Dear friends,
As we are often reminded by a civically-minded friend of ours, London has many neighbourhoods. It used to be that our city had one core of arts and culture, but now there are little centres all around the Forest City. This means that the people of the East Village are still discovering us on Elias Street. We’ve done the high street thing. We’ve done the apartment thing. We did the office thing too. Now we are enjoying the “best kept secret” sort of life, selling to customers who, if they’re wise, will keep our little piece of heaven on the DOWN LOW, all to themselves.
Our colleagues at Back to the Fuchsia and The Sentimentalist also get described this way. We’ve found a sweet spot, it seems, between accessibility and mystery. Sort of a perfect first date kind of vibe. Our stretch of street by the tracks is packed with tender amusements for the connoisseur; a brewery, an art gallery, a record shop, a vintage emporium. We’re over the moon to be part of a community like this.
We’ve been to places like ours in other cities and have always thought, “Why can’t good old London ever have something like this?” Well, it does. We’re in it. How on earth did that happen?
A perfect example is tonight’s event. Dutch avant-garde composer and sound poet Jaap Blonk is performing at our store. In partnership with Western University’s Centre for Theory and Criticism, their Department of English, and their Department of Art, the wild and prolific Blonk will be sitting down in our antiquarian cubby to do what he does best starting at 7pm. It is an unexpected delight to be able to host him, and as we said above this is the sort of thing we’d expect to entertain only when we’re visiting friends in cooler places. Yet somehow it is appropriate that Blonk is performing in an old industrial area in East London; one with a blue bookmobile in its parking lot and vintage clothes and furniture everywhere. Perhaps when you radically change things an unexpected Joy returns to life. We’ve confused the Gods and they’re just throwing stuff at us now, wondering where we fit into the Great Scheme of Things.
Being off the beaten path might give us the illusion of secrecy, but the best book collectors in town have a nose for spots like this. Our old friends have found us again. One of them, a discriminating collector, was a regular customer at our Richmond Street location. He would come in about once a week and skim all the best new arrivals off the top, often before they even made our emails.
Well, friends, he’s moving away, and he’s selling the bulk of his collection. That means that this week, we are offering a selection of some of the best books we have ever had, all skimmed off the top, like a a Grad Student’s fever dream of philosophy. It’s cast of characters includes: William Blake, Sally Rooney, Slavoj Žižek, Yukio Mishima, Joan Didion, Edward Said, George MacDonald Fraser, Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Now that’s a party.
We were also invited to explore the basement of a retired professor, and found books suited for ye ol’ British library. Both collections are included here — or at least, as much of them as we have catalogued so far — for you to peruse. Please do pick up what you’d like. And join us tonight for a barn burner of another event of the strange and unusual variety.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
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