Amazon bookstore

It's Pride month, and I thought I'd share a quick tidbit of lesbian history.

One of my favorite gay comic strips from around the late 1980s was Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". I like it even better than the "Leonard and Larry" series from the same era, because it has more of a flow of continuing storyline. The bookstore in this comic strip was called Madwimmin Books. That imaginary bookstore was based on an actual Minneapolis bookstore called "Amazon Bookstore Cooperative".

I visited that real-life bookstore a few times, after my move here in 1998. It was important to me as a small local business, since I had volunteered at Liberty Books in Austin TX for a few years by opening the store on Saturdays. That was before it eventually closed, thanks to mounting economic pressure from GLBT books showing up in mainstream bookstores too. The Amazon bookstore here lasted longer than Liberty Books, and they had increased pressure specifically from Amazon, the worldwide juggernaut that is now known for just about everything except books. Seriously, my workplace is switching to an Amazon telephone call center solution in a few weeks, a service that obviously has nothing to do with books. It turns out that Jeff Bezos selected the name Amazon just because "it was a place that was 'exotic and different' ".

What is a small fringe bookstore to do in a world increasingly going online, when the obvious website you want is already taken? The local bookstore sued for the name. It had existed since 1970, after all, long before the online company showed up. The juggernaut won the online battle, though. Eventually, new owners took over the local store in 2008, then with that change they suddenly were disallowed from using the Amazon name at all. Amazon books could no longer be Amazon books. The stored lasted about 3 more years before it closed for good.

So that's the Madwimmin Books source material. Right here in Minneapolis. :)