One of the more unusual things Baker Books did was give out an award. Not a prize for a book — a prize for getting other people to read, awarded annually to a person or an organisation in the Greater New Bedford area who had made an outstanding effort to promote literacy in the community.
This page describes the programme. The recipients are not named here. They were private local individuals and community groups, and the biographies and photographs the store originally published about them are not carried forward into this archive. What is worth preserving is the idea, which is a good one and is being copied by independent bookshops elsewhere without anyone realising a Massachusetts bookstore did it first.
How it worked
The award began as a monthly recognition — a Literatus of the Month — and settled into an annual one, the Literatus of the Year. Nominations came from customers, not from the store. Anyone could put a name forward with a short description of what the nominee had done, and the store sent a free READ bumper sticker for every legitimate nomination received, which is a small and rather charming piece of incentive design.
The winners were then chosen by the bookshop's own staff from the nominations received. That combination — public nomination, staff selection — is what kept it honest. A pure public vote would have gone to whoever could mobilise the most friends. A pure staff pick would have gone to whoever the staff already knew.
The eleventh-anniversary ceremony
In November 2000, as part of its eleventh-anniversary celebration, the store held an awards ceremony recognising eleven individuals and groups at once — one for each year it had been open. That cohort became the Hall of Fame.
Each honoree received a gift certificate to the bookshop and, more to the point, a matching donation was sent to their favourite charitable organisation. The certificates of recognition were then displayed in the store's front foyer, where they stayed. That detail is worth dwelling on: the store put the honorees' certificates on its own wall, in the entrance, where every customer walked past them. The award was designed to be seen by the honoree's neighbours rather than by the honoree.
Who the award was for
Without naming anybody, the shape of the eleven is instructive, because it is not what an outsider would predict. The recipients were not, on the whole, writers or librarians. They were people who had built something practical that put books into other people's hands: a school reading-incentive scheme, a holiday campaign that made sure a book reached every child enrolled in a local needy-families fund, a school parents' group that had organised itself around reading, a specialist reading teacher who had changed how a whole school taught it, community volunteers, and business owners who had funded literacy work out of unrelated trades.
That is the useful lesson from the programme. If you ask a bookshop's customers who in their town has done the most to get people reading, they do not name the obvious literary figures. They name the person who ran the book drive.
Why it is worth copying
The programme cost the store very little — a certificate, a gift voucher, a charitable donation, and an evening — and it did several things at once. It gave the shop a formal relationship with the schools, the library and the local charitable sector. It produced a public occasion in the store that was not a sale. And it made a specific, checkable claim about what a bookshop is for: not just a place that sells books, but an institution with a view about literacy in the town it sits in.
National organisations make this argument at scale — the Institute of Museum and Library Services is the main federal funder of library and literacy work in the United States, and the American Library Association runs the professional side of it. The Literati programme was the same argument made by one shop, in one small city, with a certificate and a bumper sticker.
The store's other literacy programme, the annual children's poetry contest, is described separately, and the Literati column page covers the store's own writing about reading.