This might be the best list we’ve put together in a while.
See, we have these trunks along the bottom edge of our store. The trunks were a practical solution to the aesthetic nightmare of growing piles of random cardboard boxes of unprocessed material. Books come in. Books go out. They come and go without harmony. Think of a rowdy teenager’s room–lots of activity but very little balance. Very little orchestration. We’d enthusiastically buy. We’d enthusiastically sell. Sometimes that middle step–the A to B, if you like–became A-D-Q-B, with LCBO scotch boxes piled against our desk like, well, the winos on Richmond against our shopfront. Vanessa saw this one day and said, “Enough!” We scoured the marketplaces of London and within a day had a shop full of trunks. Big ones. Small ones. Pointlessly small ones. Within a day, we had all of our towering piles packed within these trunks and so the mystery began.
What was inside of them?
See, we forget what’s inside of them. We dealt with our storage problem, but the books do not stop coming in. Beautiful books too. We are weak for loveliness, so when an Easton Press collection ambles through the door, we are going to catalogue it right away. We’re going to catalogue it with passion. Deep passion like Gomez has for Morticia. Meanwhile, the trunks age and grow more mysterious by the day. We look at them the way someone puzzles over their new, creepy neighbour. Should we go over for a visit? What will be inside that spooky house? Do we break in at night when they are all asleep? OR IS THAT WHEN THEY FEED? If we had bought less atmospheric trunks maybe this wouldn’t be an issue, but we bought magical ones and they are frightening.
This past week we opened one.
It was a quiet day. The Thames Valley had decided to roast it’s inhabitants in a heat wave. The dogs lay drained on the floor. We had just purchased a Stephen King collection and were pretty happy with ourselves. The man needed money for his sick cat. That’s a no-brainer. Let’s help save Rosco. After processing the Stephen Kings we looked to the street. No one. Not a soul. We looked to the shelves around our desk. There was stuff to catalogue there. There’s always stuff to catalogue there. Each time we look at it, it becomes more and more boring.
“Uggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Vanessa said, laying her head in her arms. “I don’t want to.”
The meaninglessness of everything was so apparent.
“Should we open a trunk?” Jason asked.
Vanessa looked at him with alarm.
“It’s been years.
“Maybe they age with time?”.
“Everything ages with time, Jason,” Vanessa said, and lept over the counter.
Within seconds we tore the top off a trunk rendering it useless. We grabbed books like mean old ladies at a church bazaar. Philip K. Dick! Murder Mysteries! THE NECRONOMICON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Piles and piles grew around us. Cooper thought we were playing and brought her toy over. Snackers couldn’t be bothered with any of it. We stacked three piles to Heaven and threw ourselves back like a nun possessed, then freed by Exorcism. We lay on the floor, exhausted. A customer stepped in the door, took one look at us, and then quickly left never to return. Meteorologists around the world recorded an anomalous shift in global weather patterns. Cooper stood, dumbfounded, toy still in her mouth. We had found our Members email books.
The cataloguing began. Making everything a contest, Vanessa pointlessly exclaimed how quickly she’s worked. Jason, comfortable with his excellence, steadily recorded every bibliographical detail. The product pages grew. Book after beautiful book of extraordinary quality. Ghosts in Photographs. The Annotated Alice. Dorothy Parker. THE NECRONOMICON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
We both lit cigarettes and leaned back in our chairs.
“God I fucking love my job,” Vanessa said.
“We get to do this next week too,” Jason replied.
And this, dear friends, is the story of our Members Email this week as well as the key to a happy marriage.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
