Few things mattered more to Baker Books than keeping the distinctly local, independent flavour of the shop and sustaining the region's cultural life. Those two aims met in the Local Authors section — a standing shelf, not a seasonal display, holding books by writers from Bristol County, the Rhode Island line and the towns in between, on subjects that ranged from Lizzie Borden to Martin Luther King to pink-headed ducks. There was a healthy smattering of fiction and a great deal of poetry. It was, in the store's own summary, a good section.
Why a general bookshop keeps one
A local-author shelf is a nuisance to run. The titles arrive one and two at a time, often from the author, frequently without a distributor behind them; they do not appear in the trade catalogues; they cannot be returned; and the print runs are small enough that a good week clears the stock. No chain maintains one properly, because the economics do not work.
What it buys, in exchange, is the thing that makes a bookshop a civic institution rather than a retail outlet. A writer in Somerset or Seekonk who has finished a book has somewhere to put it. A reader who wants to know what is being written here has somewhere to look. And when one of those small books turns out to matter — a definitive local reference, a first collection by a poet who goes on — the shop was the reason anyone found it.
What was on it
The dominant genre was poetry, which is normal for a regional shelf and unusual anywhere else. Small collections from area poets, chapbooks from writers' groups, and the occasional substantial book from a poet with a national reputation who happened to live here. New Bedford has had a poet laureate for decades, and the poems written about this city by people who live in it tend to be unsentimental in a way that visitors' poems are not — the fishing port that is also a drug port, the moonlit beaches and the jazz clubs, the wisdom passing between generations in a place that is not doing well economically and knows it.
Writers' groups produced a steady stream of collaborative collections. One long-running local group of four women, meeting since the early 1990s to critique each other's work, produced a collection ranging across continental drift, converted Portuguese Jewish sailors, nuclear war and swimming the cold waters of Narragansett Bay — which is a fair sample of the range a regional shelf covers.
Then the local reference works: town histories, genealogies, maritime studies, and the serious Lizzie Borden scholarship, which is a real academic field with a substantial apparatus and should not be confused with the paperback rack.
Signed copies
Because most of these writers lived within twenty miles, a large proportion of the shelf was signed — not as a marketing device but simply because the author had been in the shop. That is the ordinary condition of a local-author section and it is the detail that most clearly marks it as belonging to a particular place.
Reading local writing now
Much of the material described here was published in editions of a few hundred copies and is now genuinely scarce; the archive's page on hunting out-of-print books covers how that search was conducted. For contemporary poetry generally, the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets are the standard reference points, and both carry substantial free archives.
The related sections in this archive are local history and Spinner Publications, the regional press that published a good many of these writers.