Grandstanding isn’t what it used to be, not in our media-saturated age. On Tuesday night, the author, blogger and critic Dale Peck threw a mildly revolutionary literary event, outside the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. About two dozen people, nearly a quarter of them reporters or photographers, came to hear a speech by Mr. Peck, a founder of the publishing collective Mischief and Mayhem and a known rabble-rouser, and a reading by Lisa Dierbeck, another Mischief and Mayhem founder and one of its writers.
“We call it Action for a Dying Bookstore on the Verge of Bankruptcy,” Mr. Peck wrote in an email before the event. “We’re going to fill the store with about a hundred people (although there’s a possibility quite a few more will show up, which has me kind of scared).”
In another email, he fretted that the police might shut them down, adding, “the action is conceived of as a performance in the mold of the Viennese Aktionists,” the transgressive 1960s Austrian artists. (They are part of the plot Ms. Dierbeck’s book, “The Autobiography of Jenny X.”)
On Tuesday at around 6 p.m., following Mischief and Mayhem’s instructions, participants began gathering in Barnes & Noble, wearing carnations in their lapels to distinguish themselves from holiday shoppers. (One man wore a print-out of a picture of a carnation.) Shortly before 6:30, Mr. Peck led them all outside, onto a spot on the sidewalk directly in front of the store’s windows – its bookless windows, as he noted.
Standing in front of a man holding a placard with a picture of Ms. Dierbeck’s novel, and the slogan “Not Coming to a Bookstore Near You,” Mr. Peck briskly read a treatise bemoaning the corporatization of literature, the bloated culture of publishing, the whole bourgeois affair that could be solved with a technologically nimble, sociologically lefty concern like M&M, which publishes only electronically or on demand through OR books.
“It’s time to cut out the middleman!” he concluded. “Readers unite!”
Then Ms. Dierbeck, dressed in a black puffy coat and red earflapped hat, read a short passage from her book, chosen to sound as much like a spiel as possible. A few curious on-lookers stopped to listen, although it was hard to hear past even the small group already assembled, and the noise of taxis and a honking Chabad bicycle.
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Inside the store, it was warm. Two uniformed security guards chatted amiably, oblivious to the semi-scene taking place ten feet away on the other side of the window. Asked afterward, several employees said they had not noticed the carnationed crew, nor the reading outdoors.
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Back on the sidewalk, an assistant stood by, holding open a laptop on which people could buy Ms. Dierbeck ’s book, courtesy of Barnes & Noble’s free Wi-Fi. That was the idea, anyway. But the connection was apparently down.
Whatever. Buying books wasn’t really the point.
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“It’s a rebellion from the pressure novelists tend to feel” to have best-sellers, said Ms. Dierbeck, who took no advance for her novel.
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“It was an experiment, on many levels,” she added of the event. “We want to put the fun back into publishing books and really live up to our name and be mischievous.” Action for a Dying Bookstore on the Verge of Bankruptcy had been in the works for several weeks, she said, though not in any great detail. “As sometimes happens with a short story or a novel, you think of the name first.”
Perhaps 10 minutes after he walked outdoors to begin his demonstration, Mr. Peck announced its conclusion. “We’re going to continue the party at my apartment,” he said, giving the address. “So be nice, and bring your own alcohol.”
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