CUT ALL TEXT FROM TRAVELOGUES & ABBREVIATE FOR THIS PAGE? & MOVE MORE FULL TRAVELOGUES TO A SEPARATE PAGE? TO BLOG POSTS?

BOOKS & SHOVELS
Nostrovia!'s Traveling Bookstore

​Books & Shovels is a traveling, donation-based bookstore that's been on & off the road since Fall, 2013. We work to create cross-country dialogue in artistic + literary communities + in the streets thru providing books + art + music + graffiti + [ etc ] in-exchange for donations & bartering. 
This page serves to outline what Books & Shovels' been up to, our origins story, & where we're going.
Further down this page is information regarding how artists/writers can get their materials on our shelves, what/how we distribute, how to book us, Books & Shovels' tour history, & how you can follow us digitally as we travel. 

 Table of Contents 

( in-order of scroll )
* ​ORIGIN STORY & TRAVELOGUE GALLERIES (2013-17)
* WHAT DO YOU DISTRIBUTE?
* DONATION-BASED? BARTERING?
* GET ON OUR SHELVES!
​* MONETARY DONATIONS (& HOW THE $'S USED)
* BOOKING
​* TOUR HISTORY
* HOW CAN WE FOLLOW BOOKS & SHOVELS?
nostrovia travelling bookstore 2017
2017 Death Rattle Lit Fest, Boise. ID
books and shovels 2015 NYC Poetry Fest
2015 NYC Poetry Festival

Origin STORY & TRAVELOGUE GALLERIES

[ 2013-2017 ]
This narrative is strange to share. The reasons slinky between elusive & vivid.
Sometimes it's because I'm embarrassed of how many times we've been knocked down...but then I remember how many times we got up.
Other times, it's because of the distance we've covered, & how many lives & voices are involved in both that distance & traversing it. The people who got us here, supported us. The intimacies created cross-country when you live with five heads in a three seat pick-up truck, or when two burnt-out homies pass out post-argument on a bus half-way thru the five days separating Oakland & Boston. 
One of the more persistent reasons for this to become difficult to condense into a small press website's narration is that writing the narratives alleged extracurricular to Books & Shovels dismisses how the pieces that brought Books & Shovels together, & it's equally dismissive to put people on blast for shit they don't necessarily want Nostrovia!'s community digging thru digitally.
To respect these boundaries, names & circumstances may be changed or passed over, pending on that particular person's relationship with Nostrovia!, publicity, & content.
To start, we'll go back to 2013.
Books & Shovels was our living situation. Homies passing thru. People passing thru us.
To write this story vulnerably is to write about addiction, violence, & trauma. 
To write this story vulnerably is to write about compassion, serendipitous gatherings, & huge skies. 

[ 2013 : Naive CULTIVATION ]

Back then, before this project was named, Books & Shovels was a coagulation of tensions being pulled forward by blind ambition. 
This unnamed Books & Shovels was a seed accumulating mileage & fresh-to-the-road-anxiety gave form. The soil this form sprouted from was Jeremiah Walton's over-sized, un-pragmatic-to-carry-the-distances-walked, frame-pack. Intention was absent. Confusion abundant. The need to fulfill strange standards prescribed by expectations felt, but not given (or allowed) understanding. 
A number of sidewalk shows, both busts & successes, brought about the idea of accumulating others' chapbooks & publications to carry & distribute for donations. From there, the idea began to settle to give this potential-bloom a name & direction.
 (like Books & Shovels at that time, an idea's ghost looking for a corpse to possess, animate, & run!) 
Captain, Andy, Erie, etc--concision

[ 2014 : Where Are The Shovels? ]

We're often asked, "Where are the shovels?"
Our answer is, "The project itself is the shovels."
​We aim to dig up the underground across the U.S. & distribute the contents on the road, coast to coast & back again.
We spent early 2014 gathering books from the small presses, Nostrovia!'s homies, dumpsters, & thrift-shops. 
Ramshackle shelves were built. Shoe-boxes were graffiti-ed. Then re-enforced.
We purchased our first vehicle, a 1995 Volvo Station-wagon we named something now forgotten.
That summer, Books & Shovels ran an over-zealous, romanticizing IndieGoGo campaign to gather the last funds needed to launch out from our first festival gig at the NYC Poetry Festival. We finished the fundraiser there, securing the funds needed to head West thru a cocktail of street corner set-ups, open mics & slams, festivals, cafes & galleries, rooftop ciphers, a Kansas City Poetic Underground rumpus that rushed us out thru blurred Kansas fields that stilled fast in Lawrence with a crumpled front-end that knocked Books & Shovels' speed down to a slow-groan ride to a Walmart parking lot still stained with the fluids that trailed us from the wreck to rest.
Only a month into our official launch, we reached out digitally & received tremendous support (*gratitude to the people who have helped us grow this far*), including a chance transaction with a mechanic who exchanged our wreck & the last of our savings for a beat-up Ford Van that functioned as our exit sign straight-shot to Denver to recuperate $ & continue on to that unnamed space we've never been, & runs everywhere, then, & back again, there.
Denver proved difficult to restructure our safety net, and after a month, we retreated East to work, get out shit together, & start over.

