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

overload

What do these 5 books have in common?
Me and my new found madness.
Do you remember being a child of, let's say, six or seven years of age, holding a packet of gums in your hand and wondering what would happen if you stuck all the gums in your mouth at the same time and tried to chew them? No? Just me? The madness must have started early.
Anyhow, just as the above described thought, acted or not, comes from deliberate mischievousness, so did my latest experiment, utterly immoral and absolutely irreverent.
I decided to find out what happens when you read 5 completely unrelated books at the same time. Even though the analysis of the data is still a work in progress, I can tell you the following with relative certainty:
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
Suddenly you start feeling as if the authors laid in bed with you, a stern look of disapproval on their face for having to be shared with 4 other professors of non-fiction expertise.
As if that wasn't enough, you realize you are giving yourself an overdose of unrelated information and  so your brain intuitively wants to find the common denominator that will put order into the chaos.
The bees and their incredibly fascinating way of producing honey will go well with the History of food, but besides that, I have to make a great effort linking them to the book of dead philosophers and how their lives and ideas can help us accept the idea that we are going to die and most likely biodegrade,  with the little book of language and how important it is that we do use that ridiculous and high pitch tone with newborns, with Anne Fadiman ex libris and her essays on books and reading.
Come to think of it, now that I am writing this I can see that invisible string that ties them tight together. It is that human instinct that started all the trouble right from the beginning, the curiosity to know, the drive to explore the mystery, the impulse to jump into the unknown and find things out.
Only, maybe, jumping off one bridge at a time might actually be less fatal.
Read on

The book of dead Philosophers
Simon Critchley
Vintage

Ex Libris
Anne Fadiman
Farra, Straus and Giroux

A little book of Language
David Crystal
Yale

Robbing the Bees
Holley Bishop
Free Press

Near a Thousand Tables
A history of food
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Free Press

hyacinth pink

One of my favorite things is to have a customer tell me about their favorite book from childhood; a book that usually is out of print and impossible to find, worldwide, webwide, librarywide and so on and so forth.
Today I learned about a little girl who goes by the name of Hyacinth Pink, we are in London, 1947, right after the war, her wicked step-mother sends her to buy bloater fish and tells her not to wander, not to play, not to dream ( I am quoting the lady's description pulled out of at least a three decades memory), but of course Hyacinth goes to the cinema ( Pinocchio teaches!) and when her step-mother enters the theatre in an outrage, she jumps into the movie and finds herself living it....and the story goes on...now I want to read it but I cannot because this little gem is a rarity not to be found and I am left to wander and play and dream...maybe I will jump into a movie myself.

Hyacinth Pink
by Stella Mary Pearce
illustrator, James Fitton

Under a summer sky of shooting stars at night and on a hot sandy beach during the day, the summer read of August 2012 is Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett Good Omens, the nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nutter,witch.
I am 12 years late(published in 1990).
I try not to laugh out loud but it takes an awful lot of self restraint, just like when I watch a Monthy Pyton show.
I have no idea how authors sit down and write a book together and it is even harder to imagine that it was possible for these two to accomplish such a task without loosing themselves night after night in each other's company and that of a good bottle of some strong spirit (Terry Pratchett's little bio on the back of the book quotes:Pratchett lives in England,he has drunk enough banana daiquiri,thank you.It's G&Ts from now on).
The ideal scenario to read the book is exactly where I am on: a beach towel, holding a gin of any kind, possibly on a deserted island where you can laugh out loud.
What is your summer read?

