Wednesday 8 March 2017

Ohio bookstore flips male-authored books, displaying them backwards

To draw attention to female authors, a Cleveland bookstore celebrated Women’s History Month by turning every male-written book in the fiction room backward on its shelf.

Eight of the all-female employees of Loganberry Books went through about 10,000 books, a process that took about two hours. They’ll leave the books turned around for the next two weeks.

“Pictures are loud communicators,” Harriett Logan, the bookstore’s founder and owner, told Heat Street. “So we are in essence not just highlighting the disparity but bringing more focus to the women’s books now, because they’re the only ones legible on the shelf.”


Loganberry Books, a self-professed feminist-leaning bookstore, sells new, used and rare books. The bookstore advertises its women’s history and literature offerings as one of the strengths of its collection.

Logan said said she came up with the male-authored book flip idea herself, as a way to make a feminist point. The visual impact is even greater than she’d expected, Logan said, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

In an interview with Cleveland Scene, Logan said the display was “a metaphor of silencing the male voice—at least for this month.”

“To give the floor and attention to women, you need to be able to hear them,” Logan told Heat Street. “And if someone else is talking over them, that just doesn’t happen.”

(Source: Heat Street)

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