In 2018, wandering through Barnes & Noble, I noticed that the cover of almost every bestselling book bore an iteration of the same boring design. The author’s name and title of the book appeared in slightly-stylized font, and behind the text floated some vague shapes or pastel colors: the lazy type of design easy to parse on an Amazon or Goodreads list. As I wondered about the long-term implications of this algorithm-first aesthetic, a realization hit me: I’d lost my desire to read.
Now, my waning love of reading isn’t totally the fault of the waves of sameness radiating from the bestseller list. Talking about aesthetic trends in cover designs means I’m painting with a broad brush—though to be fair, so are the people designing these things. Still, the wall-to-wall shelves stocked with coldly iterative art felt hostile to curiosity, unpredictability, and strangeness: all those aspects of reading I’d loved and lost. I needed inspiration. I needed newness. I needed Whitty Books.
The minute I opened the door, it became apparent that Whitty Books had a particular character that the owners, Victoria Moore and Julian DeLesDernier, expressed through the titles on display. Here, in places other bookstores would showcase the culture’s hottest new releases, were horror novellas, speculative fiction anthologies, experimental poetry, indie comics–most of them from small presses. Everywhere I looked, I encountered the unfamiliar, and it became clear to me that Whitty Books was, first and foremost, a place for the independent, the underdog, the avant-garde, the local.
It was a place for the weird.
On my first visit, I decided to pick only books from unfamiliar presses. My eyes settled on a cover with a colorful image of a woman riding an elephant; behind them, a circus tent burned in the setting sun. I tucked that copy of The Dozen, a poetry collection by Casey Rocheteau, under my arm. I returned within a week or two, and I left with For Other Ghosts, a collection of short stories by Donald Quist. On its cover, two figures sit atop lonely planets and look longingly at each other across a gulf of shooting stars.
Over the next few years, I’d build a collection of strange titles boasting strange and beautiful art on the covers–a tangle of roots in the shape of a man’s face (Silver in the Wood, Emily Tesh), a drawing of an eel in the shape of infinite (The Embalmer, Anne-Renée Caillé), an image of a farm decaying forlornly in an overgrown field beneath a sickly green sky (Home Movie, Nowhere, Julia Madsen). Each of these books contain a bit of the uncanny, the type of weirdness I could expect to encounter at Whitty Books.