Dear friends,
As you might imagine, we are very pleased that London, Ontario has entered Spooky Season. Not only does this mean that the potential supernatural dome that covers this city might finally reveal its True Purpose, it also offers us humble retailers the opportunity to plaster our little spaces with dismembered limbs and unsocketed eyeballs. Just the other day our colleagues at the Vintage Showroom descended on our space and filled it with cobwebs, Halloween postcards and anthropomorphized gourds. Tammy of Babayaga’s House added an oval portrait that we swear follows us with its eyes around the room. Mary of Back to the Fuchsia displayed a clown that we swear is in a short cooling down period between kills. We encourage this. Not the killing exactly but more the larger, frightening “juicing up” of our space into the slowly developing occult centre that EOA has always been/will be.
See, our aesthetic isn’t Spooky Bookshop but rather Rare Bookshop that is slowly being taken over by otherworldly forces. This may exhibit itself in the rose-coloured pulse of Saints and Sinners portraits on the wall. It may reveal itself in the two large pothos plants quietly growing from hanging baskets into jive-talking Audrey IIs. These may encourage an oblique sense of something being off, beyond the commonsense wisdom that Retail Itself is dead. Retail Nostalgia, let us say. That’s definitely scary. Whatever way it is achieved, we embrace it. We embrace it in the strange books that sneak into a normally normal section. We embrace it in the Last Rites of simple, fair exchanges of cash for goods. We embrace it in the final form of Human Spaces, where mistakes are visible and the record scratches of reality whisper to us all of a more intellectual and human past. We embrace it in the form of vintage Halloween decorations glowing in an uneasy orange, rhyming with nothing.
This is the season where things get weird. Our summers are over and we’ve shifted back into the industrial routine of living. Folks begin to nest in preparation for the coming cold. Lives become routine again, but yet there’s a sense that something is on the horizon. Something wicked this way comes. There have been more aspirational sales, more “I’ve been meaning to read this” books brought to our counter. People are getting ready to dream. Hopefully good dreams. Dreams of a lovely future. But first we must pass through the crucible of the harvest. What a worrisome time that is. Here the resplendent spirits of the summer must be shucked and preserved. Our shop becomes a corn shucking bee of sorts where folks reassert their love of arts and letters, that books will get us through the winter. Perhaps they will. We certainly believe it. But what of what’s at the edge of the library? What if it has already gotten inside? What if it’s in that painting that Tammy brought in? Or those spider webs appearing suddenly when the shop is closed? Or that pothos hanging from the ceiling that simply says, “Feed me.”
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
