From a golden age of bookselling to community-based publishing

Working in the Commonwealth of Books lays out Keith Helmuth’s cultural memoir encompassing the past six and half decades—a narrative seen through the lens of a bookseller, bookstore manager, college librarian, editor, and book publisher.

Starting in 1960s, he was the manager of independent, academic bookstores at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, and Columbia University in New York City. He then joined the faculty of Friends World College, based on Long Island (NY) as librarian and facilitator of environmental and community development studies. This appointment eventually took Keith and his wife, Ellen, and young sons, Eric and Brendan, on assignment to the college’s East Africa program.

His memoir unfolds as the account of an era as seen by an activist devoted to the culture of books and their role in illuminating the human condition in a time of accelerating ecological and social crisis. The story is rounded out with a return to managing an independent bookstore at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It concludes with the establishment of a nonprofit, cultural heritage, and natural history book publishing company in Woodstock, New Brunswick.

Working in the Commonwealth of Books is more than a bookseller’s memoir, it is also a late 20th- and early 21st -century intellectual autobiography. A bookseller, librarian, or publisher can't simply "like" books but also has to know as much as possible about what in them might interest potential customers and readers. Bookstores, book buyers, libraries, students, and colleagues have benefited from what is more than Helmuth's “career:” universities and churches both used to know it as a calling.

Working in the Commonwealth of Books is filled with bookseller stories, librarian challenges, and publishing experiences. From the time when the golden age of paperback bookselling exploded across North America, to online, mass marketing, the author has paid close attention to the business of books and their critical role in reflecting and shaping cultural change.

Keith Helmuth was instrumental in the founding of Quaker Institute for the Future in 2003, and served as a Board member and co-editor of its publication program for almost two decades. He is the author of Tracking Down Ecological Guidance and a co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, Paths of Faith in the Landscape of Science, and How On Earth Do We Live Now?. He is a contributor to several other books on ecology, economics, and social change.

He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where he and his wife, Ellen, maintain a big garden and a small greenhouse.