Hello everyone,
It’s a wild assortment of New Arrivals this week. Our new space has opened the door to new customers coming in and selling us books. That parking, man. That parking out front is like a welcome mat for tires.
Fortunately, our footprint is still within a neighbourhood that is fairly dense. In fact, it seems our footprint just gets smaller and smaller. Soon we’ll be roaming the back roads of Ontario in our horse-drawn school bus, selling books to socialist farmers like a rural Allen Lane. It is a hypocritical sigh of relief though, because Jason was getting super tired of hauling books up steps. An old book dealer told us once to always hire young people for this job. It does feel nice having someone back up right to our door and have us dolly in a lot of boxes. We even have a room in the back to OPEN those boxes and, like, get organized.
Our dreams are small. The best of all possible worlds is a dream come true when all you need are organized bookshelves, nice coffee, and eccentric puppers.
The best collection this week was five boxes of underground comix and collectible pop-up books. Like, who collects those? What genius devotes their days to this magic? Well, we know who, and he’s a dear. He collects all sorts of amazing stuff and is a fit gent to boot. We are still going through the collection, but some are already up in our Members section and will be in our regular New Arrivals next week. We also had a student come in and sell us some great contemporary literature too: Kurt Vonnegut, Nick Land…Diana Gabaldon. Well, Gabaldon is only mentioned because we like steamy books sometimes. Who can resist the steam? Although steam is really bad for books. You shouldn’t steam them. It is intellectual steam. Like steamy things in the imagination.
In fact, if you really wanted to get rid of books, you’d just throw them in a lake. That would do it. These public exhibitions of fire are entirely necessary. We think it is because 1) these folks know nothing about a book’s physical properties and 2) they want to be SEEN destroying the books. Like, throwing them in your bathtub privately isn’t enough. Assembling 100 bathtubs in the town square and tossing in things isn’t going to cut it either. It needs to be seen from space. Bathing doesn’t have the same UMPH as public fire. If you, like us, are morally panicked by these comparisons then you do not want to hear about the bookdealer we knew who burned all of his overstock at the end of every summer. THAT was a friendship that didn’t last very long. We much preferred the steam engine collector who held an annual corn roast on his farm where he’d cook a whacktonne of corn and blast all his steam whistles at once. There was much dancing to fiddle music and everyone got drunk. That’s our kind of party.
Speaking of parties once the weather gets nice we are going to hold a parking lot party at the new bookshop. It will be a civil affair, we promise. We do not own enough steam whistles to get THAT lit. Details to come.
Until then…
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
