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About Us

Perelandra is a new & used bookshop at Wolverine Farm, a 501(c)3 nonprofit publisher & publick house in Fort Collins' river district. We celebrate great literature, fund a monthly Reader in Residence, and host the Wild Carrot Society for Technological Disobedience.

Backstory

In 2020, while building shelves at the publick house, we remembered Perelandra, the diluvial planet Venus in C. S. Lewis's space trilogy. Perelandra was diverse, erratic, ecstatic, ineffable—everything we wanted a bookstore to be. The name keeps us in touch with our dreams, and we hope that visits to the bookshop do the same for you.We specialize in poetry, art, literary & speculative fiction, social & natural science, theology, and esotericism, but we hold space for a little bit of everything (food, music, history) and are careful not to let established genres dictate the flow of interests. Here is a more or less up-to-date list of our sections.Our work is intimately connected to the nonprofit mission of Wolverine Farm Publishing; we share the view that celebrating literature can lead to “a community of creative, informed, and engaged citizens living in a diverse, healthy, and beautiful world.”

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Reader in Residence

“This, so far as I can see it, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own.”

— C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Perelandra's reader-in-residence program celebrates reading as an art eo ipso that nourishes culture and community. Each month's resident brings a unique presence and attention by way of 1) reading physical books that interest them, in person at the shop, and 2) reflecting on their practice in creative fashion.

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September 2022

Kathleen Willard

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August 2022

Tobias Bank

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July 2022

John Newman

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June 2022

Kayla Redd

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April 2022

Seth Braverman

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March 2022

Elaine Wall

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February 2022

Jeff Chelf

• On Reading

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January 2022

Brandi Thomas

• On Reading

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December 2021

Jason Hardung

• On Reading

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November 2021

Robin Walter

• On Reading

October 2021

John Flynn

• On Reading

September 2021

Julia Goolsby

• On Reading

August 2021

Rico Lighthouse

• On Reading

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Book Wagon

“Out of doors the day was setting off for joy and movement.”

— Jean Giono, The Song of the World

The book wagon is Perelandra’s walkabout shop and mobile studio space. Home-built in the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, it features 100 square feet of open-air shelving and a tiny interior studio.In summers past, the book wagon could be found full of bargain books and oddities at The Lyric and New Belgium, but it is currently enjoying retirement in a garden in northwest Fort Collins :)

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Genres at Perelandra

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral.”

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Downstairs

Beyond Conflict (current affairs)
Provocations (experimental, sui generis)
Brave New Word (special new releases)
Everyday Alchemy (food, drink)
ECP² (essential contemp. poets/presses)
Visionaries (feminist, avant garde)
Continuous Motion (history, culture)
Legerdemain (storytelling masters)
Required Reading (individual canon)
Time Machines (class, commons)
Uncommon Type (rare, antiquarian)
Notebooks & Journals
Radical Imagination (sci-fi, fantasy)
Living by Fiction (literature, stories)
Ritualistic Utterance (poetry, poetics)
Deep Story (social justice, humanities)
Archetypes & Cosmos (astro, occult)
Wolverine Farm (in-house & local)
Western Philosophy (religion, prayer)
Eastern Philosophy (buddhism, taoism)
Second Nature (ecology, wilderness)
Memory Castles (memoir, bio, essay)

Upstairs

Art & Visuals (artists, graphic novels)
Icons & Critics (legends, commentary)
Contemporary Fiction (notable, new)
Library of Perelandra (anthology, editions)
Human-Nature (social & natural science)
Harmonices Mundi (music, sound)
Time & Space (historical, biographical)
Paperback Classics (market, vintage)
Colorado State (resident authors)
PeRioDiCaLs (back issues)

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Wild Carrot Society

“Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.”

— Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

The Wild Carrot Society for Technological Disobedience is an irregular gathering at Wolverine Farm. We engage perspectives before and beyond the digital in a variety of creative ways. Gatherings are free and open to all interested parties. The only requisite is to leave anything that can be construed as a device at home or at the door.

Mission

To evaluate & respond to the ubiquity of digital infrastructures.
To empower non-digital sites of communion.
To resist the colonial imagination of technological society.

Vision

A safe space for the untechnical recovery of self-knowledge.

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Volunteer

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work.”

— Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

Bookshop volunteers channel creative forces that sustain a wild, welcoming, community-informed space for literature.Many of you remember Wolverine Farm from its time as a volunteer-run bookstore at the Bean Cycle. Now, with a new literary wilderness established at the Publick House, we are both returning to form and reinventing what it means to celebrate books in northern Colorado.Stewardship of Perelandra’s environment takes many forms—observation, acquisitions, outreach, accessibility—and we are eager for your particular genius as it may apply to any/all of the above.We ask volunteers to commit on a monthly basis for a minimum of two hours per week. Beyond the joy of book-forest bathing, you’ll get a free drink on your shifts and an awesome book discount :)

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Shop Notes

9.25.22

Bookshop visitors: Have you read all these books?Me: Not even close.Also me: That is a really fascinating, humbling, and apocalyptic question.If you read a book a week—an ambitious pace, to my mind—for a year, you'd cover 52 titles. That's 260 over five years; 520 over ten; 1,560 over thirty... Read more →

9.21.22

Bookshop visitors: Where do you get all these books?Me: We work with a dozen world-class distributors to access books that make us feel radically imaginative and alive. Community members share their passions and their gratitude; we follow through on their every suggestion, and welcome frequent donations.Also me: Beautiful people die every day. People I wish I had known. People I knew well; people I loved. Just this past weekend... Read more →

8.24.22

Many people love Wolverine Farm and have made it what it is today. But (especially as Fort Collins grows) many more either don't know that it exists, or—seeing as we serve beer, make food, and host rentals—what it exists for. So I wanted to take a moment to speak to the meaning of Wolverine Farm, as I understand it.Wolverine Farm means that creativity, ecology, and hospitality are not just theoretically intertwined but form a practical basis for sustainable business... Read more →