Reflections

Here it is. This is where the picture of the Market as it used to be , comes from.
I am not going to spend too many words on it. The book is intentionally poor of text, as the photographer and author of the book lets the images narrate the content. I will only use the author's words, Nancie Gee ,first Chinese woman to author a photographic book in America, to describe the soul of the Pike Place Market that she so beautifully managed to capture with her camera:
"It is the melting pot where people of all nationalities and races have a common meeting ground, a place for old and young, a place where immigrant farmers have found a way to make a living and provide more for their children." In fewer words: the true American dream.
And at the end of the book, Marvin Reed, master market, observes:
"...it is the one place where people can revert to being just human , with no other requisite at all, where the ability to communicate, free of pressure and free of bigotry also frees one from the fast paced, high living society, of conformists and group-oriented people who seem to make up our modern society". And this was written in 1968.
The book was published in 1968, by Superior Publishing Company,Seattle, Washington, now not in existence anymore, although their books pop out every now and then and come my way, usually books about Washington's ghost towns or railroad history.

Books and the afterlife

I know, I had promised I would tell you where the picture of the previous post came from, since it comes from a delightful book worth reading about, but, did you know that booksellers have a hard time keeping promises?
We tend to get carried away with the unfolding of unforseen events that ,like the wind on autumn leaves, stir us in all directions.
Therefore, before I keep my promise, i'll tell you another little fairy tale...
After all the books were packed and stored away, the bookseller, feeling restless in the idleness of not running the bookstore, was nonetheless hitting all her usual places for buying books, trying to restrain herself from spending too much money and forcing herself to be disciplined about what to buy in such delicate times. Of course she failed every time. It is practically an impossible mission, with the result that boxes of books are now taking over her apartment.
In the midst of all this unsuccesful self-restrain exercise, the bookseller receives a phone call from the lawer of Leslie Cameron's estate. The immediate reaction that the word lawer caused to the listener was a sudden thought: whose toes could have I possiby stepped on?
But no, Leslie passed away, and left in her will Lamplight books' contact info so that they would be the first buyers of her entire life time collection of books .
The bookseller was suddenly overcome by a cocktail of mixed feelings: sorry for the tragedy ( she in fact was another victim of breast cancer), the usual feeling of anxiety that house calls always ignite, the sense of excitement that private collections cause, to name a few.
So off she goes into the world of Leslie on First Ave. and Harbor Steps, where she meets Joni, one of the executors of the will.
Joni showes her where the books are, and it only takes her a quick glance to realize that she would spend lots of time and money going through that collection, so she took her jacket off and started digging.
After 20 minutes or so of picking, looking, pulling and piling, another feeling added itself to the pile: the strange feeling of being an interlooper or worse, an invader of a private world that was still warm with life, Leslie's bookshelves! And as all book readers know, home bookshelves don't only hold books, but a whole variety of objects that usually end up there,in that space of the shelf right in front of the books because there isn't really another place for them and because that little balcony is perfect for display: postcards, framed pictures, journals, candles,vases, jewellery boxes, souvenirs that friends brought us from their trips...you can add to the list just by looking at your own bookshelves, I bet ya!
Looking at those objects and moving them around so that she could get to the books, made her peep into Leslie's world and her taste, her fancies and her curiosities. Some objects as well as some of her books, represented future projects, others referred to projects already accomplished, others were totally compulsive buys, we all have those things laying around the house that make us think: what was I thinking!
So she turned to Joni who was organizing everything else that remained of Leslie's life, and asked her if she too had the same mixture of feelings.Joni replied that the mix was so strong she had to take pills to be able to fall asleep at night. The two immediately bonded over that and a friendship was born.
Leslie was a very interesting woman, fascinated with the world in all its forms of espression and curious like a child about it.
I enjoyed getting to know her from the after life, through her objects. She left me with an ecclectic collection of high quality books and a friend and the warm feeling that ,once again, books are magic.

