Interview with Francisco Hernandez: leaves
leaves, a bookstore and rare book room in Brooklyn, NY, was created by Francisco Hernandez in the spirit of building and sustaining community. With a desire to develop stronger book trade connections to youth and young audiences, Hernandez designed leaves with the aim of making books affordable, accessible, and relevant. Hernandez previously ran Alabaster Bookshop as a manager, and is a CABS-Minnesota Diverse Voices Fellowship alumnus. He offers insights into the process of developing and running leaves.
Jeanne Dodds:
What motivated you to create leaves, your second-hand bookstore and rare book room?
Francisco Hernandez:
I think I was pretty unhappy with the traditional ways of the book trade. Looking around it felt like the New York book scene was mostly just different iterations of the same bookshop. So when we started building leaves we really tried to do everything a little differently. The scene was mostly middle-aged and older men selling to younger women and we wanted to invert that paradigm. If the idea of a used-bookstore typically evokes dust and decay, we wanted everything to feel fresh and alive. We wanted the turn-over of stock to feel fast and intense– like the shop was something different every time you visited– and the curation to be roughly a decade ahead of the curve.
We wanted to meet the needs of the community and not just be a reflection of what booksellers think is cool. And I feel we did a pretty good job of that: if I’m not mistaken, the flagship Greenpoint shop is the only general-use all secondhand bookstore in the five boroughs!
JD: What is your perspective on the booktrade as a collective space, where readers, collectors, and the curious triangulate to create community?
FH: I think that we have a lot more work to do in order to make books themselves–and by extension the trade– more accessible to people. The first step is to change how we educate people more generally. Rather than presenting a literary canon for students to digest and regurgitate, we should encourage young people to explore all the possibilities of the literary word for themselves. I (seriously) adore Moby-Dick, but the idea of assigning it as a classroom book is insane to me. We should do a better job of meeting people where they are and showing them all the ways that books are vehicles for exploring the anxiety, angst, anger, and yearning that people experience on a daily basis.
JD: What are your ideas for supporting ways that collecting rare books can become more accessible to young people?
I think young people are already collecting, they’re just not calling it that. Because in our society, older people hoard all the wealth and power, younger people will never be able to replicate the kind of monied high-spot accumulation that characterized the previous generations. So young people are having to compensate by becoming more creative and intuitive about what they value. Our job is to foster a new market for cultural objects that is a little more fun and a lot less snobbish than it was before. Young people will come to the trade if you make room for them.
JD: What is the book on your store shelves currently that's most inspiring to you?
FH: A truly horrible question; it’s like asking to pick a favorite child!
Okay, gun to my head: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. It’s been an obsession of mine for years; but, in my defense, it only gets more relevant by the day. Basically, Arendt believes that capitalism has driven people apart from each other and away from their traditional ways of living and understanding the world. The new world we’ve built is awfully lonely and encourages people to believe all sorts of dumb and morally insane things they find emotionally and ideologically soothing. These fascistic movements are each pseudo-communities designed to fill the existential void left by modern society. It’s a big reason why I believe community building is more important than ever.
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The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt
JD: What is one thing of significance that you have learned from bookselling that you would like to share with the bookseller community?
FH: Bookselling has really taught me a lot about myself and how to be a better person. If the novelist trades in imagination then a bookseller trades in empathy. Nothing will serve you better as a bookseller than learning to explore the world from other perspectives. And I also love this business because I find it constantly humbling; intellect will get you half as far as curiosity. So when you are bogged down by the seeming sum-total of human intellect, don’t feel dumb. Remember: Be curious, be kind, you’ll be just fine!
JD: What is a story that stands out for you about a relationship with a book buying customer?
FH: The children that come in have to be my favorite customers. In Greenpoint we made a little kid’s reading nook so that they had a space to hide or lay down; something that was at their level (literally) and they could feel they had ownership of. In the early days of the shop I was alone and had to open myself rain or shine, sickness or health. So one sunday I was too hungover to function but opened anyway. While I was trying to console myself by laying in the kid’s nook, a little girl came up to me and accosted me: “you’re not supposed to be here!” And while I was tempted to explain that technically I owned everything in this room, including the kid’s nook, I just apologized and brought her favorite little chair to sit. I was proud that she understood the space belonged to her; enough to scold any adult bold enough to get in the way of her Sunday reading.