The five-person team at the Radical Cat didn’t know whether their move to 1500 S Virginia Street would work out until, quite literally, the day they got the keys.
The feminist bookstore’s new location, in a free-standing ex-tattoo parlor, is still a work-in-progress, even as it’s already open for regular hours, Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10 p.m. – 6 p.m. and Sundays from 12 p.m. – 6 p.m. It’s joined in the new location by a small record store, Fine Tooth Records.
Ilya Arbatman, a co-owner and bookseller at the Radical Cat, said the move from the original location on Wells was so abrupt due to a dispute with the bookstore’s landlord at the time — and that the team was lucky to clinch the new location just in time.
“Our old space is pretty small, and there’s a lot of things about it that we really loved,” Arbatman said, “But, ultimately, it was a good time for us to find a place where we could sort of grow.”
Now that the cat annex in the back is finished, the ‘cat’ part of Radical Cat is up and running again, in partnership with the Nevada Humane Society. Visitors who want to adopt a cat, or just say hi to one, can add a meeting with a feline friend to a stroll through shelves lined with diverse, progressive titles — many of them covering issues surrounding topics like race, disabilities, gender and sexuality, class and environmental justice.
“The term ‘feminist,’ it’s totally appropriate, but it doesn’t encompass everything,” Arbatman said. “It’s the idea of a certain empowering, liberationist sort of politics that can apply to a lot of different kinds of people and groups.”
A curated selection lines one of the gender & sexuality-themed shelves at The Radical Cat.
The Radical Cat is more curated than a typical big-box chain store, they explained, because the bookstore is working towards a different goal, and that means choosing the titles sold there with more purpose.
“The point of this store is to feel a bit more current and contemporary and sort of responding to this moment in history, rather than being a repository for all the knowledge that’s out there,” Arbatman said.
In that same vein, it’s mostly the work of living authors who surround visitors as they enter the bright, airy new space. During special events like readings, workshops and organizing meetings for activist groups, Arbatman said, it’s like all the voices in conversations around change are still present in the room, even if the event is more focused on a few identities or issues.
“We could just be a big empty room that hosted meetings, but having all the books on the shelf, it’s a way of imbuing the building with a certain kind of energy,” Arbatman said. “It’s important to have the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) shelf, and the Arab or Jewish or Middle Eastern shelf, and the Indigenous shelf, and those things are all occupying the same space.”
Is every classic on the syllabus present? Probably not, Arbatman said, though the work of James Baldwin, for example, tends to be a Radical Cat mainstay. Arbatman, who opts to own a flip phone instead of a smartphone, argued that for many classics, so many copies already exist that there’s often no need to buy them new.
And yes — though the Radical Cat is still a business that sells brand-new goods, Arbatman argued that it’s one of a lot of small bookstores with a different approach to what it means to be a business.
“Is the point of it to make a million bucks or is the point to stay in business, pay a living wage and stick around as long as possible?” Arbatman said.
The store offers a selection of zines along with book titles.
Part of the reason the bookstore has managed to stick around since it first opened in March 2022, Arbatman added, is that Reno has shown up to support it.
“Whether it’s the Holland Project or KWNK, or other local organizations, we’ve seen and we know that Reno is a place where the community will support businesses that align with the community’s values,” Arbatman said, “and people really do like to shop local and be local here.”
Arbatman explained people care about the store enough that they’re willing to break away from the idea that the ‘best’ way to get something is the cheapest or easiest way.
Instead, they told the Sagebrush, enough readers have decided that how and where they spend their money matters to keep the Radical Cat afloat — despite what Arbatman has been hearing from skeptics who think Amazon’s replacement of bookstores is inevitable.
“You could find these books elsewhere, but you’re not going to find a concentration of them that looks like this elsewhere,” Arbatman said. “It’s not just about the thing you’re getting; it’s about the experience of getting it.”
Peregrine Hart can be reached at peregrineh@unr.edu or on Instagram @pintofperegrine.
