Endlessly creative bookstores show how much we still need more books from women

A literary world without women isn't much of one at all. And these bookstores don't just want you to knowthis—they want you to see it.

Take Loganberry Books, an independent bookseller near Cleveland, Ohio. To kick off Women's History Month on March 1, the store turned all its books written by men backward, with their spines obscured from view. The result was largely a sea of white shelves highlighting the still-prevalent gender disparity in fiction publishing.

In Toronto, House of Anansi Press took a different approach, releasing a stop-motion video of its books by women steadily disappearing from shelves.

"If we removed all the books edited, designed, and marketed by women, there would be nothing left at all," staff added in an Instagram post.

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Of course, the literary gender gap isn't just limited to the people who make books. In fact, as Quartzreports, none of the Pulitzer Prize recipients for fiction between 2000 and 2015 were written from a primarily female perspective. Then there's the stigma associated with reading books written by, for and about women—from the misapplied "chick lit" cover to the perceived shame of reading woman-centric books in public.

So what can you do about all this? Here's a good start: head to an independent bookstore and buy a book written by a woman.