Dear friends,
It might seem a bit backwards to completely transform a website after being inspired—in part—by something called The Luddite Club, but here we are. This is the reality. If you’ve navigated to our site recently, you’ll notice a big change. You can no longer buy books directly from our website. Gone are the pages and pages of books for sale, each one scanned, catalogued, and presented next to a nifty little click button to purchase them via a shopping cart designed with your online ease in mind. You’re welcome to email us, and sort out a purchase there, but we have forsaken the world of online retail.
This seems counterintuitive. Isn’t the world all bleep bleep boop now?
A ha! We’re here to tell you, the kids are all right, dear friends. They eschew social media. They communicate via text, sure, but they post sparingly on sites like Instagram — not at all on Facebook! — and prefer their online presence to be ephemeral and fleeting. They’ve grown up in a world where they can find anything they want online, buy it, and have it shipped to their house. We are but a tiny used bookstore in an industrial plaza near the tracks in pokey-old London, Ontario. We cannot compete with the ENTIRE INTERNET. There is, however, one thing we can do better, and that is: run a tiny used bookstore in an industrial plaza near the tracks in pokey-old London, Ontario in the way that only we know how.
No one can imitate it. Fakers will be spotted miles away, like an AI generated video of Snoop Dogg on Mr. Rogers. Posers be wary. The literary mind is well-attuned and aware of your sneaky temptations, your fuzzy blankets and pun-acious mugs full of designer teas. A real used bookstore, run by a couple of worn out 90s kids, is a unique commodity all on its own. It’s harder to find every day. Our best customers don’t want a website. It cheapens us. They want—like the kids in New York’s Luddite Club—to put down their phones and experience life. They want the real world, with its dog-eared pages and marginalia. They want to walk among the shelves, peruse the spines, and smell the dust of ancient pages.
Our website rendered passé, we decided to make available our long back-catalogue of newsletters, creating an online exhibition catalogue of the strange performance art we call the bookseller life. Unearthing these newsletters and slapping them into blog posts has taken us down the proverbial memory lane. We’re building it slowly, adding photographs and documents. We’ll eventually annotate it too. We’ll add better navigation for those who want to bum around in the archives. There are even murmured aspirations in our quiet moments to put together some kind of printed volume of our best write-ups, and make it available in the store.
This is something we can offer that is uniquely ours. Instead of finding books to buy (and you will, still, see pictures of books to buy, because we love books and we want to tell you about them), you’ll find on our website what we wrote about our new stock and our lives over the past decade. You can revisit entries about anthropomorphized bookseller beavers and shed-dwelling raccoons. You can read about our foibles and eccentric shop events of varying success. You can summon nostalgia for Willow Switch concerts on Richmond, Kangaroo Variety at Novacks, and Book Parties in alleyways past. This, we offer to you.
We are sure that, on some level, you understand.
Damn the algorithm. Damn it to hell. All hail the card catalogue.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
