For the first week of every October, Baker Books turned a substantial part of its front-of-shop over to books published by presses almost nobody had heard of. The promotion was called Get Lit, and it was a coordinated national effort: in one of the years the store took part, more than ninety bookstores across twenty-nine states ran it simultaneously.
The argument
The case the store made for it, in its own words, was blunt. In a world of corporate mergers and multinational conglomerates, independent presses were going the way of the dodo — and fast. That mattered, the argument ran, because unlike the large publishing companies, independent presses have the freedom to take chances on untried formats and first-time authors. They specialise in innovative poetry and fiction, in cutting-edge non-fiction, and in work by young and emerging writers: important work that may never be read at all without the support of grassroots publishers.
It is an argument about where new writing comes from. Large houses acquire authors; small houses discover them. Every few years a major literary reputation turns out on inspection to have started with a first collection from a press operating out of two rooms, and the pipeline that produced it depends entirely on whether anyone stocks that press.
How it worked
Get Lit was coordinated by Small Press Distribution, founded in 1969 and for decades the only non-profit book distributor in the United States dedicated exclusively to literary titles. Sponsors over the years included literary magazines and writers' organisations. Participating bookstores committed to displaying and hand-selling independently published literary titles for the week.
The practical difficulty this solved is invisible from outside the trade. Small presses are hard for a shop to buy from: many titles are not carried by the main wholesalers, terms are inconsistent, and returns are often unavailable. A distributor that consolidates hundreds of small literary publishers into one orderable list is the reason a general bookshop in Massachusetts can stock a poetry press from California at all.
What went on the table
The Get Lit displays were, by design, unlike anything else in the shop that year: poetry, experimental fiction, essay collections, translated work, music writing, memoirs from figures who were legends in one field and unknown in every other. Books that fit no section cleanly and would never survive on a chain's front table for a single day.
Get Lit was also the natural companion of the store's other small-press commitments — the Spinner Publications shelf holding a regional non-profit press's entire list, the local-author section, and the Open Book Series devoted to debut and rising-star writers. All four are the same argument from different angles.
What a shop risks
It is worth being clear about what a week of small-press displays actually costs a bookshop, because the promotion is often described as though it were free goodwill.
The front table is the most valuable retail space in the building, and in early October it would normally be carrying the first of the season's big autumn titles into the run-up to Christmas. Giving it to poetry and translated fiction from presses with no marketing budget means real forgone sales. Many small-press titles are non-returnable, so unsold stock is a write-off rather than a credit. And the titles are slow: a small-press poetry collection may take a year to sell three copies.
A shop that runs Get Lit anyway is making a deliberate, costed decision. That is what distinguishes it from a promotion supplied and paid for by a publisher, which is what most front-table displays in most bookshops actually are.
Afterwards
Small Press Distribution ceased operations in 2024 after fifty-five years, and its closure was felt across the literary small-press world precisely because the function it performed had no obvious replacement. The independent-press argument the store was making in the early 2000s therefore reads rather differently now — not as a period concern but as an unfinished one.
For readers wanting to follow small-press and literary publishing today, the National Book Foundation tracks independently published work through its awards, the Poetry Foundation covers the poetry presses, and the American Booksellers Association is where the retail end of the argument still gets made.