Literatus is a slightly arch bit of Latin for a lettered person, and Baker Books used it as the name for the whole cluster of things it did around literacy: a recognition programme, a column, and a standing argument about reading in the community.
Literatus of the Month
The programme started as a monthly recognition. Each month the store singled out a person or an organisation in the area who had made an outstanding effort to promote literacy locally, and wrote them up. The nominations came from customers, using a form at the counter and later on the store's website; the selection was made by the shop's staff.
A monthly award is hard to sustain — it needs twelve genuinely deserving nominations a year, every year, in one small city — and in time it became an annual one, the Literatus of the Year. The eleven monthly honorees recognised at the store's eleventh-anniversary ceremony in November 2000 became the Literati Hall of Fame, which is described in full on its own page. As with that page, the recipients are not named in this archive; they were private local people.
Writing about reading
The Literati name also covered the store's own editorial voice — the running commentary its booksellers kept up about what they were reading and why. That voice is the through-line of the whole site, and it is what makes the archive worth keeping. It is present in the Pick of the Literate subject lists, in the shelf-talker recommendations, in the favourite-books lists, and in the annual Banned Books Week material.
What characterises it is a refusal to be neutral. The lists say when a book is worth the money and when it is not. They say when a section is good ("It's a good section. We like it."). They make jokes at the expense of school districts that banned To Kill a Mockingbird. That register — opinionated, local, slightly amused, never corporate — is the actual product of an independent bookshop, and it does not survive scale.
The bumper sticker
The small detail everybody remembered was the incentive: nominate someone for the Literatus award and the store sent you a free READ bumper sticker. It cost the shop almost nothing and it did two jobs. It got nominations in, and it put the word on several hundred cars around Bristol County.
That is a fair summary of how the store approached literacy work generally. No budget to speak of, a clear view about what mattered, and a preference for things that stayed visible after the event was over.
Where the name came from
The store's whole naming scheme ran on the same joke. Its reading lists were The Pick of the Literate. Its literacy award went to a Literatus. Its loyalty club was a Baker's Dozen, which is thirteen, which is what a family called Baker would obviously choose. None of it is subtle and all of it is memorable, which is the correct trade-off for a small business trying to be recognised in one city.
There is a real editorial position underneath the wordplay. Calling a customer-nominated community award a Literatus prize deliberately borrows the vocabulary of high literary culture and hands it to a person who organised a book drive at a primary school. That inversion is the argument: the people doing the most consequential literary work in a small city are usually not the ones the word is normally reserved for.
Elsewhere
The same argument is made at national scale by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds American library and literacy programmes, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports reading and public-humanities projects through the state councils. Both are worth knowing about for anyone trying to build something similar in their own town.