The Pick of the Literate was the name Baker Books gave to its own reading lists — the section of the site where the booksellers wrote about what was on the local-interest shelves. Those shelves lived in the café end of the store, and the store called them the crown jewels of the collection. That was not entirely a boast. A general bookshop in a city of a hundred thousand people does not usually maintain a serious standing bibliography of its own region; this one did, and kept it current for the better part of fifteen years.
What was on those shelves
The local-interest section covered every angle on southeastern New England the store could find a book for: the cultural history of the area's towns and cities, the ethnic diversity of the region, and above all the region's long and complicated relationship with the sea. It was organised into standing subject lists, each of which has its own page in this archive:
- Whaling — the industry that made New Bedford, from the Arctic to the South Seas, and the literature it produced.
- Nautical history — voyages, shipwrecks, lighthouses, circumnavigations and the language of the sea.
- Fishing — the modern working fleet, one of the largest in the United States, and the danger and economics of it.
- New Bedford — the city itself: whaling port, textile city, fishing port, and a documented haven on the Underground Railroad.
- Portuguese history — the Luso-American and Cape Verdean SouthCoast, the largest single strand in the region's modern identity.
- Spinner Publications — the New Bedford non-profit press whose regional list the store carried in depth.
- Local history and local authors — the general SouthCoast shelf, and the writers who lived here.
- Fall River — the neighbouring mill city, with a history of its own.
How the lists were written
Each list carried a short editorial introduction and then a run of titles, every one with a paragraph explaining what the book actually did and who would want it. The paragraphs were written in-house. That is what separated them from a distributor's feed: they were opinionated, occasionally sharp, and they assumed a reader who lived here and already knew the outline of the story.
The same habit produced the store's other recommendation traditions — the shelf-talker picks, the favourite-books lists, the customer recommendations. The Pick of the Literate was the most durable of them because its subject did not go out of date.
The other standing lists
Local interest was the core of the Pick of the Literate, but not the whole of it. The store maintained a rotating set of general subject lists alongside it, each with the same treatment — an editorial introduction, then annotated titles. Over the years these covered education (pitched at anyone with a stake in schools, not only teachers), poetry, young adult, children's chapter books, science fiction and fantasy, women's writing, politics and current affairs, parenting, arts and crafts, and a standing list of debut writers.
The debut list is the revealing one. Very few general bookshops maintain a permanent first-novel section, because debuts are the hardest thing on the shop floor to sell. Keeping one as a standing list — rather than a seasonal table — is a statement about what the shop thought it was for, and it is consistent with the store's small-press promotion and its reading series for emerging authors.
Reading these lists now
Prices, editions and availability have all been stripped out; several of the presses named have since closed or been absorbed, and a number of the books are themselves out of print. What survives is the shape of the bibliography — which subjects the region generated a real literature about, and which books were considered the standard ones on each. That is still useful.
For anything requiring a current catalogue, the institutional collections are the place to look: the New Bedford Whaling Museum research topics for whaling and the port, and Digital Commonwealth for digitised Massachusetts material generally.