So, this past week we sent out a survey to everyone to get a sense of how the shop is doing.
In our little email essay, we asked for honesty and cheek, and boy did we get it! Thank you! (Although there was one troll who can drown themselves in the Thames, the rest of you are champs). We’re still combing through the answers and making plans and stuff but we thought it was important to share a few of our favourite answers (with comment of course) to better celebrate the colourful minds that haunt our door.
In no particular order, here are a few of our favourites facts or comments with our responses below:
46% of those surveyed said they would live in our bookshop. 46% PERCENT!
To this, we reply:
Sadly our bookshop is too small to accommodate all of you who want to live here. This isn’t a huge issues since we assume most of you were speaking figuratively, (we prompted you with the answer and you went for it), but if you were answering literally, there are options. What if we rigged the bookshop with spooky effects and held a $100 book credit contest to ANYONE WHO CAN SURVIVE A NIGHT IN A HAUNTED BOOKSHOP? Even better, we could hold an evening where we all pretend to be sketchy relatives of a rich bookseller who has passed away, and we’ve gathered to hear his Last Will and Testament. We could dress up like rich people and get prizes (moral punishments for our awful lives), one punishment being to wander Richmond Street dressed in old-timey clothes baying, “What hath hell wrought?” to drunk Western students for one week. We’ll leave that one with you, but if your answers are any indication, someone reading this–God Bless You–will jump at the chance.
A 24 Hour Snackers-cam or Cooper-cam
This is something we have actually seriously considered. Sadly, our fear is that you’d all find out what slobs we are. Five seconds in our shop storage room or kitchen at home, even from the vantage point of a 2 foot dog, would terrify you. Also, much of it would just be a live feed of butt licking. However, this anxiety could be overcome by us finally getting our stock room–and kitchen–organized and accepting that the internet was made for feeds of butts and the like and–privacy issues not withstanding–what we all really need right now is the world seen through the eyes of a dog or WHY ARE WE EVEN ALIVE?!? Consider it considered, at least for the shop if not our grody home.
More casual shop events!
So many of you are just like us–terrified of people yet longing to just BE IN A ROOM with interesting folks. This come hither GET AWAY FROM ME disposition is our heart in a nutshell. Sitting in a chair and discussing stuff, over a ginger-ale or beer, at night in a bookshop is what we crave too. Despite Jason’s tendency to drift the conversation slowly into the iceberg that is UFOlogy, inter-dimensional tourism, and poetry, we will overcome our shyness and love of social discomfort to try and create more opportunities for these kinds of events. Sometimes you just want to show up and slink into a convo about the new (amazing) TV show Somebody Somewhere and not have it be so INTENTIONAL. HOW DO ADULTS MAKE FRIENDS AGAIN?!? We don’t know. We weep and weep and weep. But we get it, completely, and will do our best to help.
“TSHIRTS PLS FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY!”
If we were handing out prizes for survey responses, the third prize would definitely go to the above. It made us laugh out loud. The panic, the desperation, the raw NEED of that all caps answer is what we did not expect but wanted to hear. Like a friend smacking your self-illusions into the mud, this frightening answer shook us to our core. Not that the t-shirt requests NOT in all caps weren’t helpful too. We just picture this pour soul finally having a platform to scream T-SHIRT at us and it made us feel seen and very special inside.
“If you drill thru the earth and jump down and would not burn up… when you got to the middle and gravity shifts would you explode on impact from the gravity shift or would it be like a elastic and you survive?”
Well…we asked our nine-year-old boy and he assured us that, much like a black hole, if you were to be caught in a tunnel through the centre of the earth you would eventually 1) die and 2) have your remains stretched out like spaghetti. This is science, he assured us, and we are too scared to disagree.
Our shop allowed someone to “smell books without judgement.”
Second prize to this one. Friend, we see you. We support you. You are our hero.
“Géo caches for fictitious London Ontario artifacts that fit into a greater fictitious mystery that is chained to member events and activities created and expanded by the community. So much so that it becomes quasi-real culturally”
Friend, yer gonna love our podcast.
More mainstream titles in your weekly emails!
Jason has had a stranglehold on the book selection of our New Arrivals email for too long. One can only take so many books about aliens before critiques appear in surveys. He is a child. He is a man-child who still believes aliens are real and will visit booksellers if there is a critical mass of related paper material in stock. We apologize for this shameful focus and promise to be more open to a broader reading palate. Jason is actually writing this essay and now that it’s all laid out for him, he’s a little concerned about it too. Why haven’t the aliens come? What have these past forty years been about? Who is he? What is his value? He thanks you for your supportive feedback and will try harder in the future to not JUST have books about aliens and people who love them.
“Have someone take over the ex Prince Albert’s and turn it into something like the Bermuda Triangle Chili Parlour.”
This is first prize. First prize to the max. We can’t express how much we love this. You’ve combined so many incredible things in this name. Natural mysteries. Stomach pleasing dinners. And parlours. SO MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A PARLOUR! Seriously, what can’t happen in a parlour. So you win. You win the world. Whatever does end up going in there it will always be the Bermuda Triangle Chili Parlour to us, and if we ever lose our minds and open a cafe in the store (which we won’t) it will be called the Brown and Dickson Bermuda Triangle Chili Parlour and Bookshop, no matter what it is, no matter what it sells. God bless you.
These are just a few of the many incredible answers we received. As mentioned above, we are still combing through the responses and plan to address the more complicated (and even stranger) requests as we can. Do look for improvements. In the meantime, thank you for your complements on our email writing skills. Thank you for the love shared with our dogs. Thank you for your honesty. Thank you always for your support.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
(and you)
