Back in the game: Gulf Coast booksellers find ways to press on.

When Hurricane Katrina assaulted the Gulf Coast, devastating lives and livelihoods, it did not spare the region's bookselling community. David Walker, special projects director of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a nonprofit organization of about 1,800 independent bookstores, estimated that nearly a dozen of the 25 member booksellers in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi were adversely affected by Katrina.

In Mobile, where Katrina's storm surge was the highest since 1917, Adline C. Clarke of Black Classics Books and Gifts suffered minimal damage and flooding and quickly reopened. "The carpet was damp near the two doors, but the inventory was spared," says Clarke.

In New Orleans, Community Book Center and both locations of the Afro-American Book Stop had major damage. "I'm taking one day at a time," says Michele Lewis of Afro-American Book Stop. After the storm, Lewis and her relatives fled to a two-bedroom house in Shreveport where 23 people jockeyed for space. Lewis's New Orleans home and bookstore in Lake Forest Plaza Mall were in the eastern part of the city--the area hardest hit by the storm--and she lost everything there. The second store at New Orleans Centre Mall, between the Hyatt Hotel and the Superdome, was heavily damaged.

Weary of the upheaval, Lewis says, "I'm just ready to get back to being Michele." She is ready to reclaim the Michele Lewis who, at age 24, in 1992, knew she did not want to continue working as a data entry clerk in a bank and began selling books on weekends from a card table that evolved into a brick-and-mortar business.

Vera Warren-Williams opened Community Book Center, the city's oldest black bookstore, in 1983, frustrated by the inability to find books by and about African Americans. The bookstore, located in Faubourg Treme, the country's oldest, urban African American neighborhood, quickly became a community institution.

Hurricane Katrina left the store under more than six feet of water. Williams seeks to rebuild her livelihood after an odyssey that eventually landed her and her family in Chicago. The ABA, of which Lewis is a member, quickly moved to obtain extended credit terms for inventory and to get stores re-supplied with books. In addition, Walker says the ABA had set up a relief fund, provided business advice and offered free legal assistance to members, as well as a Web page (www.bookweb.org/hurricane) for information on housing and employment.

Individual booksellers have rallied to aid Lewis and Williams. Emma Rodgers, co-owner of Black Images Book Bazaar in Dallas, says, "Bookstore owners have always worked together to the best of their ability with the time and resources they have available to do so." Susan Novotny of the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, in Albany, New York, donated 20 percent of her sales over two weeks to Afro-American Book Stop.

In Chicago, Williams, armed with her portable credit-card machine and a patchwork inventory gleaned from other booksellers and distributors, has worked festivals and received permission from churches and organizations to sell at events.

The results were mixed. "Vending books is hard and 'heavy'--especially in Chicago when there is snow," she says.

Lewis has found a temporary home in New Orleans' Garden District, sharing space at 3051 Magazine Street with Mary Price Dunbar's Beaucoup Books, which sustained less damage than Lewis's stores. As this issue was going to press, Lewis was preparing to host a signing with Michael Eric Dyson for his new book, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Civitas Books, January 2006).

"Customers are finding us, and we're selling books" says Lewis.

Gwendolyn E. Osborne is a frequent contributor to BIBR.