The Independent Bookseller Today

Jonathon Welch

Join via Zoom

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86479814971

Talking Leaves…Books is Buffalo’s oldest independent bookstore, in its fifth decade in the city. I’ll talk a bit about the history of independent bookselling and its special role in the ecosystem of authors, publishers, and readers, and about our history, with a focus of the turbulence and changes over the past 30 years and the current challenges of a fragmented reading public, a  monopolistic competitor and a global pandemic.

Jonathon Welch was born in the middle of a year in the middle of a century in the middle of a country in the middle of a family of seven children. He came to Buffalo to pursue a degree in UB’s English Department. With a small group of friends and fellow book lovers and literary and literacy advocates he helped establish the bookstore now known as Talking Leaves…Books, where he continues to work. He lives in Buffalo with his wife, Martha Russell, one of the store’s co-founders.