One thing I love about the lesbian-feminists I know is their proclivity to tally. Give them a list of writers, for instance, and they’re apt to tell you: the number of women on it; the number of people of color it includes; the percentages of each; qualities of representations, and more. That tendency may be a result of seeing so many barriers shattered during the past fifty years. We’ve witnessed access to credit cards and home loans, an end to employment advertisements by gender, the openings of universities and professional schools to women, firsts in a range of occupations, and more. Through it all, these people were watching and counting. As I explore in the Feminist Studies article, “She Who Shouts Gets Heard!” and Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein explore in Data Feminism, counting and accounting is a vital feminist methodology. Data, they argue, can “remake the world.”
Perhaps that’s why, when I was chatting with Carol Seajay, the creative genius behind Feminist Bookstore News (FBN), it didn’t seem absurd to wonder: How many books did FBN mention over the course of its run? FBN published its trade newsletter from 1976 until 2000, so this seemed like a reasonable research question.
In 1976, women in the United States were opening bookstores left and right and starting newspapers, magazines, and journals to publish writing and thinking about the growing feminist and lesbian movements. That summer, a group of women gathered at a campsite near Omaha, Nebraska, for the first Women in Print Conference. Together, these women were galvanized by the networking, information sharing, and idea generation of the conference. They wanted to keep the energy going, so they decided they needed a newsletter. Carol Seajay and her comrade André agreed to start the project. Over the next twenty-four years, Feminist Bookstore News became a definitive source of information about feminist bookstores, feminist publishing, and feminist literature—as well as delicious gossip about comings and goings of bookwomen, authors, and publishers. It remains today a vital documentation about what happened in the Women in Print movement and what people were thinking while they were doing the work. It’s a treasure trove for researchers and anyone interested in bookish feminisms.
According to Seajay, most books published by independent feminist presses were listed in FBN, and totting up those books would offer a way to scope the size and impact of feminist publishers during the heyday of the Women in Print movement.
This idea intrigued me. Could we measure empirically the movement’s impact? The conversation with Seajay led me to initiate a research project through Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary and arts journal that I edit. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom attracts a range of volunteers and student interns to its work. To begin the FBN audit, Sinister Wisdom volunteers scanned issues of FBN at the San Francisco Public Library to supplement the Reveal Digital feminist collection at JSTOR. Then we enlisted volunteers to build a database that enumerated all the articles within FBN. We wanted researchers and general readers to be able to find stories easily in FBN’s massive archive.
That article database will be available for download from the Post45 Data Collective. A report on this phase of the project is available from Sinister Wisdom. Now Sinister Wisdom volunteers are embarking on the next database project: a database of every book mentioned in FBN. Folks interested in participating in this collaborative, community-based research project are welcome to join us.
Along the way, we compiled some statistics about FBN that illuminate the periodical’s size and scope. We call it “Feminist Bookstore News By the Numbers.” We hope this data encourages more readers to dive into this archive and unearth new stories, new counts, and new accounts of feminist books and publishing.
Year of first issue: 1976
Year of last issue: 2000
Total number of issues of FBN: 134
Total number of pages published in FBN: 10,746
Length of first issue: 8 pages
Length of last issue: 140 pages (22.6, last print issue)
Length of last electronic issue: 28 pages (23.1, last electronic issue)
Shortest issue published: 7 pages (volume 1, number 6)
Longest issue published: 162 pages (volume 22, number 3/4)
Number of issues published in the 1970s: 20
Number of issues published in the 1980s: 47
Number of issues published in the 1990s: 64
Number of issues published in the 2000s: 1 print and 2 electronic issues
Total pages published in the 1970s: 373
Total pages published in the 1980s: 2635
Total pages published in the 1990s: 7538
Total pages published in the 2000s: 200
First issue formalizing a Table of Contents: volume 3, number 6 (1980)
First email only issue: volume 22, number 5, published 2/21/2000
Title changed from Newsletter to News: volume 6, number 2 (1982)
First display advertisement*: volume 3, number 5 (October 1979)
Name of advertiser: Harper & Row Publishers
Books advertised: Seasons of Woman by Penelope Washbourn; Rape by Susan Griffin; Womanspirit Rising by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow; The Spiral Dance by Starhawk; Becoming Woman by Penelope Washbourn
Number of advertisers in the January 1985 issue: 4
Number of advertisers in the Fall 1985 issue: 19
Number of advertisers in the January 1990 issue: 28
Number of advertisers in the Fall 1990 issue: 19
Number of advertisers in the January 1995 issue: 38
Number of advertisers in the Fall 1995 issue: 76
Number of advertisers in the January 2000 issue: 54
First issue produced on a computer: volume 7, number 2 (1984)
First issue produced using desktop publishing: volume 11, number 4 (1988)
*Debates about advertising began very early in the life of Feminist Bookstore News. In FBN volume 2, number 4, a paid review was published. Interesting debates about advertising continued through the following years.
Compiled by Cassidy Hunt for Sinister Wisdom.
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