Eventually, Frank Reiss moved back to Atlanta and opened A Cappella Books, a shoebox of a store in Little Five Points, and Reiss watched his son’s success with admiration and even some envy. “I followed Frank to library sales to buy books,” he told me, “and then I asked him for a list of the top one hundred writers, and I started going to garage sales on my own, looking for those hundred writers, spending ten cents or a quarter buying each book, filing up my spare closet and then the whole spare bedroom. And once I had done that, I started looking for a location.”

Reiss brought the same flair to bookselling that he’d used elsewhere: the shelf labels were made with the tailor shop’s monogram machine; bolts of paisley tie silk were made into deluxe shopping bags. But he found the actual selling of used books to be a little boring, so another form of arbitrage he exploited was the surfeit of literati who felt that getting to spend their days in a bookstore was practically paycheck enough: in those early years, the employees he hired all knew more about books than he did and almost ran the place themselves. He mostly amused himself playing softball, tennis, and touch football.

Like the Jacob Reisses who’d come before, he seemed to know everyone in town, so it wasn’t surprising when he finally figured out a way to make his bookstore into its own kind of civic institution. That began in 1995, when Reiss learned that the local radio personality Don Keith was about to publish a novel and was hoping to do an event for it. “We said we’d do a book signing, whatever that is,” Reiss remembered. What it was was successful: “We sold a bunch of books and we had a good time, so we thought, Let’s do that again, and that was the start of our signed books.”

For most people, signed first editions conjure images of white gloves and Plexiglas-protected display cases, but Reiss doesn’t generally deal in rare or even old books. Some of his biggest sellers over the years include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Be Useful,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” Joe Namath’s “All the Way,” and, as of this month, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” Like those books, most of his inventory was recently published, and most of his authors are still with us. The Booksmith’s shelves feature an eclectic mix of poetry and literary fiction, plus local and regional titles, along with whatever other nonfiction Reiss has a mind to sell. It might be the only bookstore in Alabama where you can’t find a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and the only one in the world where you cannot buy a Bible, not to mention anything by J. K. Rowling.

How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.

The public library in Fairhope, Alabama – a picturesque city on the shores of Mobile Bay – has found itself in the crosshairs of battles over library content.

The Alabama public library service board of trustees recently voted to withhold state funding from the Fairhope public library after complaints from conservative parents about books in the teen section. In the same meeting, the board voted to immediately dismiss the executive director of the state library agency, who had been planning to resign.

The board chairperson, John Wahl, who is also the chair of the Alabama Republican party, said board members believe the Fairhope library is in violation of state policies to protect children from inappropriate materials. The books that have been cited by the upset parents include Sold, a National Book Award finalist about a girl who is sold into sexual slavery in India.

The actions come amid a broader national culture war over library content and programs and a surging number of challenges to books on library shelves. The Fairhope library’s defunding is the first measure taken under a new Alabama law and 2024 administrative code changes that say to receive state funding, local libraries must have policies to safeguard youth from “sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate for children or youth”.

The American Library Association’s list of the most-challenged books of 2023 included many with LGBTQ+ or sexual content.

“I think that the GOP chair on the state library board is forcing the removal of books just because of anti-library extremists. I think that’s ignoring the voices of Fairhope taxpayers and library users,” said Amber Frey of Read Freely Alabama, an organization that has opposed the restrictions.

Wahl said his board was not trying to ban the books. But he maintained the state code requires “the actual relocation of these books out of youth sections”.

“We are unapologetic about standing up for Alabama families and putting them in control, even if that means temporarily defunding local libraries until they can be compliant,” Wahl said.

He said parents objecting to the books read excerpts during the meeting to demonstrate why they believe the books do not belong in the teen section.

Clean Up Alabama, a group that along with Moms for Liberty had sought restrictions, praised the decision. “We saw the board step up in the fight to protect our children,” the group said in a statement.

The secretary of the board of the Fairhope public library said they were shocked by the action.

“We’re devastated and really stunned by this. We had no warning that this was going to happen,” Randal Wright said.

Several years ago, the library received complaints against 35 books and went through a review process, Wright said. The director declined to move them after determining they were appropriate for teens.

Wright said they recently received a request to revisit that decision because of the new state policies. She said the board declined to move them.

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“We had looked at those books, and we stuck by that decision,” Wright said.

Wright said she believed the challenges were filed by a small number of people. The overall community was supportive of its library, she said.

Read Freely Alabama has started a fundraiser for the Fairhope library to try to replace the $42,000 in state funding. The group had raised $8,000 by Friday afternoon.

The state board on Thursday also dismissed Nancy Pack, who has led the library service since 2014. Pack had planned on resigning at the end of September.

Wahl said there had been friction between Pack and some board members who believed she was hostile to the policies they were trying to implement.

Pack has spent more than 30 years as a librarian and has been honored as a distinguished alumna of the University of Tennessee’s school of information sciences.

“Libraries have never been political,” Pack said, adding that the attacks on librarians and libraries have been distressing.

“We have seen more librarians retire rather than go through what we’re having to go through at this time.”

Librarians, advocates sue to block restrictive new Alabama library policies

May 10 2024

A group of families and librarians filed suit in federal court this week to block the implementation of new library material policies enacted by the Autauga-Prattville Public Library Board of Trustees in Alabama. Filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, the suit seeks a preliminary injunction blocking the library board’s newly enacted policies and a declaration that the policies are unconstitutional.

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