GETTING THE WORD OUT

With September 1st as our opening date, we spent time trying to raise awareness about the project, some of the collective went over to Vancouver for the Under the Volcano festival to table and spread the word about The Camas bookstore and infoshop. ListServe contacts were kept informed of the progress, some volunteers helped out with the renovations, with the bulk of the work being done by the Camas Collective Members. September also being the 2nd annual Anarchist Bookfair and The Festival of Anarchy, so the opening of a bookstore/infoshop like Camas was great timing.
On Wednesday 4th sept. we hosted our first event a film screening, as part on the Festival of Anarchy, Hold Fast is about a group of young anarchist sailors who do up a salvaged boat and sail it from Florida to Haiti. There was a good attendance and things went smoothly for our first event.
The next evening was our 'grand opening' party, although we were not technically open at that point, but with so many people from out of town here for the bookfair and festival, now seemed the perfect time. The party was well attended, lively and energetic, with two kegs and a Black Cat Cafe style open mic stage.There was one really drunk guy trying to set light to a big bag of leaves and sticks right outside of the building, he was told to desist and sling his hook. The cops rolled by around 11pm to say hi, so we closed things down shortly after, not wanting to create undue friction this early on.
The week-end of the bookfair we had a table at the fair with zines and a few books, met some great people, a lot who donated their unsold stock to Camas and a few people came by the space to do some volunteer work to get us closer to our opening date.