once upon a time

Once upon a time there was a little bookstore in the hugest farmers' market of the entire world.(exaggerations are a must in story telling)
That farmers' market might not be the oldest in the world but it certainly has a great story behind its carts, stalls and shops.
It all started one morning at the break of dawn, the year was 1907, the month was August, the 17th, a Saturday that year. Everybody was exited that morning, customers and farmers were about to meet face to face, skipping the middle man.
Farmers were about to hand customers their onions and potatoes directly, maybe with a little chat about the weather and the family, a hand shake and a subtotal that would make them both go home content and satisfied.
And from that day on, the market developed into the Pike Place Markets,Inc, where lots of immigrants from Europe and Asia came to sell their produce after becoming farmers in America along with the American farmers, and along with them meat sellers arrived and fish sellers, artists and performers, and of course booksellers and antiquarians joined in because if you hold bread with the right hand you must hold a book with your left one; travelers and tourists started making it a stop during their adventures... and so ,to this day, this place incessantly shouts and shamelessly yells its uniqueness and every day, if you sit on any curb at any of its corners and look for a while, you will see , passing by in front of you the whole wide world.
(the picture comes from a beautiful book that I will tell you about in the next chapter, because suspense is a must in story telling along with exaggerations)

a fresh start, starts with empty

This is what four hands, four arms and four legs can do in four days of work.
This year's proposition is to make sure this space gets filled with great books again before spring puts greenish buds on the trees and birds build nests on those trees.
Emptiness is definitely a fresh start and all the possibilities can be explored.
It turned out that the early morning rise to move a grand total of 274 boxes of books , happened on the last day of 2010 and not on the first day of the new year as previously scheduled, and the books will be sleeping sweet dreams in a controlled heating system storage with private rooms and lockers and not in a warehouse in Sodo , as previously arranged. So not only the New Year's Eve party was saved but the books are located in a five stars hotel with room service and jacuzzi as opposed to the dorms of a hostel.
The Gods were watching over Lamplight Books that day.

packages

Christmas brings love and affection in the form of gifts wrapped in sparkling paper and ribbons, cards filled with meaningful sentences, feasts and delicatessens , decorations and candy canes and sometimes used books too.
This year people didn't think twice about donating a used book because people this year know that the beneficiary does not care about the fact that the book is recycled. The recession put us all in the same boat and we are all way more understanding with each other.
And once the Christmas shopping season is done, I will wrap the entire bookstore and put it under my tree. Yes, you read it correctly: the time has come for me to pack up, let the construction crew do their job and move back in the spring with a complete and extreme make over.
The Pike Place Market is undergoing a major operation of remodeling its guts, a sort of bowel wash, where pipes are being replaced, wires are being reconnected and earthquake life-saver devices are being installed into the walls.
Now it is the turn of the building in which Lamplight books is located.
Once this is over with, I will be glad to know that I will be walking every day into a safer building.
Right now ,however, my attention is completely focused on the fact that I will have to pack and move eight years worth of accumulating books of all sizes, in the time frame of about 10 days during which Christmas eve and day and New year's eve and day are happening.
The movers will move the boxes on the first day of the new year at exactly 5 am so that when the market opens all the trucks are already gone.
And this is the first year that the market decided to be open on new year's day to promote business.
My mother thinks that I misunderstood directions, and I wish she was right.
We have a rhyming saying in Italian that says something like, whatever you do on the first day of the year , you will be doing all year long: So for the year 2011 I will be waking up at ridiculously early times of the day, every day, to move boxes full of books all year long.
Happy New Year to you all, my patient readers, and may your 2011 be light,may you not have to lift too many boxes, may you wake up when you want to, may you live in safe buildings.
peace and love

(just between us)

