Thank you Kiddos

This week Lamplight Books hosted its first "book reading" for children.
Fifteen extraordinarily well behaved five years old kids from a pre-school in north Seattle sat on a blanket, nose up and mouth open , listening to one of those children books even adults enjoy re-reading a thousand times.
The missing Piece Meets the Big O. By Shel Silverstein.
Usually the triangle missing piece ends up being interpreted with a high pitch tone ( I think you are the one I have been waiting for)while the Big O is obviously played by a baritone ( But I am not missing a piece ).
The lively aspect of reading this book to children is that the adult can really let his/her creativity run wild on a huge variety of noises to keep the attention going: the rolling, the bouncing, the flipping and the flopping are very "noise inspiring" themselves
Not to mention the pages that bear no text, then you can press play and have the soundtrack going ( see the scene where a pac-man like piece is bumping along a flowery field with the missing piece in its mouth, any mumbled song in the style of Chariots of Fire will do ).
The kids had a terrific time and the reader was left completely dehydrated and voiceless for the following hour but loved it nonetheless.

Last but not least, this year Lamplight Books was glad to be part of the initiative " Walk for Kids" ,as one of the sponsors , promoted and organized by The Pike Place Market Child Care and Preschool, that took place June 4th 2011.
Both the bookstore and the preschool hold dear at heart the concept of high standard education, whether that be in the form of self-education through books from a bookstore or with the help of great teachers that you remember for life at the preschool, it is a privilege and an honor to be part of such a caring community. Thank you Pike Place Market! And thank you Kiddos!

Read on

if wednesdays are waky fridays are freaky

Freaky friday saw the piles
elevate through the miles...
the piles of books are rising to heavenly heights, their towering looks make me feel like I am in a temple in Athens, praying to the Greek Gods that one of these days I will have all the books into their places and off the floor.

Friday was a very strange day, for a couple of reasons; first of all an old Texan man wearing his Texan accent and Texan hat, purchased an old beat up copy of "the joy of cooking" telling me that a long time ago he used to know the lady whose name was written inside.
Not only he managed to find the book, rummaging into the various sale boxes that were laying outside, but he was as surprised as me when I told him that the reason why I had that book was because my neighbor is that woman's grand son, who took me to her house to pick up her books.
The other interesting coincidence happened when a customer asked me where he could find a bookstore by the name of: "This is not your grand ma bookstore", in the vicinities.
To my baffled expression followed my negative reply:
not only I am not aware of such a bookstore being in the vicinities, but I have never heard of such a bookstore in town at all.
However for some obscure reason the name rung a bell that drove me crazy for a couple of hours, until I realized that the day before , while cleaning up some books and looking through the pages to see what kind of treasures I might find, I happened to find a bookmark slash business card of a bookstore named " this is not your grand ma bookstore", located somewhere in the States I cannot remember where.
Freaky Friday ah?

Quiz of the post:
what is the most frequent reason why people have to re-purchase a title?
A. the previous copy was water damaged
B. the previously owned copy was smeared with coffee stains and/or baby food stains and/or wine stains
C.The previous copy was chewed by a mouse and/or a cat and/or a giraffe
D. the previously owned copy was lent to somebody and never returned

the correct answer is D.
If you got it right you just won a groupon and/or coupon and/or advantage card to redeem at the store so that, if you are the one who never returned that copy of The catcher in the rye, it is now your chance to pretend you have never lost that copy and you've also read it and loved it,
and if you are the one that never got their college copy of David Copperfield back , you might find it at the store,with your name in it still.

Read on

open sesame

Extra extra, read all about it!

Come in , look around , get lost in the dusty shelves , because now you can:

Lamplight Book is open for business.

The magic word has been said and....voila', the doors of the secret cave opened to lead you straight to the treasures....

