Indie bookselling advocate and activist Danny Caine, who in January 2022 sold 49% of shares in the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kans., to seven of his employees, announced on Thursday that he is relinquishing his majority stake in the store in a seller-financed deal to the three employees who remain minority co-owners. The specifics were not disclosed. Kelly Barth, Chris Luxem, and Mary Wahlmeier Bracciano will become co-owners of the Raven on January 1.
Barth, who has worked at The Raven since 1997, will take charge from Caine of adult frontlist buying and relations with the store’s staff, a total of 14 including the co-owners. “With more than 40 years of Raven experience between them,” stated Caine’s release, “these talented booksellers are poised to usher the Raven into a flourishing future.”
Caine, who left Lawrence two years ago to move back to his hometown of Cleveland, is moving on from bookselling to assume the position of multimedia content creator for the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy organization that supports local retailers against big-box stores and other corporations. The ILSR is headed by Stacy Mitchell, a familiar figure to independent booksellers who has spoken on several occasions, at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute conference and elsewhere, on the dangers Amazon poses to the sustainability of communities. Mitchell and Caine, in fact, met at Winter Institute 2020 in Baltimore. Caine, who has resigned his seat on the board of the American Booksellers Association, effective immediately, is completing his first full week working for ILSR.
The Raven Book Store, founded in 1987 by Mary Lou Wright and Pat Kehde, initially specialized in mystery books and regional interest titles. It expanded into a full-service general bookstore in the late 1990s in order to fend off a Borders Books & Music store that opened nearby. The Raven doubled in size in 2021, when it moved from its 1,000-sq.-ft. space into a 2,000-sq.-ft. storefront in a historic part of Lawrence’s downtown area in order to better accommodate its thriving online sales operation, which launched during the pandemic.
Initially a part-time employee at the Raven while working on his MFA in poetry at the University of Kansas, Caine purchased the store in 2017, a few months after completing his degree. “I just fell in love with the store and with the business,” he told PW in a 2021 bookstore profile.
Caine burst onto the national scene in 2019 as an advocate for indie bookstores and small businesses when he self-published a zine, called How to Resist Amazon and Why, that was subsequently expanded into a book and published by Microcosm Publishing. A sequel, How to Protect Bookstores and Why, was published by Microcosm in 2023. During a brief phone interview on Thursday afternoon, Caine told PW that ILSR had facilitated much of his research for both books, and that he was eager to take on a new opportunity to work for an organization that has helped him so much in his work.
The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association named Caine its Bookseller of the Year in 2019, and PW named the Raven its Bookstore of the Year in 2022. During his acceptance speech for PW's award, Caine said that he believes that “the future of bookselling is booksellers” and that “the best way to ensure that bookstores have a seat at the table is to foster a new generation of talented and enthusiastic booksellers. The best way to do that is to make sure that bookstores are welcoming and equitable places to do dignified work. Places where people can earn a living wage and build a career.”
