Longtime activist bookseller Andrew Laties, author of six books, including Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want to Fight For—From Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities, winner of a 2006 Independent Publisher Award, will kick off his latest about banned books, You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book?, at Word Up Community Bookshop in New York City’s Washington Heights, on August 6.

Laties who has founded and run a succession of bookstores since 1985, when he opened The Children’s Bookstore in Chicago, is currently co-owner of Book & Puppet Company in Easton, Pa., with his wife, Gaia Abraxas. Laties also publishes books under the Rebel Bookseller imprint and co-founded the Easton Book Festival. He received a WNBA Pannell Award in 1987 for his work in children’s bookselling. PW spoke with Laties about his new book and his decision to publish it through the bookstore.

You’ve been publishing your books and those of friends for more than two decades. How did you get started as an independent publisher?

I used to tell people when we published Rebel Bookseller that I am the only author who had to start a bookstore and publishing company just to get published. I had sent a manuscript to Sander Hicks based on his work at Soft Skull Press. I thought he might be willing to publish an incendiary book about the publishing industry. He responded by saying that he was opening a bookstore/coffee shop, and did I want to become part of the business? So I came in [2004] as a business partner at Vox Pop, and we started a bookstore, coffee shop, and publishing company.

When Vox Pop ceased its publishing operations in 2009, I said to Dan Simon at Seven Stories Press, can you assume this book? Veronica Liu, who was managing editor at Seven Stories at the time, worked with me to expand it. The second edition came out in 2011. She led a group of neighbors to open a bookstore together during the process of editing my book, Word Up in Washington Heights, and they are still operating it 14 years later.

How did Melba Tolliver, the first Black American to anchor network news, encourage you to write about book banning?

I know Melba pretty well. She had been chair of the Easton Book Festival and does programming at the store. She approached me at the store and said, “Will you help me get this memoir [Accidental Anchorwoman] published?” I thought the fact that I couldn’t find a publisher or an agent to represent her was telling about the state of the book industry today. So last year we published it out of Book & Puppet Company. I knew how to use the Ingram Spark self-publishing platform, because I had done it for myself. Her memoir went on to win the National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Book Award 2024.

This year I continued to work with Melba promoting her book, and we ended up talking about book banning. I had told the story about a bookstore that had to close because of right-wing parents attacking them for the books they were bringing to book fairs. And she said, “Andy, you have to report on this. You have to go public on this.”

I feel like we’ve published these books together and are kind of a team.

What is one of the most surprising facts you discovered while working on the book?

It’s not really parents that are driving this round of book banning. The American Library Association said earlier in 2025, reporting on the prior year, that 72% of all book challenges this year were lodged not by the public, not by parents, but by school board members and administrators, essentially by management inside of the school system. And that’s very interesting.

In the book, I explain from my own childhood that around the time I became a school board member [in high school], a lot of people were ideologically motivated to join a school board so that they could change the school district.

Did you feel pressure from other store customers to speak up on book banning?

I am a public figure. I stand at my cash register and people can come in and talk about what’s on their mind. I read very widely, and I try to create a bookstore with books that express the interests of my community and myself. There are a lot of things that I have opinions about, and I’m constantly reading in my areas of interest and stumbling across new areas of interest. That’s what a bookseller ought to be doing. You ought to be able to talk about every book that’s in your store. People come up to you with a book and say, “What’s this?” You ought to have something to say, and I do. I can talk about everything that’s in my store. When I find myself in this situation a lot, people will ask me a question that’s related to my practice, bookselling. What I have found over the course of the last year, several people have said, What’s with all this book banning? I’m hearing about book banning.

This book is me attempting to answer their question. I use storytelling. I use personal anecdotes. But the personal stories are all at the service of explaining the facts I’m trying to lay out. There are so many ways that you can push back against this authoritarian controlling culture, and I’m just trying to point out what they are.

You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book? Our Hundred-Year Children’s-Literature Revolution and How We’ll Keep Fighting to Support Our Families’ Right to Read by Andrew Laties. Book & Puppet Company/Rebel Bookseller, July ISBN 979-8-9908448-5-8