Enjoy !

timing is everything

And so now the cells have stopped multiplying themselves erratically and are doing what they are supposed to do, each according to their own function: shelves up, most of the books on the shelves, lights on, counter delivered, cables plugged in.
It is now the beginning of the subtle and delicate phases: the art of displaying (hence the empty shelves you see) and the task of detail-caring...like my gypsy friend says : I am in the process of fine-tuning the store.
Just like at the Opera house when, right before the start, the orchestra is creating that beautiful chaotic melange of fine-tuning sounds of the instruments, mixed with the last acceptable bursts of cough and aborted laughing shrieks of the audience, before the conductor comes in:
This category works better there, let's move it...oh wait, now I have to move this other category as well because it does no longer make sense here...
This process has been going on for a week now and If I did have an audience waiting at the door for me to be ready ,they would have started rioting by now.
The time to start the show is close, very close, but not quite there yet; the books and I are a bit impatient, but we know that in order to perform well, timing is everything.

The Onion and the Body- part two

It just occurred to me that it was exactly a year ago that I started Lamplight Books blog, beginning of April 2010.
the second post was promising a part two that I had never fulfilled and it was about the layers and the body of the store.
What a better timing than now to finally fulfill the promise?
Part two is about a body (or an onion )that goes through a complete and extreme makeover.
First of all, all the layers get peeled off so as to get to the the core of the matter:
What is this body made of? What does its heart look like? what kind of energy does this core emanates?
Once these key questions are asked, the stripping can begin because no matter how differently you re-arrange the layers, you will make sure to maintain that same center of gravity.
And so now, after the last batch of shelves was delivered by the Master Carpenter, the skeleton is assembled with its skull, collar bone, ribs, hips, and so on and so forth.
The muscles are next,(remember the muscles part is played by the books themselves), and as you can see, half of them are in their new homes,attached to the bones.
The skin will be the dress with which the body introduces itself to the public. You would think that the books should be assigned that part but I think that the first quick glance is always directed to the general look of the space, its style and its decorations, or lack of them.
Lamplight Books 's dress 's main feature are still them: the lamps and the old type-writer.
No more paintings or art on the walls, not only because all the wall space is now been taken up by bookshelves all the way to the ceiling, but also because, unless you have a real Picasso up, what can you possibly have that is worth drilling the wall for?
So, decoration is going to be minimalistic, and behind a see through dress, the muscles will dance their dance boldly so.

45 down 229 to go

Fiction is completed, A through Z.
After that little triumph, things started becoming unclear for a minute and so I decided to sit down and draw the outline of the store and brainstorm on where to put the remaining 101 categories.
Panic knocked at my door again, but I ignored it and so now I think my new mantra is:
Panta rei. Everything flows. Nothing stays the same, so if I misplace a category, no big deal, I can always change it later.
I find this process of organizing categories, a very tricky and delicate matter, and did I mentioned stressful?. When you find yourself in the middle of it and stuck, you have to focus on concepts such as Logic and Fluidity, which, in a situation of chaos and confusion, are aliens on earth. You want to have what people look for the most,visible and easily accessible, but what is it that readers are NOT looking for. I should line everything right at the entrance , all piled up in huge towers, right in their faces as soon as they come in and leave the rest of the long and narrow canal to roller skating. ( this is the panic talk).
On a more rational note, I should make some decisions based on concepts like: space availability, people's tastes, the volume of a category and , yes, personal taste, hence , a whole wall dedicated to Fiction.The rest will all be born out of its ribs.

one box at a time

Today was the big day of getting the books back. The movers moved back the 274 boxes of books and everything else they had taken out of a space that is 680 square feet big: shelves, tables, chairs, fans, stools, heaters, more shelves.How I am going to fit everything back in will be interesting to figure out. At a first glance I felt instant panic, then, all of a sudden the meditation mantra of the day came: one box at a time, and so I started opening the first box of the mother of all categories, FICTION, A for Abbey and Austen, down to B for Barth and Burrough, through C for Celine and Chekov and D for Didion and Duras all the way to G for Gide and Garcia Marquez ( still not sure why it goes under G and not M ).
A little progress was made for the day, silence was the background music that filled the space in my head and in the store, since I had forgotten stereo and cds at home, so I could hear loud and clear the words : one box at a time, one box at a time, one box at a time.....