Wow.
Thank you so much for dipping your various toes into our Reading Week extravaganza. Some of you dipped your little toe. Some your big toe. Now that we write this down, we acknowledge that toes might be gross to some people and promise that all toe gunk has been cleaned from the shop. There is no toe gunk here of any kind nor was there ever, really. This is a provable fact. No shoes no service.
But, wow, the shop was BUSTLING, both in-store and online.
Despite our desire to never become the robber baron funded, turkey giveaway megashops of department-store-like bookstores, we felt at times that it was like a Miracle on 34th Street in here. Clearly, we are more Shop Around the Corner type people but, wowzers, our shelves were GUTTED.
Fortunately, we had loads of stock in the back so we’ve restocked all kinds of new titles. People keep selling us things, so there’s no reason to worry that we’ll run out of new treasures. If you’ve ever wanted to see what a line-up looks like at a used bookshop, then you could do no worse than Brown and Dickson on the Saturday of our sale weekend.
It was a sight to see, although we avoid all consumer-invented, white-collar middle class claptrap. DO NOT BUY CRISCO! It is a wholly unnatural, invented concoction made from the by product of cotton manufacturing marketed as a healthier alternative to animal fat and is, as such, a BED OF LIES.
We prefer the entirely ephemeral market of used bookselling, acting like shadowy outcasts on the fringes of Victorian England rooting through abandoned shacks and Houses of the Dead. When we watch A Christmas Carol we have sympathy for those rotten characters who rifle through Scrooge’s post-life materials, selling them to spooky pawn shops. Admittedly, though, we also relate to Scrooge who only wanted, it seems, to be left alone in the evenings.
Lots of you brought your dogs in, so that was splendid too. Jason even got to hang out in our display window with three dogs at once, strangers peering in at him from Richmond, like it was Simpsons or something, if the subject of the Simpsons window Christmas display was a bald, used bookseller was his pack of maniac hounds.
At this moment the shop is quiet, and we’re able to write down our pointless thoughts on life and commerce, one of our favourite things to do. We’ve been cataloguing up a storm for you, so here, in deep gratitude and hope for the future, is our latest New Arrivals list.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
