elitist frauds like Carol Bly will assure you that that was the Golden Age, of course.

Yeah, freemarket... I blogged on that at http://www.theamericanmind.com/ the other day. http://freecycle.org/ will give you a link to a community email list (usually run through Yahoo! Groups) where people can offer up what they want to get rid of. I got a swingset/sandbox thing the other day for my daughter. It cost me gas to Cold Spring, a bunch of sweat and lunch at BK.

Wouldn't "FreeBay" be a better name?