Dreams of terror and death

Last night in my dream I was posting a blog entry that went on and on filling an infinite amount of pages.
In order to stop that stream of consciousness I had to tell myself it was all just a dream and woke up. Exhausted.
I do not recollect the subject matter otherwise I would have had an endless source to utilize for the real blog.
Nonetheless, the books themselves and the location of the store offer an infinite amount of stories and the one I am sharing today belongs to the horror section ( Lovecraft, Koontz, King....)and it is called:
Dreams of terror and death ( borrowed from the master of terror, Lovecraft).
Once upon a day, yesterday, a curious but cautious bookseller, me, made a house call (I went to somebody's house to hopefully purchase some good books).
As I was running through the inventory's titles trying to communicate coolness and keeping the eager espression out of my eyes, I was also over hearing the conversation that the owner of the books was having with her lady friend and this is what I have heard:
I am now down to cookbook number 200; I cut the pages, scan them on my computer and throw the books away...
I suddenly found my spine under the grip of an icy fist that wrapped its grasp around it tighter and tighter. My breathing drastically shortened to the point where I started feeling light headed and ready to pass out. Fortunately I managed to pull myself together, suck the tears back into the eyes' tear pockets and just uttered a little shriek.
The life of a bookseller is sometimes visited by nightmares from which you wish you could wake yourself up from.
However,our loyal friend Memory, will turn this experience into a faded dream to be told around the camp fire, under a starry sky, with a good book waiting in the tent.
Sweet dreams...

savage dawn

Excuse the blur but, even though it was not intentional, I decided to post the fuzzy image anyway since it is healthier not to see these covers too clearly.

However, the purpose of this picture is to introduce a breaking news which, in my view is cause for celebration:
not only amazon recently bought out avon romance ( or a similar publisher, I am not sure, one of those anyway) but also Dorchester publishing, to whom these covers belong to.
Everything is fine: the bad books to them in the e- form, and the good ones to us, still in paper, still real.
The expansion of the giant into the market of muscly grabs and frail looks, will give me nights of restful sleep, reassured by the fact that when you shoot for quantity and not quality we are not in the same business.

As a side note: I recommend you google translate Easy runner comment on the last post, it would be a loss not to have read it and I could promise you here that Id translate it to share it,but who knows when that would get posted!

Home Libraries

The ostrich's head is finally out of the hole.
I will face my responsibilities as the publisher of this blog and make a public apology for my lack of commitment.
(wouldn't you be glad to hear this from the wall street gang?)
Anyhow, as in all apologies, the excuses follow:
(but it was for the Greater economic Good)
I was busy re-arranging my Home Library, yes capital H and capital L, because Home Libraries are an institution and being a book seller you can imagine the amount of homework.
My first thought was: how will I arrange it? like the bookshop? A through Z and by category? or will I go wild and re-invent the laws of classification: by color, by order of purchase, by the mood I was in when I bought the book ( Twain goes on the happy shelf, Sartre goes on the sad one) by my intentions towards the book( Henry James on the "will never read again" shelf next to my friend Ernest, Faulkner and Proust  keeping each other good company in the "I will get to you, I promise" shelf, Descartes and Kierkegaard on the "what was I thinking" shelf and so on and so forth ).
The method of classification will determine the nature of the Library, and the possibilities are infinite:
your library can be your map, your diary, your painting, your consciousness, your wall of shame, your passport, your portfolio or resume, your sculpture, your treasure chest, your dowry, your retirement plan, your stove burning material, your building blocks, your memory....and all you have to sacrifice for it, is having handy help at hand reach when you move, because your friends know and they are all busy that week-end.
I acquired a book for my library today:
Homer's Odyssey, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, with twelve engravings by Marialuisa de Romans, California Press. A book about one of the greatest journeys of literature narrated by one of the most wonderful characters ever created. Everyone should have a copy of it in their Home Library. It will go on the shelf of the Giants.
Now I have it too, and, like every book that sits on my shelves, there is a story behind it:
I hunt the book with my bow and arrow ( remember?), I opened it and found the business card of a fellow bookseller, Peter Miller, I showed it to him stating the obvious: look Peter, it's the cycle of life,they bought it new from you, gave it as a gift that was discarded and now I found it and went on asking how could people part with such treasure and pointing out the beautiful dedication:
June 1991
dear Jason,
all of the rules,
they are all here
Peter.
Peter says with a hint of disappointment in his tone: hey, this was a present from me to a twenty one year old friend of the family, exactly 21 years ago....
Sometimes that is how it goes....we dismantle our Home Libraries....
So I handed the book to him asking him to make the gesture of giving it to me as a gift with the promise of never getting rid of it and so he did adding a new dedication below the 21 year old one:
almost a true journey, as this
book of order finds its
proper home. I could not
be more thrilled.
Peter.
Ask me if I got rid of it in 21 years,
the answer will be no.