[ 2015 : Our MOST RECKLESS RUMPUS ]

2015 kicked off with Christopher Morgan joining Nostrovia! as co-manager & founding our annual Chapbook Contest series. 
2015 also introduced us to Tucson, the cultivation of a Hobo Haven quickly turned trap house, & direct acknowledgement of the degree to which validation was an expected prerequisite to functioning in performance oriented environments (performance oriented environment as defined as everywhere, & 'direct acknowledgement' defined as the beginning process of letting go). ​
As our ambitions turned ugly--fearful--so did the way we toured. Reckless abandon. Kerouac-hipster martyrdom worshiped at escapism's suburbans altars. The long treasured tradition of pretty junky corpses waiting to be born. Whatever shady hoops we had to hop thru to soothe our fears that faced ourselves more honestly in the ways we refused to do anything other than resent the fact we were afraid. 
I use 'we' cautiously.
Besides the most dramatic year, this was the busiest year for Nostrovia! yet, & the year with the highest density of shows.
2015's also smeared with the love of a weird lil family that formed thru a gaggle of hoogalins gathering out in the desert to sing campfires loud & howl with coyotes scampers yelping with the rolling dust tickling cactus shadows with shimmers sunrise blinds blank with the day coloring itself in the dark.
I'm grateful this year unfolded the way it did, the way it integrated into these personal mythologies.  
It allowed for this to be written, as vulnerable, & lack-of, as needed.
We hit the Tucson Poetry Festival, toured to the Bay, down thru Big Sur & Los Angeles. There, one of us broke down crying for fear of the futures we were writing. The ways we plagued ourselves with impossible standards that drugs permitted the hallucination of meeting. The woman on Sunset Blvd screaming at empty spaces, terrified of what she sees. The divisions cultivated between friends that resulted in Books & Shovels collapse & storage in the Bay. The superimposition of past traumas on the present. We made homies in Monterrey, hit Santa Cruz, wandered into the bellies of dead red woods & out the other side into view of mountains sure to kill us if we were to continue wandering distances concrete doesn't know.
Oakland's Beast Crawl, the NYC Poetry Festival & waking up half-buried in Coney Island sand, San Francisco's Lit Crawl & the vicious no-sleep drive to Tucson, to Flagstaff, to Austin & its neon blur, to New Orleans, New Orleans, Arkansas handcuffs & ink bringing out the lines of our fingerprints. 
To Kansas City. The Poetic Underground. A fight among homies & a rush to Denver that was met head on by a near accident ice slicked our wheels with surrounded by semis. 20mph thru snow storms to keep the engine's heat lapping the frost settling our interior's lack of functioning heaters. 
Albuquerque. Flagstaff again. Dead phones lost in Utah mountains. Salt Lake City. 
& the drive back down to Tucson, to settle, to put pieces together, to figure out what the fuck we're doing.

[ 2016 : This Lil CROSS-COUNTRY Lit Fest ]

Following 2015's chaos, 2016 offered a relative tranquility, stability, a sense of development. 
Books & Shovels became less of a home, and more of a project.
We hit the Tucson Poetry Festival, the NYC Poetry Festival, This Lil Lit Fest in Denver, Brooklyn's Boog City, & wrapped ourselves from Tucson to New Orleans to New Hampshire to Detroit, down again to the desert & East again towards New Orleans, to Florida, among alligators attempts to catch a perfect photo resulted in touching the tail of, being hunted, mosquito swarms & where our car shouted white fumes in the Everglades & lead us to Miami where a story condensed resulted in police chasing us out to a Greyhound & back again, again, again to Kansas City.
2016's calm existed relative to 2015's. 
2017 slowed further thru a longer descent into intent.

