What a difference two weeks can make in a Minneapolis bookseller’s life—and bottom line.
On January 13, DreamHaven Books and Comics owner Greg Ketter told PW that he ascribed slow sales at his store to the economy and to the weather, and that he “really hadn’t witnessed” the ICE agents that have been swarming the Twin Cities since late December. “Maybe I’m out of touch,” Ketter said.
Now, thanks to social media, Ketter has become one of the most recognizable faces and voices of the Twin Cities’ ongoing resistance to ICE.
Ketter became a social media phenomenon over the weekend, when MS Now aired a video of him pacing half a block away from where Alex J. Pretti had been murdered by agents an hour earlier, cursing the 50-100 armed ICE agents keeping the crowd back. That video, as well as a photo taken minutes later by freelance photo-journalist Theia Chatelle of Ketter walking through clouds of tear gas, immediately went viral.
Life for Ketter has not been the same since. The store landline has been ringing off the hook, he told PW, and DreamHaven’s website has received so many hits, that it went down for several days. A GoFundMe campaign for the store that’s been dormant for four years received more than $5,000 in donations since Saturday, according to Ketter, who said the money will be donated to local food pantries, as well as an influx of supportive letters and emails.
Counting only sales through AbeBooks and eBay, DreamHaven’s current sales are 10 times that of a typical January, Ketter said, noting that on Tuesday morning, there were more than 100 eBay overnight orders awaiting him. Two retired employees are now helping Ketter and his sole employee, who is new and still being trained, process orders and ship books. There are orders big and small of “$5 books,” he said, with titles on tyranny and on the Constitution proving the most popular.
“We're trying to keep up,” Ketter said. “We don't have that many books in stock. I mean, if I have five copies, that's probably a lot, so we're ordering books every day, trying to get them in as quickly as possible. We'll have everything under control before the end of the week, but the orders are still coming in.”
Comma and BookTok
Ketter is not the only Minneapolis bookseller whose profile has been raised amid the ICE protests thanks to social media. On January 16, Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma: A Bookshop in Linden Hills, responded to a post on Threads that was “looking for businesses in Minnesota that didn't support ICE.”
Ford, who says she is “far from a social media expert,” commented that Comma was one such business, and that it hosts a resistance book club, distributes whistles, and raises money for mutual aid against ICE. The comment went viral after being shared on BookTok.
“That gave us national attention,” Ford said, “Since then, we’ve been shipping hundreds of orders from around the country.”
Like DreamHaven, books on tyranny, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers are most popular with online customers, according to Ford. Orders have been so robust, she said, that the store closed its doors on Monday and Tuesday just to catch up on shipping orders that peaked this past weekend after a statewide strike against ICE and Pretti's murder.
In typical Minnesotan fashion, Ford's thoughts turned to DreamHaven: "Greg is totally inundated in a wonderful way,” she said. “I wonder if he needs some help from the bookselling community? I want to reach out just to see if there's any way we can figure out whatever he needs.”
