Tuesday, April 30, 2013

moon shine

Let's welcome the month of May,explorers month, the month during which we celebrate famous explorers, travelers and adventurers, by chance or by profession, by choice or by circumstances; those who after pushing the boundaries of the known not satisfied, jumped into the unknown, who faced scylla and charybdis, who discovered new lands thinking they were ancient lands, who made roads out of valleys, who drank indigenous potions, who never came back.
No? May is not explorers month, typically?
Well it is at Lamplight Books, thanks to our honor member of this blog, Easy Runner, who, with his comment to the previous post, gave me the idea and already contributed with two big names:
Freya Madeline Stark, her books are hard to find in the used world and they hardly see the shelves once I do find them before they get bought...she lived up to 100 years, so now you know the secret of longevity: do the unthinkable like being a woman of the mid 1900's and traveling to Afghanistan by yourself.
Bruce Chatwin , (In Patagonia and The Songlines ) of which I have just found a compilation of letters entitled: Under the Sun ( included the correspondence with Paul Theroux).
I am going to leave you with one more name suggested by the purchase of J.K. (you know who you are), a regular at Lamplight Books who always comes in with the typical look of a book lover: secretively happy to come in trying to tell himself :"I'll just have a look today", and more often than not finding a book he cannot leave behind, and sure enough today he walked away with Marco Polo, The customs of the kingdoms of India,in the cute Penguin edition, Great Journeys, telling me he is in the middle of Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands, where the author spends 5 years traveling around the Arabian desert with Bedouins...
...and while I am sitting here thinking, talking and writing about travelers and adventurers, an adventurer from Virgina asked me if I carry books on Moon Shine, and forgive my ignorance if I didn't know it is that distilled corn and apparently illegal drink ( a Virginian version of the Irish Pochin ) and I guess I would have known had I been a great explorer myself....
more to come


Thursday, April 18, 2013

Pouring-rainia

Happy new year!
Have you ever been to Hyde park? yes? have you ever stopped and really listened to the famous preachers, monologue shouters, yellers, story tellers? I bet the answer is no and neither have I.
Well if the big web of the net is Hyde park and those preachers or story tellers are me, I can now grab my little stool and start the monologue in front of you, passers by, confident that nobody is going to hear me since I have neglected the blog for so long....
And did I say Happy new year and happy new round of reading, in any shape and form.
Like with every new start, it is always wise to go back and ponder on the origins and initial intents and see if we are going in a desirable direction.
The original intent of this blog was to give a little insight into the anatomy of a bookstore and the life and adventures of its shop keeper (intent from which I strayed a little) and then, hopefully to show how alive and constantly going through metamorphosis this organism is.
So, that said, let's go back to the original sin:
The house of the knowledge pursuers. A life.
According to several of the lovely yelp reviews that this house received, this house has stacks issues, is jammed to the brim, not always organized but nonetheless a gem.
There is still a lot of work to do towards smaller piles and neat displays so yelp reviewers and non yelp reviewers fellow readers bear with me as I attack those piles.
Bear in mind though:
picture Hyde park and its well groomed green English garden and then think of the Pacific Northwest forests; where are you most likely to find the wonders of the wilderness?
So the adventure begins again and I will tell you here what treasures I find when,with a lawn mower in one hand and a hatchet in the other, I will trim the hedges a bit so the explorers can walk through the woods, although you know that everything grows back eventually!
peace