Rainbow Bookstore

Rainbow Bookstore is my favorite bookstore in Madison, so of course I had to stop in and check it out again. From what I remember, Rainbow broke away from Peoples' Bookstore back in the early 90s, right before Peoples' closed shop. My connection to Rainbow was mostly that I was an occasional customer, but I also volunteered for a little while for the store for a very short while in the mid-90s. I remember, as well, of a meeting we had in the basement of the store, a small and dank space that wasn't the most conducive for a meeting. But I imagine, with their expansion a few years back, that meetings are now held in the main store, perhaps in the extra space where they sell UW textbooks.

From these memories of Rainbow, I was later motivated to volunteer at Mayday Books in Minneapolis. Rainbow is the sort of community space, centered around books, that sold me on the importance of independent businesses in the community, especially collectives and cooperatives. Through the years I've been impressed by the level of organization and sophistication of Rainbow. They must do a lot of online business, having their inventory on the website and being members of indiebound.com. Moving in on the textbook sales, competing with the monopolistic and cold-hearted University Bookstore, was also a smart move.

In visiting the store today, I was most heartened to see a number of young people in the store browsing through the collection, especially given the very high number of independent bookstores in the State Street area, all carrying used leftist literature. I was happy to see one sign that the left community in Madison is alive and well and supporting their leftist bookseller.