These are just a few of the items to grace the What's New shelf by the front door this week! We're still hauling box after box of stock into the store and rolling it out to the floor. Customers are trading and we're ordering more from suppliers around the country. Each day a new treasure appears.

Just today the Complete Works of Poe (the large black leather-bound volume in the top photo) was snatched up by a buyer with exceptionally good taste. However, we have found a number of other classics that are quickly filling out our literature section. Including a complete set of the works of Shakespeare.

A special book

There is also one book that I'm having a hard time putting on the shelves - a collection of John James Audubon's most beautiful paintings of North American birds. They are unbelievably elegant.

See what I mean?

At the beginning of the book is a short introduction to how the famous naturalist began his career painting birds. It seems that he had made a model of a dodo that was only "tolerable" which he destroyed swiftly with a kick from his own boot. The next day he took a shotgun down to the local stream, shot a bird, mounted it using wire (to position it as naturally as possible), and then proceeded to paint it.

The irony of gunning down the birds to paint them never seemed to bother him. In fact, he once wrote, "I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day." Imagine a modern naturalist saying the same thing! In fact, it was not only the everyday birds that Audubon hunted for his canvas, but as one biographer noted, "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he persued it, never apparently worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."

Sure enough, there's an exquisite painting in the book of two carrier pigeons...

People - friends not yet met

People are interesting and each comes with his own view on the world - sometimes shocking (like Audubon's toward the birds he painted), but always worth trying to understand. Working as a bookstore owner means interacting with an incredibly diverse customer base. Some are so happy to come into a bookstore that they are dancing with excitement (this is not embellishment, I actually had one dance in last week), others come in uncertain and afraid that we might sell "those" kinds of books, still others are ready to play the hard bargainer and take issue with every price on every book as some outrageous example of capitalism at its worst. And there are those others who simply drift in with a gentle smile, happy to find a safe environment and a world of ideas neatly stacked upon our shelves.

So far I've been showered with praise, politely ignored, chatted up, impolitely ignored, called a liar, and looked at as if I'm crazy for giving away a cup of coffee for free. Once I was accused of pricing books too low (we offer half of retail on trade and he expected four times what we offered) and once I have been told that calling our prices "fair" was....well, let's just say it was a metaphor for the byproduct of dairy farming (even though we meet or beat the online marketplace pricing).

Still, people usually mean well and if they cause offense it is rarely intentional. They believe themselves to be honest, smart, and witty and who am I to disagree? Each person is a new experience and each point of view requires a different touch and a different tone of voice to make them feel comfortable. Sure, it's good business to be nice to everyone, but it's more a matter of displaying gratitude when they show us the favor of coming into our store.

I'm starting to think of it this way: The next person to walk in may be the next person to become a life-long friend, but he may have had a bad day today. Perhaps he's lost a family member. Maybe nobody's ever been nice to him. Maybe he takes a while to warm up. What a fool I would be to ignore him! If we only make friends with perfect people then we will be lonely indeed.

Poe seems to have touched on this life without empathy in his poem Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were - I have not seen
As others saw - I could not bring
My passions from a common spring -
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow - I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone -
And all I lov'd - I lov'd alone....

Then - in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Wandering through the shelves I conveniently forgot the anniversary of the attacks in New York so long ago (or was it yesterday?) and decided it was time to organize the biography section. There was work to be done and staring into the past rarely leads to a future of any value.

So, setting to work, I pulled the presidents and other politicians to one side and placed them below the history shelves. Then the social commentary and rantings of left and right wing zealots who had slipped in unnoticed were cordoned off into the current affairs and politics section. Next the books on royalty were thrown near the presidents and politicians, but still kept somewhat separate (are royalty politicians, thespians, or something else altogether?).

Finally, it was time to go through the eye-crossing experience of alphabetizing the straight biographies by the subjects' names. As I shelved book by book I started to think about who the people were and what was written. Perhaps no volume was more pretentiously inscribed than Katharine Hepburn's Me. Somehow she seems to have summarized her entire view on life in a two-letter capsule that left room for no one else.

Nearby were other tomes of self-absorption and self-aggrandizement. The political players and the egotistical actors seemed as though they were Narcissus and his reflection, but it was never clear if either was real or if both were simply ghosts in the glass.

However, there would occasionally appear a biography that touched upon a life of greatness. Written through love for another rather than oneself they caught the eye and drew a desire to enter into a life well lived. One author considered Hellen Keller's achievements and her even more extraordinary gracious attitude toward life. Another volume contained a collection of Mrs. Anne M. Lindbergh's diary entries titled Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (I couldn't help, but feal the fear and sadness that weighed down the book in my hand). Nearby was olympic skater Ekaterina Gordeeva's tribute to her husband who died so early, My Sergei. Again, just down the shelf, sits Lisa Beamer's tribute to her husband Let's Roll, recounting an ordinary life of family and love that ended in a heroic act on September 11, 2001.