[ 2017 : Great Lakes, Great Escapes ]

Now there's rent. Less volatile acrobatics to leap show to show. A stable living situation. 
& less Books & Shovels activity. 
N! homie Chris Salas & Jeremiah Walton did meet up with Christopher Morgan in Nampa, ID, for Death Rattle Lit Fest. Before that, Jeremiah ran Tucson to Kansas City to Michigan City with a suitcase of chapbooks & small press for The Literary Underground's Sidewalk Pulp. East was gripped—yanked—and the horizon cropped Toledo's skyline as our tour coughed into the city for features at the Poetry Community Center & Trunk of Truths. Then Pittsburgh to wander. We didn't do a show there. We screwed around, dropped homies off for their remaining distance to the Atlantic & shot West to climb Cincinatti rooftops we fell from thru Kentucky to drag ourselves along that dotted yellow line to St Louis, Kansas City, & back down to Tucson. 
Tucson to the Kansas City Poetry Throwdown to the The Literary Underground's Legit AF Lit Fest. 
Lake Michigan's coast lead us thru Chicago, Milwaukee, & out thru pined miles to Minneapolis, & that familiar route South into Missouri & that familiar two-day route Greyhound takes from Kansas City to Tucson.
Since then, we've rested.
We've missed one schedule show since kicking off, & we don't intend to miss another. We're sorting out personal noise in-relationship to being able to run such a massive project, & also how Books & Shovels itself can be made more community oriented, reliable, & capable.

WHat Do You Distribute?

Our focus is to distribute small press publications & contemporary underground lit.  
Alongside books, we’ve distributed CDs + records + stickers + small paintings + graffiti + [ whatever we can carry ].
Removing monetary incentive as a primary focus (poetry's favorite platitude), and talking one-on-one with each person who digs thru our shelves, makes distributing more personable, and let's us get a vibe of the places/communities we're passing thru more intimately.
It’s been a dope way to meet artists outside of the lit & arts community. Years later, there’s still many people we’ve met that we’re in touch with, have lived with, or continue to hit up when we pass thru town. Poets + rappers + DJs + film-makers + novelists + [ etc ]. These are Books & Shovels' lil community network, and people I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the lives of.

Donation-Based? Bartering?

"Why bother doing this? Is Jeremiah Walton insane? Is his merry band of individuals equally insane? It is hard to say. But what is more insane is doing the same thing every day, the same thing that deadens the soul, for a paycheck. That is downright foolish and millions of people do it every single weekday of their lives. Due to the world that’s being lived in this is acceptable activity. It does not need to be that way. Like Jeremiah Walton shouts the idea should be to live not to make a living. Art offers an escape from some of these sadder moments in life."
-Beach Sloth
In New Orleans, we were sung songs accompanied by violins for books. 
In Austin, we received showers & wine.
Tucson's given us tobacco for books. San Francisco threw down some cash. Venice Beach offered freestyles & graffiti.
Everything we distribute is donated, dumpstered, purchased independently, or bartered for. 
Everything we sell is donation-based or bartered for.
We like the idea of cross-polinating literary communities across the US thru picking up literature from local small presses, writers, poets, [ etc ], and carrying these materials with us. What we're unable to sell we distribute to Little Free Libraries. 

Get On Our Shelves!

"I’m donating copies of all my books for this badass van of book goodness. You should think about sending [Books & Shovels] some books!"
–Bud Smith, author of "F-250"
We welcome authors + publishers + folks with books they'd like to unload to shoot us an email (with "Book Donation" in the subject line) @
[ We aren't currently accepting book donations, but thank you! ]
traveling bookstore 2016
Tucson AZ, 2016
travelling bookstore 2015
Arts Bar & Cafe, Santa Cruz CA, 2015

Monetary Donations 
(& How The $'s Used)

$ donated to Books & Shovels most immediately goes towards gas, or is set aside for vehicle repairs. Depending on our current financial situation, it may also be spent on food, purchasing books (preferably from independent stores / small press), vendor-fees, cigarettes, & occasional motels to shower & rest.
Outside of online-donations, books sales, & bartering, we'll also busk, gas jug, fly signs, or work odd-jobs to compensate living expenses. These practices shift & vary depending on who's in our crew & what our position to create/take opportunities to get where we're headed.
We get dirty. Sometimes the books too.
If you're able/secure to, we accept monetary donations digitally below :
[ We aren't currently accepting fiscal donations, but thank you! ]

Booking

At the moment, Books & Shovels isn’t touring, or seeking donations & vending spaces. We appreciate you thinking of us, but right now, we need to take time for self-care & rest.​
[ XXX ]

Tour History

Since upgrading to a vehicle, Books & Shovels has featured @ 

2017

2016

2015

2014

...among a long list of odd-ball spaces across the US (we’ve yet to go international, but we’d be grateful to).

How To Follow Books & SHovels?

For now, following Nostrovia!'s Facebook + Twitter (@NostroviaPoetry), or Jeremiah on Instagram (@RuntRaccoon), are the best ways to keep up with Books & Shovels. Doing so also helps our outreach grow, and gain new opportunities to help us better promote shows & the content on our shelves!
In the future, we intend to relaunch a travelogue series thru Nostrovia!'s Tavern. We've run one serially in the past, but maintaining a travelogue thru travel’s unforeseeable circumstances proved difficult to give priority to among N!’s many projects + the shit that goes wrong on the road.
Picture
2014 Lawrence, KS
***