Haec City's M. Callen on Online Browsing and the Responsibility of Bookselling

Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with M. Callen, proprietor of Haec City / Also Books in Pittsburgh, Penn:

Named for “haecceity” or thisness, Haec City deals in books, objects & images that reflect the evolving visual and material cultures of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Areas of note include education, textiles, decorative arts, reference, vernacular materials, misfortune - and, Also Books, in general.

The Haec City website originated as a pandemic-era project designed to mimic the experience of visiting a bookshop during a time when those spaces were inaccessible. In translating the ritual of rummaging through piles of books to the virtual sphere, clicking on an image substitutes picking up something that catches our eye, creating the opportunity for serendipitous discoveries absent of algorithms. 

Haec City / Also Books maintains a public archive of select sold listings to encourage engagement with rare materials outside the traditional bibliophile community. The “Rummage” site for books remains active while Haec City’s primary focus has shifted to a broader range of material, especially manuscripts and ephemera, offered through the main website, PDF catalogs, and book fairs.

Callen responded to the Bright Young Booksellers invitation with this note:

I appreciate your patience as I negotiate my approach to bookselling as a practice vs the reality of it being a business. As a one-person, fully self-sustaining operation, I recognize it is not a savvy decision to pass up this opportunity. It may even be irresponsible to the balance sheet - after all, I don't get to do this if I don't make the numbers work. 

Responsibility is one of those words that echoes a lot here. I am fortunate to have made the business successful enough that I get to work more with manuscripts and primary sources and things that often feel like small miracles to still exist. I am deeply grateful to institutions for valuing this material, engaging new audiences, and creating contexts for it to persist. Along with that echo of responsibility is caretaking and remembering and necessity. 

These are all important things - and, at the moment, desperately so. I wish I had the capacity and the eloquence to talk about them more fully, and perhaps it is cowardly not to try. Articulation is a troublesome feat, and the short answer to the questions of what a typical day looks like and what I love about what I do. The task of saying what something is - finding, learning, and understanding it - is the most fundamental and consequential aspect of bookselling. Every day I get to make that effort is a profound privilege.

As I rolled around the decision of sensibly participating in the series or maintaining the quiet integral to my practice, I realized I wished to say only that - and in explaining it here to you, rendered a form of profile. If you'd be interested in sharing this in lieu of the usual Q&A I think it would be a fair representation. I fully appreciate, however, that it is not the content you were looking for, and there are many worthy young booksellers who could benefit from participating. I'd like to reiterate my sincere thanks for the invitation and the occasion to reflect on my current role in the trade. I am grateful to be part of it.