And so, despite my attempts to forget, I found myself remembering. I remembered that not all lives are lived well. I remembered that the lives that are most important are rarely the most famous. I remembered that the world rarely cares what we think of ourselves, rather it thinks more of those who care for others.

It seems the past still holds lessons worth learning after all...

That my friends is pure Americana hand-crafted wood signage with LED Christmas lights (the "books" sign not the "open" sign). We decided that we needed a little something that would tell the world what it is that we're actually selling. We have no idea when the permit will come through from the city to post the billboard so it seemed apropos to get something up and lit as soon as possible.

So does it work? Yep. People saw it and started wandering in - a couple with a dazed look in their eyes like they had been hypnotized. They'd walk in and then look around in surprise as if they did not know why they had come in... okay, not really but it did draw in a number of customers. In addition, because it uses LED's which draw very little power we're able to leave the sign lighted all of the time.

Even better, it looks just like the kind of lighted sign you would expect in the window of a used bookstore. Next time you drive down 4th street take a look and you'll see what we mean.

A beloved author passes away

Time is often like a child entering the woods. It wanders slowly through the trees, almost pensively, but as soon as we turn our eye away it is hopelessly lost never to be retrieved again.

One of the first novels many adults remember reading is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. First published in 1962 after numerous rejections it quickly caught the imaginations of millions of children and is still a perenial favorite. However, on Friday, L'Engle died at the age of 88 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

It's hard to estimate the impact that her books have had on millions of readers. I remember sitting in class watching as one student or another would be completely absorbed in the famous book with the Pegasus leaping over the blue orb on the cover. Page after page they would read and the world around them would fade away and they would emerge an hour or two or three later wondering themselves whether or not L'Engle had somehow folded time through the magical words she had woven into her book. She will be, without a doubt, missed by those who were introduced to fiction through her wonderful words in A Wrinkle in Time.

Stop the telemarketers!

Of course, time has other consequences. For instance, do you realize that it was exactly four years ago that the national "Do Not Call" list was formed? Did you also know that if you signed up four years ago that your name is being dropped from the list? Yep.

Alas! May it never be! Click this link immediately and register your home number so that you too may have some peace and quiet! Fail to do so and you will find that there is no time to eat dinner, watch a sunset, or read a book!

A month into the Uptown project!

And while we muse upon time and how quickly it moves, scroll down the page and see how quickly our little store has transformed from an empty shell into the wonderful little place it is today! It's hard to believe that we are completing our second week of being open and that we had begun construction almost exactly one month ago by taping out on the floor where the shelves would be...

I don't believe in Karma. Life doesn't balance out as much as we might like or hope. Still, there are days where good and bad seem to come in alternating measures. Yesterday we received news that a dear family member is ill and in the hospital. He will be going in for surgery soon and so our thoughts are distracted and our prayers are for him.

Today we received the long awaited neon open sign and have it hanging in the window. Whether or not it has had any effect yet we do not know. Still, it's bright and beautiful and we're hoping that it will at least get some folks looking.

Also, we've added some spotlights that are aimed at the shelves facing the main window. Yesterday I noticed that they seemed a bit dark as the evening wore on. It made it difficult to tell whether or not the store really was open. Now the shelves glow with warm light reflected off of all those beautiful covers!

One of the joys of owning a bookstore is the opportunity to browse through thousands of books that you might not otherwise get an opportunity to see. Some are well known, others are extremely collectible, some are well written, but may have been published through a poor company that just did not know how to market the product well enough. It's sad. An author pours months and even years into a work and some bungling businessman drops the ball and an author fades into obscurity.

That's the beauty of the used book business. Large stores hold maybe a few hundred new titles and a few hundred older titles that are perennial favorites. A used bookstore holds thousands of different titles. It's a treasure hunt and you can always tell who the real seakers are as they troll through the shelves looking for that next chest of dreams, romance, adventure, or simply escape.

Of course, it's not always a cake walk. Today one poor customer walked through the door and made a straight line for the sci-fi. I recognized his face and called out his name.....except, it wasn't his name - it was somebody else's! He was gracious about it, but then I didn't realize how stupid a mistake I had made until long after he had walked out. Images of Chris Farley slapping his head and yelling "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" came to mind.

How else can you be stupid? Well, remember all those requests for coffee? If not, you can just scroll down a bit and you'll see them. Well, I finally plugged in the coffee maker. It takes all of two minutes to make a cup. Now, how many people could I have given a cup of coffee to had I taken that two minutes about two weeks ago? Sheesh! Oh well, Coffee's on folks! Yep, it's a free cup of Joe for anyone who asks.