On a winter night last year, a few months after losing the bulk of his personal library, journalist Danny Postel noticed a sign in a vacant Edgewater storefront a few miles from his home: LEFT OF CENTER BOOKSTORE–COMING SOON.
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Postel was just as fortuitous a find for the store as the store was for him. For one, he’s bought more than 300 books there, replacing many of the volumes that had been auctioned off by a storage company in a complicated mix-up Postel describes as “one of the worst nightmares of my life.” But in the last year and a half he’s become more than just a customer: he’s also become Left of Center’s unpaid champion, networking tirelessly to make the store a stop on the rounds of authors, journalists, and intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation. Some, like University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, have given readings; others, like Hitchens, have submitted to lengthy in-store interviews with Postel. (The interviews are usually published later in outlets like Logos and the Common Review.) When poet Andre Codrescu visited Postel recently, Postel brought him to Left of Center after lunch.
“He talks about this place in the royal ‘we,’” says Levey. “When [the store is] not doing well, he’s like, ‘We’ve got to do something.’
Despite Postel’s best efforts, Levey struggles to pay the bills. She opened Left of Center with much less money than generally needed to start a bookstore–between a quarter and a third of the cash necessary to cover expenses until she found her legs–and though sales have increased every month since the store opened and she’s developed a “really serious core” of loyal regulars, “closing could be imminent at any point.”
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