Dear friends,
Last Saturday, Jason surprised us all when he put Bob Dylan’s Christmas album on at the Vintage Showcase. He is, perhaps unexpectedly, a Christmasey sort of person. We know he can be grumpy, and sometimes appears on the outside to be more of an Ebenezer-before-he-goes-to-sleep person, but the tradition of holiday ghost stories and his monocular penchant for bright, shiny things has made December his favourite time of year. It’s the perfect combination of creepy, shiny beauty. Not to mention…presents. There are also presents.
Jason is one of those people who really does jump the gun when it comes to holiday cheer. He grew up in the country where the big black skies of Southwestern Ontario might drag the soul into hell unless they are lit with megawatts of Christmas lights along every straight line of a house, both inside and out. He has a list of albums that will see regular rotation this time of year, Bob Dylan’s Crime-Against-Taste being one of them. The playing of this album, however, was nearly immediately shut down when a customer said, loud enough so that everyone could hear: “IT’S TOO EARLY FOR THAT SORT OF THING!”
(The really strange thing is that they were not objecting to the neverending hilarity of Bob Dylan’s rendition of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, which really puts Lenny Bruce’s toes to the fire).
Despite objections, this customer was too late. We are well into the Christmas season at the Vintage Showcase. The Spotify playlist is loaded with Kenny Rogers, Elvis Presley, and Neil Diamond. Our colleagues at Back to the Fuchsia and Babayaga’s House have already plastered our shared space with fever dream levels of vintage ornaments and antiques. Our antiquarian nook looks like the face of an advent calendar whose secrets are not chocolate, but forbidden knowledge.
Why do we do this? Why did we torture this poor customer with our seasonal sensibilities when we could easily have waited a few more weeks and given her a moment’s peace?
We were told that this is a tradition at Back to the Fuchsia, that the MOMENT November 12th rolls around, the Rubbermaids of yuletide goodness collected the year over are freed from their imposed organization and let loose upon the sales floor like Girls Gone Wild at a resort in Tulum. It’s a maximalist achievement, the likes of which we don’t believe have comparison in the region. Our shop sits nestled like a decorative conch in this colourful ocean, and Jason could not be happier.
We have also been blessed with two excellent collections. The first is small but mighty, from the stores of a local artsy fartsy veteran with truly superb and bizarre taste. He has sold to us before, and you liked it, so we know this will be well received.
The second collection is a bit of a Christmas miracle. We’re working on it. It’s huge. It’s currently sitting in our dining room, all twenty boxes of really, truly generous Christmas miracle. One of our long time collectors has decided to unhinge themselves from their worldly possessions, and we mean truly unhinge. Marie Kondo has nothing on this guy. He’s shedding it all, backpack in hand, hopping on a bus to anywhere. This particular eccentric, this charming, lustful, and brilliant young man, has bought the best and brightest books he could find over the last decade, combing London’s bookshops and any others he ventured to on his travels. He surrounded himself with the best literature and philosophy. He absorbed it. He piled it up around him and felt it soak into his skin. Many of these books were bought at our stores on Richmond Street. He was a regular, and he’d scoop up the best stuff we had before it even hit the shelves, sometimes before it even hit cataloguing. It’s an incredible collection from someone so young. You’d be jealous to have it in your house.
And so, he called us up and said, “Hey, I’ve got my entire library in the car. You want it?”
We recruited the help of our incredibly tall and strong teenager and used a book brigade to mount our dining room with boxes of treasure.
Where will we have Christmas dinner now???
Well, we’ll just have to price it all and get it on the shelves. Our store is about to become a Rapper’s Delight just in time for the holidays. Please stop in as we parcel it out as fast as we can, and email us if you are after anything in particular — because it just might be here across from our morning coffee.
Happy Dang Holidays, Book Fans!
Jason & Vanessa
Our little bookshop is bursting with glorious Christmas cheer.