this time...., and do not roll your eyes up to the mighty sky thinking: here we go ,how many excuses can this one come up with!
this time i have been neglecting this space because I got lost and busy trying new literary genres, weird books and it is absolutely not my fault.
this better stay between us and it is only to be considered a sort of "intermission post", in between posts, one to keep your attention alive and your faith ( too dramatic of a word, forgive) into the existence of this blog. (back in ma'good old days and in the old country the tv intermission consisted of roughly ten, ten!, minutes of the same lovely and bucolic tune of an harp, which functioned as background to a slide show of polaroyd images representing landscapes ,little villages and monuments of Italy, like old postcards)
Anyhow, I cannot bring myself to write much because I am literally stuck with a big book a thick one. Maybe to talk about a boys' book versus a girls' book is a sign of short-sightedness, literary sexism and so on and so forth and this would be a whole new debate in need for a post-post, not an intermission-post, but I bet you if you go out on the street and randomly interview people asking them whether they have ever read people like Louis L'Amour or Asimov, you come out with more men answering positively than women; just as if you ask them if they have ever read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights the women would count more yeses on their sides.Then ,of course you have the exceptions like Ayn Rand , Agatha Christie, Patterson or Grisham, universally ingested regardless of gender, religion,ethnicity, political party (maybe not the Ayn Rand's books ,I started noticing a pattern there). Generalizations are, by definition, outrageous but at the same time also reliable generic guidelines, and so the recurrent image in my eyes of the veteran buying Cussler or Clancy ,or the lady grabbing her purchased Nora Robert or Debbie Macomber with newly manicured and flashy square nails doesn't make the apple fall too far from the tree. However the book I am reading further shook my already wabbly theories and defied their core suppositions. The author is indubitably established and his talent widely recognized, but he seems to be flying low on the celebrity sky, not making much fuss even though he made his voice loud and clear in two genres very hard to approach as their audience is very particular about what they want to be fed (in my opinion only, this is not a fact) : Graphic Novels, once called Comics, and Sci-fi, although his books aren't sci-fi perse.
Guessed yet? (Violet, you've already won the Harry Potter contest, so zip it)
English. Ah, and a third category now that I come to think of it: young adults literature, two books, one with a female heroine (not just for girls) and one with the male hero( not just for boys).
He loves mythology....
Neil Gaiman, American Gods. A fantasy book for guys, right?
Well, I'm half way through it, I picked it up after a series of his books' appearances on the shelves of the store, and the comments made by the customers who bought them, and now I am hooked. I keep asking myself whether that is going to turn me into a female sci-fi weirdo geek ( outrageous generalizations...), and I am still suspicious over the fact that I cannot put it down ,but once the judgments and labels habits are put aside all I'm left with is a good read in my hands.

memory

Every time I find a book written by Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi longstocking and many more titles, including the two mentioned by Violet, Mio of Mio and the Lionheart brothers ( I checked them out,yes, and now I have to get my hands on them!), as I was saying, every time I find one of her books, and it happens that I find them in several different languages and various editions, at a surprisingly frequent rate,they are pricy. They are rare and pricy. The early editions anyway. The scary stuff doesn't surprise me really if we think that the legacy she shares is made by authors like Grimm brothers, or Perrault ( bluebeard!)and all the rest of them, with
stories that all the major professors and psychologists, and pedagogists, and intellectuals analysed and came to the conclusion that they help us, children,to come to terms with the toughness of life. Then uncle Walt came around and did the opposite! Thank goodness the little marmaid doesn't feel the knives in her feet every time she walks with her brand new feet. Although in all fairness,had Disney only stuck to the original version, all the little girls,now full grown women would have faced the life-long pain that their favourite shoes inflict upon/below them, with much more endurance and knowledge.
My grand-ma carefully executed the same "operation safety" Disney did, when she used to tell me the synopsis of the major Operas and Operettas. So ,for example, when she would tell me the story of La Traviata, Verdi, taken from Dumas, La dame aux camelias, Violetta of course does not die and she certainly doesn't belong to any different social class, but happily marries the love of her life. Considering the fact that in practically 80% of the Operas, the heroine tragically dies and that almost all the Disney's happy endings camouflage a tragedy, I reached the conclusion that life is almost never what we remember it should have been!
And speaking of memory: two good books I came accross with that tackle the memory issue
The Sea, John Banville, where the memory of the past becomes another type of present that unfolds along in a parallel dimension, and A short history of tractors in ukrainian, Marina Lewycka, that helps me remember that learning about the past by reading fiction is fun and effective.
Gianduiotti: are you comfortable in that chair? Every time I go say hi to Davide, owner of the bookstore Therese, in Torino, Italy,I learn a lot. He is the prototype of the old bookseller, but in a young body, he has passion, he believes in the true meaning of community,he is kind,he knows what he sells, he reads a lot and he keeps it small and simple. And he his in your neighborhood!