Paragraphs for UPB
We’re stubborn. CHRISTINA CREVELING
The love of my life. Well, one of them. BRENDA HILLMAN
It is easy to forget what an incredible gem UPB truly is. One walks by, goes in, is suddenly inhabiting a world of scholarship and thought. Suddenly, again, the reason one spends one’s life reading and writing and teaching comes back. A room of our own. Both calm and a sense of actually belonging to something worthwhile. It is easy to forget that such an experience is available almost nowhere else. Rare, special, precious. Please take care of it before it is gone. PAUL RABINOW
University Press Books is my sanctuary. MIKE PALMER
I don’t much like the idea that a city’s particularity is based on its shops. But strange bedfellows produce wonders; surely Berkeley, with its intellectuals and shopkeepers, is the only city in the world with a hair salon named AhDorno! Among all the wonders, University Press Books is unparalleled. For a certain kind of worker, it serves as a hardware store with a traditional streak, where the tools on offer still include odd-shaped screws and left-handed scissors. But there’s no nostalgia in this, just a kind of utility; the more the world belongs to identical big-box hardware stores, the fewer things people will be able to make. UPB is not just a place where knowledge is stored, but a stopover place along the way to making more — a pleasant stopover, with chairs and nice people and a sense of calm, at once necessary and sweet. These are particular qualities indeed, which the city would be far lesser without. JOSHUA CLOVER
Upon arriving in Berkeley for my job interview in February of 1990, I arrived (from Jerusalem) in the middle of the day, and not having any appointments till the morrow, I checked in at the Women’s Faculty Club and then started wandering down Bancroft. After a bit, I arrived at University Press Books. I stepped into the store and five minutes later decided: I want this job. Once having been offered the position, I thought housing would be no problem, as I could simply move into UPB by taking a job as their night watchman, not imagining any needs, physical or otherwise, that would not be served by living in that wonderful treasure house. My feelings have not changed since that moment of love at first sight. DANIEL BOYARIN
University environs without scholarly bookshops, even scholarly life without books—this is a future that we hasten at our peril. UPB reminds us why the caress of the book is not to be lightly forsaken. Harboring thinking, thinkers, and thoughts that nestle and squawk together, it holds and proffers a world worth far more than the pennies saved by purchasing books on-line. WENDY BROWN