Literary Baseball T-Shirts “Selling Very Well”

By Jason Boog 

whitmanshirt.jpgEverybody panicked about the future of books should keep their shirts on–in September, Novel-T launched a line of baseball shirts for famous literary characters and authors.

To find out about the future of the shirts, GalleyCat interviewed Novel-T co-creator David Bukszpan. “The shirts are selling very well. Not ‘Going Rogue’ well, but more like ‘a popular literary novel translated from the French’ well,” explained Bukszpan. “BookCourt in Brooklyn just stocked up with over a hundred and powerHouse arena (which is also in Brooklyn) has regularly reordered.”

The t-shirt maker added: “The second team is currently being assembled–no news yet, but we see some promising players in Europe. There are plenty of 20th Century Americans that we’d love to draft. Writers, agents, estates, or publishers who’d like to make suggestions should write me. We’re hoping to debut the next team in the spring.”


Bukszpan also talked about the company’s fundraising goals: “We’ve raised several hundred dollars for 826NYC at a dollar a shirt. We’re rather short of our (possibly too optimistic) goal of raising a grand for them by New Year’s, but maybe with a strong December we’ll reach it.”

He concluded with his dream team for future shirts: “Personally, I’d love to have a dream team of all poets–call ’em the Bad News Bards. The problem isn’t just that I strongly doubt the shirts would sell enough for us to break even, it’s that I think it would be difficult to get players like Lowell and Bishop and Berryman and Sexton and Ginsberg and Blake and to show up to the field. And it would be pretty ugly if they did. I suppose you could throw Frost on the mound to try to add a sense of order, but he’d have a difficult time with this bunch.”