Anthony Haden-Guest on Book World

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST November 19th, 2025

The death of the writer Victor Hugo at 83 on May 22, 1885, produced an intense reaction in France. Forty thousand people spent the night on the Paris streets, then over two million joined Hugo’s funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried. This was an unusual display of public reverence for an individual who wasn’t a power figure in church, state, or the military, but a writer—best known for the novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

A number of writers have since experienced a degree of such general well-knownness—most notably Ernest Hemingway, with Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe among the last—but it’s no news that things have changed dramatically in the world of the printed word, namely books, magazines, and newspapers. And not among grown-ups only. I recently visited the Peanuts Museum, a tribute to that comic strip near San Francisco, and found it full of kids. I asked Jean Schulz, widow of Charles “Sparky” Schulz, the strip’s creator, where children might now be reading Peanuts. “I don’t think they read anything,” she told me.

Writers Ron Kolm and Philip Giambri selling books

A performance in book and puppet

So what had brought them there? “Social media,” she said. Indeed, with books—along with other such users of printed and illustrated text as newspapers and magazines—struggling to maintain a presence, and an urgently necessary presence in our all-too-interesting times, it struck me as the right moment to take up an invite to attend the Easton Book Festival in Easton, Pennsylvania. The invitation was from Shalom Neumann, the artist, who has a studio and gallery in Easton and who represents an art element at the fair. It is one of over three thousand book fairs that take place annually in the United States and was launched seven years ago by Andy Laties, who ran a bookstore elsewhere in the state.

“One of my greatest pleasures as a bookseller had been to participate in book festivals. And I thought it would be something I would like to do myself,” Laties told me. So why Easton, I asked? “Easton was a place that had a lot of festivals,” he said. “And many people around here were interested in participating in a book festival. There was a whole literary scene of self-publishing or performing authors and artists. It became more than I had originally thought of. It became a community.”

Ron Kolm, the writer and a core member of the writer crew The Unbearables—known for their 1980s actions such as reading poetry to people going home from work on the Brooklyn Bridge—has also worked as a bookseller, lastly with Posman Books in Chelsea Market. “That was when COVID hit and Chelsea Market closed its store,” he told me. “And the last book we sold was Camus’s The Plague. That is a true story; I didn’t make it up.”

Linda Klleinhub and poet Madeline Mortenberg,  in front of a wall of Shalon Neumann's art. 
 

Story hour at Book and Puppet

Kolm continued, “My whole thing is books and bookstores, so when I see anyone with a book on the subway—which isn’t all that often—I go over and congratulate them for reading a book. If there’s one person in a coffee shop reading a newspaper, I go over and congratulate him. Everyone used to be reading a newspaper; now everyone is looking at their cell phones. They bump into you in the street because they’re looking at their cell phones.”

The reaction of Book World to this creeping decline includes an energetic reach-out to other forms, as typified in Easton by The Book and Puppet Theater, which Andy Laties set up eight years ago. “It’s a bookstore and a gallery and a performance space,” Laties said. “And it’s a year-round bookstore, open seven days a week.”

Selling books

Linda Kleinbub is another stalwart of Book Fair culture as the creator of Pink Trees Press, which works with the Book & Puppet Theater during the Easton festival. “We do performances several times a month. We do puppet shows, we do concerts, we do open-mic poetry presentations,” she told me. “Tonight we have an art workshop. The last exhibition we had was twenty-one artists.” The show was in the book fair, then moved on to Shalom Neumann’s gallery.

Philip Giambri & Pauline Findlay

Her Pink Trees Press is one of the operations that has budded up to create a space between the established publishing houses and the tech of self-publishing. How do they publicize their books? “Events are in art galleries… community gardens… libraries…” And how do they distribute them? “A lot of it is very grassroots,” she said. “We go in person to the bookstores.”

Kleinbub describes Pink Trees as a Not-For-Profit Press. What does that mean? “Basically there are three types of presses,” she said. “The For-Profit, the Hybrid, and the Not-For-Profit.” The For-Profit and Hybrid presses require payment from the author, she said, and described some such complex deals. And the Not-For-Profits? “We publish authors; we do not expect the author to pay for the publication of the book. And all the money we make goes back into the press for the future. It’s not like we’re in it to make money. And there’s not a lot of money to be made.” Silver-Tongued Devil, an anthology of East Village writings, was published in 2020. I attended a reading from the most recent Pink Trees book, Night of the Manhattans, at Otto’s Shrunken Head, a tavern on East 14th Street, a few days ago.

So Book World is battling fretfully on.