Even as civil unrest radiates outward from Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer one week ago, the Twin Cities bookselling community continues to struggle to surmount this latest crisis. Most of the bookstores in the areas targeted by protesters—some of which were beginning to reopen after having closed in March as the pandemic spread, with limited hours and restrictions on customer browsing—have been shut down completely for the safety of store employees.
Moon Palace Books, located close to the Minneapolis Police Department’s third precinct, remains unscathed, except for a smashed small window sustained during an attempted break-in. The exterior facade is completely boarded up, and contains graffiti as well as the store's own artwork. But two legendary indies in the Mill City’s Midtown area were not so fortunate. Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore were completely destroyed on Friday night, when the building housing both was set on fire and burned down. Uncle Hugo's was the oldest independent science fiction indie bookstore in the country.
On Saturday, owner Don Blyly posted on the store’s website under the headline, “Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s Foully Slain,” the same statement he sent employees and posted on Facebook earlier that day: vandals had broken all the windows in the two stores and then squirted accelerant through them. By the time he arrived on the scene in the wee hours of Saturday morning, both stores were too full of smoke for him to save anything. Buildings on both sides of the street were burning as “dozens of people were dancing around.”
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