Household Books

Rock n roll in a bookstore. Hell yeah.

Infinite Hills: Cincy Sessions with Sundae Drives at Household Books Sundae Drives recently recorded "Severance" at Household Books with Infinite Hills' Cincy Sessions!

This past Thursday I was thrilled to lead a Lit Society workshop alongside Bond & Grace, exploring the idea of the personal library as a form of self-portraiture. We spoke about book collecting not as consumption, but as curation a creative act that reveals identity, memory, and emotional history. In an increasingly digital world, books continue to offer physical presence and a tangible relationship to meaning.

“What you really collect is always yourself.” — Jean Baudrillard

Pictured are a few of the books that bear emotional weight within my own portrait: the signed copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that Peter Sagal gave me when it was a One Book, One Chicago selection; my original copies of the Redwall series, read half to death in grade school, a copy of Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, inscribed after a sublime conversation about the surreal moment during the pandemic when we realized they were taking down the rims; and a bizarre Italian first edition of The Princess Bride that my friend Matt thoughtfully unearthed for me in a Roman used bookstore.

Having read and re-read these books, keeping them as containers for meaning and artifacts of gestures or conversations that touched me, makes it easy to share a passion and a perspective on the art of collecting.

Given that it was a weekend set aside for celebrating all that indie bookstores do to bring value, vitality, and beauty to their communities, we figured we’d do as much as we could possibly handle and then add some for good measure.

Thanks to all the book lovers, field trippers, musicians, dancers, work-shoppers, poets, allies, neighbors, orgs, and cute dogs, who make dreams come true and all that.

Long live the bookstore.

Come celebrate bookstores with us this weekend. So many ways to carry a torch.