A. N. Devers will never forget what happened at one of her first antiquarian book fairs, in 2015. She had pulled two novels from a shelf, one by Joan Didion, the other by Cormac McCarthy. And then she noticed the price tags of each: Didion’s was priced at $25, while McCarthy’s went for $600.
“I just looked around the room,” Devers said recently over a cappuccino at London Review Bookshop in the heart of Bloomsbury, “and thought, it can’t simply be scarcity. It’s who’s collecting what and who’s selling what. And as I knew from publishing, men don’t read books by women as much as they read books by men.” The frustrating logic goes from there: “If they’re the ones [who] are mostly buying and collecting rare books, then there’s not a market for women writers.”
It’s a moment Devers, a writer, editor, and now bookseller who relocated from New York City to London a couple years ago, has turned to often since launching The Second Shelf this September. The multifaceted project is not just about promoting female authors but driving gender equality in the literary canon, generating excitement around rare books, and re-discovering work by and about women. Following a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $42,000—as well as the establishment of an advisory board including Kirkus Reviews fiction editor Laurie Muchnick and the writers Cheryl Strayed and Jesmyn Ward, among others—The Second Shelf now includes a quarterly print journal, an online bookshop launching soon, and a brick-and-mortar London-based bookshop, slated to open in November in a small courtyard in Soho, that will regularly host readings and events.
The Second Shelf—named for a 2012 Meg Wolitzer essay published by The New York Times Sunday Book Review—arrives amid a broader movement that aims to center female and minority voices in the cultural conversations and building a better foundation for the next generation in turn. There’s the Times’s ongoing project that gives “overlooked” individuals like Sylvia Plath and Ida. B Wells long-overdue obits; the Paris Review’s monthly online column, Feminize Your Canon, which has shone a spotlight on women like Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West and British novelist Olivia Manning; Brooklyn-based shop Honey & Wax now awards an annual prize of $1,000 for an outstanding, intellectually rigorous book collection conceived and built by a young woman; on Twitter, writer Rachel Syme makes daily recommendations of little-known nonfiction reads about women’s lives.
This wave of interest in underrated, under-read women is undeniably connected to #MeToo, but Devers said there have always been women in the book trade promoting work by other women. For the most part, though, they’ve largely been treated as a niche, as reflected in the price disparities. “It’s kind of a conundrum,” she explains. “I would prefer to not have to be in this position, but at the same time, it’s also a challenge and joy to get to say that this is an issue that needs addressing.”
Devers calls her print quarterly, which doubles as her catalog of books and literary ephemera for sale, a “fashion magazine for books to read in your tub. It’s the thing I would want to read.” The process of assembling the first issue was frenzied (“I was commissioning things very, very informally over D.M. Breaking all the rules.”) but the final product is polished, playfully designed, and downright luxurious, its saturated, marbled paper calling to mind a tome one might find tucked away in the Morgan Library.
And the rule-breaking process paid dividends. After Devers spotted a tweet from novelist Lauren Groff praising Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant, Devers reached out to offer a spot on the Second Shelf team. “She immediately got on board, signed on for the advisory board, and agreed to write something.” The ideal process for Devers was clear: “I wanted great writers, great books, a range of prices, and representation of different women from different backgrounds.”
Devers said it’s possible for any woman to build her own Second Shelf. Step one: choose a woman writer that speaks to you, and start by acquiring her first editions over time, saving up for more expensive additions or asking for them as birthday gifts. “It seems like a nostalgic or precious pursuit, at first,” Devers says. “I think women are very practical with their money. They’re worried about the day-to-day. Book collecting just seems like a little bit of a frivolous endeavor. But when you actually look at the issue at hand—which is that women aren’t collected and women’s voices don’t take as much room physically on shelves—then you see it as a mission and a purpose. And that your pursuit of these books can actually make a difference.”
And, for now, at least, a female-focused literary collection comes at a reasonable price. “The threshold is lower because their books are less money. So, at this moment, it’s a good time to start your collection.” And she knows just the place to go.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect that Devers offered Groff a position on the Second Shelf team, not a book.
