Akimbo Bookshop in Rochester, N.Y., started from scratch, twice. Owner Rachel Crawford opened the original Akimbo on Apr. 30, 2022, “with no staff, no nearby family, just sheer determination,” she said. She hosted more than 50 community events in the store’s first eight months, but when a January 4 fire in the pizza shop next door irreparably damaged her entire inventory, Crawford had to hustle to stay in business. “The soft open for the second shop was April 29,” almost a year to the day from her debut.
With an inventory of 1,700 titles and a 500-square-foot selling space, Akimbo specializes in books on social justice nonfiction, titles from indie publishers, as well as works in translation. The old location was a spacious walk-up, Crawford said, but lack of accessibility “was a point of shame.” In the new shop, “there are no stairs, which is more aligned with my ethics,” and she offers seating “because I want people to be able to look through their books comfortably.” She intends Akimbo to embody her “firm radical beliefs.”
Crawford is committed to grassroots publishing, and she got her start by working at the University of Rochester’s Open Letter Press and in literary programming at a Finger Lakes arts organization. These experiences were a window on “how to get an account with Ingram, how to do book selection—everything,” she said. “As a sort of joke to myself,” she added, she created an LLC called Akimbo Books in 2017, though she never expected to open a store.
When Crawford lost her job as a literary coordinator early in the pandemic, she “set up a crappy, awful website during the shelter-in-place.” Somewhat to her surprise, Rochester acquaintances began ordering from her site and following her on social media, expressing genuine support. “I had coffee shops with much bigger followings shouting me out,” she recalled.
Other small business owners supported the online shop, Crawford said, and once the pandemic eased, her popup shops began selling out their inventory.
This success, and nudges from associates, made her confident enough to crowdfund a bricks-and-mortar store in late 2021. “I’m very frugal, so I set $15,000” as the goal, she said. “I made my goal fast.”
The first location “had a kitchen and three bathrooms,” Crawford said, perfect for events, and she hosted indie press authors including Dashiel Carrera (The Deer) and Uzma Aslan Khan (The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali). When June Gervais came to Rochester to promote Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair, about a tattoo artist, Crawford arranged a reading in a tattoo parlor.
“We had so many artists, and a poetry night that was organized by some poets in town,” she remembered. “It was a blast.”
The fire in the next-door restaurant ended the good times and almost wiped her out. Within eight months, from the April opening to the January fire, “I had learned a lesson that most people never learn in a lifetime,” Crawford said. “I didn’t have very good insurance. Lawyers at the American Booksellers Association looked over my policy and my lease after the fire, and I was screwed.”
Having crowdfunded the original shop, she was reluctant to crowdfund another, but as a jobless single parent, she felt she had no choice. On January 11, she set a goal of $32,000 to cover rent, inventory, supplies, and other needs for reopening. By April, more than 475 donors, many of them from the bookselling community, had helped her exceed that ask.
“Within weeks I found a space in the Neighborhood of the Arts” in Rochester, not far from the first Akimbo, Crawford noted. “I halved my rent and doubled my foot traffic, with lots of students and professors.”
Local public artist Mike Dellaria (aka Dellarious) helped her rescue damaged books from the fire and created an “homage to the old shop”—a wall installation featuring charred pages. A carpenter cleaned the ash and residue from her old toolbox so the smell of smoke wouldn’t pervade her belongings in the new shop when she was doing renovations.
Akimbo’s inventory is again dedicated to social justice and politics, literary fiction, and translated work. “Open Letter’s titles do well because they’re in our backyard—it’s hyper-local,” Crawford said. “Two Lines Press is phenomenal, and so is Transit Books.”
Though Crawford, who remains Akimbo’s sole full-time employee, now occupies a smaller space, she puts bookshelves on casters to move them for gatherings like writing classes and readings. “If we need room for 50 people, we go talk to somebody” and partner with another community space, she added. She does pop-ups too, such as selling books at an inclusive queer dance party hosted by Juice Box and its sister organization Rendezvous. “They had a gazebo, live DJs, a Buffalo Bills game on TV—it was just very cool, and they asked me to be a vendor.”
In Akimbo’s new incarnation, “it’s less about the size of the store, mostly about my emotional capacity,” Crawford said. “When I say I ran myself into the ground last year, I mean it.” Out of the ashes, a new Akimbo Bookshop and a sustainable business model were born.
