Tigris-Euphrates: A Feminist Bookstore

Plainfield, VT: Tigris-Euphrates, 1975. Single sheet, 8 ½ x 14 in. Mimeograph from typescript. Addressed, stamped and postmarked at verso. Horizontal lines from folding, and small staple holes at top and bottom, where it was sealed for mailing. Very good. Item #10344

Postmarked and hand-addressed 1975 mailer from Tigris-Euphrates, a seemingly unrecorded early feminist bookstore in Plainfield, Vermont.

Little record exists of this early feminist bookstore operating outside the queer nexuses of New York and California, and it is unclear how long it operated. This mailer explains the dire financial situation the store found itself in. Additionally, many collective members had recently departed and the bookstore desperately needed volunteers, and potentially a new space. The remaining collective members list various options for moving forwards with the enterprise, including moving to another town in Vermont, turning the store into a business as opposed to a volunteer collective, or operating out of a woman’s home on weekends. The mailer also promotes a few upcoming events that August, including a full moon celebration, and a softball game / art show / picnic.

We find little record of this space; it is not mentioned in Kristen Hogan’s The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, though we were able to locate a reference in an appendix of Daphne Spain’s Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City. We locate no Tigris-Euphrates ephemera in OCLC as of October 2024.

A rare record of the feminist bookstore movement of the 1970s, outside of the urban hubs, and a record of collective horizontal management, and its accompanying challenges.

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